Their Service has always been impeccable and their servers just run.
I have been running k8s clusters on hetzner for quite some time now and the flexibility for the price is exactly what i expect from a hoster!
Now with this addition Hetzner closes another gap that made projects spends thousands more on enterprise clouds. So im not only happy but also proud that they just keep innovating!
I used to work for a team that rented dozens of servers from them and we had disk failures almost every other week, which required creating a support ticket and asking them to swap out the drive so we could rebuild the RAID array.
They used regular SATA consumer drives and they were probably pretty old or refurbished or something.
I've been very happy with Hetzner for some workloads.
* Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
With hetzner - failure means your monitoring detected disk failure, sent you a pagerduty alert, which you then have to check the alert, figure out what has failed, and send in a support ticket to get the disk replaced. This will take a couple hours, after which you have to rebuild your RAID array, and hope no more disks fail. All the while operating with degraded performance.
(Don't get me wrong, hetzner is _great_, I've used them for years and highly recommend for numerous scenarios - but the idea that their failure and reliability is anything like "the cloud" is fanciful)
On AWS, something is constantly breaking. One of the 100s of services will always have performance issues, degraded availability or some other crap going on.
On Hetzner, the hard drive, CPU or RAM on one of the machines will die once every few years. Maybe.
(This changes as your service grows and scales out, but there's a stupid high amount of traffic a few machines can take.)
I've been responsible for millions of dollars of AWS spend over the last decade. I've had virtually zero AWS caused downtime in that period outside of the few major outages that affected the whole world (for example that major S3 outage) - but the "100s of services will always have performance issues or degraded availability" has literally never been true for me. I've had hundreds of instances be retired - but that is all automated and without downtime.
Over the last 18 months at my current company, we've had 100% uptime - there has not been a single AWS incident that has affected us in us-east-2. And since we're using ECS and fargate, we've also not had to worry about instance retirement.
On the other hand - I've also had numerous personal servers with hetzner over the years - and the hardware is _old_. I've had at least 3 hard drives go bad over the last ~8 years.
Again, I still strongly recommend hetzner for many cases - but I just think it's important to go in understanding the difference in responsibility for things like hardware level monitoring.
So I guess you can blame your own team for ordering consumer sata?
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[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52/configurat...
CPU temperature: 40C
Even Herzner cloud just works and I don't know how they do it but it's dirt cheap.
If you've have 500 servers for a long time, and a new script discovers 5% have a failure and sends 25 emails at the same time, I can see why Hetzner might want a single email. Numbers made up, but you get the idea.
It's just something you have to do yourself with Hetzner.
We had a bunch of racks and fan failures gotta be one of rarest one. Even on my personal junk I had zero actual failures, just one getting noisy
> Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware.
Not really different than cloud, they aren't buying top of the line servers, they are making their own just like hetzner, for cheapest per performance unit.
Big german language report: https://www.golem.de/news/besuch-im-rechenzentrum-so-betreib...
I use them, and I've been very happy with both pricing, reliability and the service.
Only possible bad thing to say about them: their static IP's aren't always "clean": I had a couple of instances where the IP I was allocated was blacklisted and it took some back and forth with their customer service to fix the problem (got a new IP).
But other than that quality / price ratio is way higher than GCP, AWS and their ilk.
I also use OVH, they're pretty decent as well, in the same ballpark as Hetzner.
For instance i was trying to migrate a large exchange group off to office 365 recently and their migration assistant simply has not been updated to support modern auth for office 365 amongst other things.
Also the migration failed from their own accounts for some reason....
As for the dirty ips: yes that happens but its not really hetzners fault, as the ip you had assigned had been taken away from the "bad actor" prior. If you tell that to your support agent, i have gotten a new one without a problem
EDIT: Ironically, not i cant even list my exchange accounts in ovh. it just keeps on loading and loading
Isn't that a problem you're always going to get with $any provider? You never know who previously owned that IP and what they did with it.
I've only become a customer again since their vps cloud offering and I've actually been recommending that because it has been flawless for me for years.
No but i get it, but i had a lot of failures in general with spinning disks. I think it has to do that SSDs and NVMEs are much better at telling you how much juice they got left in them. I don't neccesairily think its a problem of hetzner alone though, as disks on other hosters have failed too for me.
I also used to maintain a couple of "plain old offices" and Hard disk failure is sadly just all around us, when you are using bare metal.
Another reason for kubernetes!
They do provide a csi driver for kubernetes for their blockstorage and private networking for both too.
you can even have the masters of VMS and the nodes on bare metal
Personally I only had some network issues with them.