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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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).

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

> 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.

>"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.

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