Ask HN: Insanely Cheap Storage, Why? Hetzner Storage Box | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Insanely Cheap Storage, Why? Hetzner Storage Box

9 pointsTigerTeamX12 comments

Storage boxes on hetzner gives you:

- 1TB of data - Unlimited Transfer

for less than 4 euros. What are the downsides of this? It seems insanely low pricing. Is it unreliable/slow?

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=de

I’ve tried two times (once 1 year ago and one more time one month ago) without success to register an account on Hetzner. They always end up either directly rejecting me or asking for my ID/passport. There’s simply no chance I’m giving a copy of my passport (which is not even a guarantee of admission) to such a private company. I guess I’ll stay with digital ocean.

> There’s simply no chance I’m giving a copy of my passport

why?

You could try giving it to them and blurring the passport number. They're not doing anything extreme with it and I doubt they're even checking it against any database - they just want to stop fraud and disincentivize bad actors from using their network. I'm sure if you asked they would be fine with a blurred passport number and a recorded Skype call to verify you're the same person as in your passport photo.

Yeah, like, why should I give a copy of my passport to sellers? It’s not norm.

It could be used by a disgruntled employee for identity theft. Or they dump them in an insecure location that is breached.

I would say the same for almost any company, but I've been with Hetzner for like 7 years and the prices, support and up-time is unbeatable. They're this German company, and if anyone knows Germans there are very keen on security. I trust my ID there more than I do at any bank that have it.

It’s a) a mixed calculation. Not everyone is using the 1TB and the Transfer. b) Storage at scale is cheap. c) Transfer is even cheaper at scale. d) It’s “only” on one Server with a raid system e.g. no cloud with multiple copy’s.

Transfer basically costs $0 for them because they pay for capacity ("size of the pipe"), e.g. $0.50/mbps to their IP transit vendors. When cloud companies charge you for transfer ("stuff through the pipe") e.g. $0.1/gb, they're basically extracting "free money" from you. They want to charge you some minimal amount for transfer to disincentivize everyone filling the pipe, but they don't actually need to do that to cover their costs. Hetzner is taking an alternative approach of capping transfer instead of pricing it per GB.

Thanks for the explanation Ellie.

Because that's what it costs when you're not maximizing shareholder profits or paying silicon valley wages.

Storage is cheap. I personally wouldn't buy into this because a 1TB drive is only like $30 nowadays, but you do you.

but what if I'd like to use it on a server? :P

Servers are cheaper than ever, too.

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