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Comment by abujazar | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Hetzner servers for ~15 years with multiple clients and employers, and always been disappointed with other providers compared to what Hetzner delivers. OVH with their frequent network level outages, the 2021 fire and so on. DigitalOcean with their way too frequent and long lasting maintenance windows. And AWS/GCP/Azure with their obscene pricing, ridiculous SLA and occasional hour-lasting outages. One application platform I managed was migrated from DO to Hetzner with huge cost savings, much better uptime and insanely much higher performance running on bare metal servers rather than cheapo VMs. If you need more than two vCPUs and a few gigs of RAM, I see absolutely no reason to use overpriced AWS/GCP/Azure VMs.

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While I like Hetzner a lot and can share your recommendations, I just don't see how it compares to full-blown cloud providers like AWS, GCP or Azure. It's a common misconception to put them at the same level when the offering is completely different.

Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone. If someone can run their full workload in e.g. Hetzner without much hassle then they shouldn't be using any of the other cloud platforms in the first place as they'd be definitely overpaying.

EDIT: I want to clarify that I unfortunately do know some companies use the big 3 as simple VPS providers but it seems that everybody agree here that it's a waste of money and that's one of my main points, which is also why the comparison of the big ones vs Hetzner or any other standalone VPS/dedicated server provider is pointless as they serve different use cases.

> Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone.

Hmm, anything that doesn't have insanely huge traffic and requirements does, and in those cases the major cloud vendors are still cheap and easy enough for those use cases.

Hetzner seems to fit the "not big enough to get major discounts and support but large enough to have considerable cloud bills" customer and that is fine.

Amazon for example tries to capture these with the Lightsail offering [1] which is a separate product from the typical AWS offering (even though of course it runs on AWS but that doesn't matter in this context). No need to go with "raw" EC2 which would make things more complicated and more expensive if all you want to have is a couple VPS.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

I wonder what percentage of AWS are just EC2 instances that run as a simple VM. I know I’ve never used more than that.

This is how my employer, a large enterprise, uses 'cloud'. They just picked up all the server boxes and virtualized them in AWS. Obviously it costs a lot more now and there's no benefits like flexibility because the configuration is all static.

I know cloud can make sense but not like this.

> Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone.

I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of cloud customers that do a simple lift and shift.

Indeed, and it's not just fools doing "lift and shift". I think a lot of shops do simple "lift and shift" to minimize vendor lock-in.

I've worked for at least 3 companies using cloud services that could have hosted what they were doing on a handful of boxes for a fraction of the cost.

(The most egregious was a system peaking at maybe 5 hits a second during the month-end busy period living in multiple pods on a GCP Kubernetes cluster.)

Hosted Kubernetes offerings has to be one of the highest margin products of the big 3. So many clusters spun up doing little to nothing. And the cost... In the org I'm in people spin 1 and 2 worker node clusters all the time. And I appreciate the control plane / worker node model, but it's overkill in so many situations.

Just switching from Ruby to Crystal - basically the same syntax - will save you at least 3-4 times the money if not 10x in some cases. Not talking about a good Nginx/OpenResty loadbalancing and utilizing Varnish, Redis etc.

Until infrastructure fails, for an enormous number of possible reasons. I've seen it happen over and over.

> I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of cloud customers that do a simple lift and shift.

I've done exactly that at a previous startup. Granted, it was 10 years ago, but going from racked infra to AWS ended up being half the cost for what was effectively twice the infra (we built out full geo-redundancy at the same time).

>"Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone"

It actually does happen. They build some software, deploy it on VM and have said software use cloudy database service that removes a headache of maintaining backups, standby, point in time recovery, secure data at rest.

I have couple of shell scripts that do all of that and use Hetzner but I can imaging some org with enough money to not care about the price for convenience of somebody else taking care of your data.

Time to start charging corporations to use your shell scripts I guess

They already pay for the cloud and someone to manage their cloud stuff I bet they would shell out half that if you offered your scripts.

I think that just shows how nonsensical these cloud providers really are when you can just write some scripts to handle it

>"Time to start charging corporations to use your shell scripts I guess"

Believe me I do ;) I adapt those to particular products I develop for my clients. However not worth my time to bother releasing those in generic form. Suddenly I would have to satisfy bazillion specific constraints and requirements for generic users.

> Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone.

Most of my clients do just that - just EC2 on AWS. Ofcourse, my experience may not represent average case, but it is certainly not "nobody". I believe that most do it because AWS/Azure is the "safe option".

Choosing AWS/Azure is the modern version of "Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".

I just recently tried Hertzner myself and I love the experience for now. I am aware that I am comparing apples and oranges here but; Hertzners UI is just so fast and simple compared to AWS and the pricing is great. Even their invoices are clean and understandable.

Lots of companies do this even some big ones. Mitigating vendor lock-in is a big reason. Using what’s effectively simple VMs makes it much easier to pick up and go elsewhere.

Not all businesses decide that’s a risk worth mitigating, but some do.

> Most of my clients do just that - just EC2 on AWS. Ofcourse, my experience may not represent average case, but it is certainly not "nobody". I believe that most do it because AWS/Azure is the "safe option".

If they're going to do that... why not at least choose Lightsail?

Lightsail lacks any VPC or Security Group controls - these are typically the first things I miss when using plain servers at a VPS provider.

It's not just companies using the big 3 as simple VPS providers. A lot of applications are also hugely over-engineered for their actual needs, and unnecessarily ties themselves to the proprietary cloud APIs just for the sake of IAC or just for the sake of the simplicity of having the whole infrastructure at one provider. Or for the sake of using Kubernetes, for which I guess 1/10 of use cases are actually appropriate. I guess part of the problem is that using Big Cloud Provider X is the default in a lot of companies, and alternatives are not even being considered when starting out a new project.

> Nobody seriously uses AWS/GCP/Azure to have a couple VMs or dedicated servers alone.

Many companies and people do host loads that would be better served on dedicated hardware on EC2 because "cloud".

> Hetzner without much hassle then they shouldn't be using any of the other cloud platforms in the first place as they'd be definitely overpaying.

The ability to provision, de-provision, clone, load balance and manage without talking to people, waiting for hardware or really even having to understand in detail what is going on (yes this is bad, but still... ) is one of the big reasons cloud is popular. Many dedicated hosts have gotten a lot better in this area.

The first time I saw Hetzner's pricing - I assumed it must've been a scam - since it seemed like such an incredible deal, and yet I hadn't heard of a single person that ever used it.

Glad that I'm regularly seeing how awesome this company is lately.

I've been using Hetzner for many years. I've had a couple maintenances on baremetal servers over the last several years. Otherwise, the only down time has been self inflicted.

Hetzner is not on the level of the any you mentioned. It's dirt cheap because latencies and protections against exploits are non-existent, sure it serves good when you don't have such needs but the moment you need any (i.e. DDoS protection and low/stable ms for game servers) - hetzner is out of the window.

- Someone that used to fry lil hetzner servers for fun

Interesting. can you maybe tell us some anecdotes?

If you mean the anecdotes related to >used to fry lil hetzner servers for fun<

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/ddos-for-hire-service-we...

should be enough

Presumably you can front it with CloudFlare if you need DDoS protection?

Not if you're running game servers; those require plain UDP (sometimes TCP) proxying and CF only offers that on the enterprise plan afaik.

I'm not sure if this is the enterprise plan, but it is designed for proxying game servers and preventing ddos like steam's newer networking:

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-spectrum/

It’s incredibly expensive, looked into it before.

Addition to the replies before mine, even if you could use CF - it's a joke, it's easily bypassable and there's tons of methods to do it (i.e. the most common we used is huge botnets with simply emulated browsers sending tons of req/s, and that's just the 'public' one, there's tons of private ones we used to write ourselves that were much complex but needless as the one I mentioned before worked just fine)

Not my experience at all. Hetzner obviously does offer DDoS protection and responds quickly to that kind of issues. I've also had Hetzner techs proactively contact me regarding attacks on our infrastructure (none of which actually took any of our servers down, by the way). For specialized needs, you can even have your own hardware installed next by your servers in the same rack for a relatively small premium.

sir, I'm the former staff member of the infamous webstresser.org, I think I should know what we received millions of dollars for,

I understand that you never received attacks of such 'large' scale but it takes $5 to take a hetzner server down (assuming you don't know how to do it yourself)

If you don't mind answering, what was the nature of your attacks? Was it bandwidth exhaustion or layer-7 CPU exhaustion?

Details would be enlightening : ) Was it the servers or the applications running on the servers that were taken down? Running bare metal servers exposed to the public is a fairly obvious footgun, there should be at least one layer of load balancing in front in addition to the provider’s firewalls. I’d argue MOST publicly exposed servers run by amateurs can be taken down for less than $5. Regardless of them being bare metal at Hetzner or some EC2 instance.

I agree with your judgement on OVH and the top tier cloud providers. I've never used Hetzner but I've had good experieces with UpCloud, Vultr and Linode/Akamai. These three providers are my defacto goto everytime I need to deploy stuff...

I have been using Kimsufi servers (OVH cheap end) for more than 10 years and have not experienced any major outages (and can't remember even small ones). I still have one dedicated server there. 14eur/mo for i5 750, 16gb ram and 2tb hdd seems quite good to me.

It's like people forget that Leaseweb and Worldstream exist.

Not to mention their default DDoS protection by default. AWS DDoS team costs about $6000 last I checked here in hnews. Of course most corporation chose AWS because of permission management console.

I run a hosting company that has around 100 large dedicated servers at OVH. OVH's website sucks, but everything else is great-- outages are extremely rare in my experience, and their built-in DDoS protection is excellent. Also, OVH's Canada data center has great ping times from the US, whereas Hetzner's locations are in Europe.

We use Hetzner but I also had good experience with Scaleway (another French cloud provider).

Hetzner is German.

Yeah, with "another" I was referring to OVH the parent mentioned.

Have you tried Contabo? That has been my go-to hoster for the past decade.

Not familiar with them, but their pricing seems significantly higher than Hetzner.

Interesting. I initially went with Contabo because they were (are?) much cheaper than their competitors. At last when it comes to VPS.

The biggest issue I’ve had with providers like Digital Ocean is the networking speeds. 1 Gbps is just not enough especially when you need to restore a backup or similar.

Just wish they had more of a US presence. Latency is a killer for me.

They do have two US locations, but only for «cloud» products, no bare metal servers.

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