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Comment by Uptrenda | Hacker News Reader

Nice, I just bought Hetzner's 'EX101' and I'm extremely happy with it. Already hosting my own STUN, TURN, and echo servers. They give you plenty of IPv6s and adding additional IPv4s is very cheap. I'm happy with it.

I want to say that if any of you decide to try Hetzner and use their auction process instead of their regular packages - make sure you check out the details for the CPU. I made the mistake of buying an old server on there because it had plenty of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth. Then I saw the CPU was ancient and had only 4 cores.

You know there is something quite unique and strange about Hetzner. They charge you no money until your first invoice date rolls around. So you essentially have access to their servers for free until whenever the next invoice date is. It seems to me... how to say it? Kind of crazy and insanely trusting. But it works, I guess?

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> Kind of crazy and insanely trusting.

The reverse is always surprising to me: as if blocking a credit card constitutes the ending of a contract.

In Europe, a contract isn't entered or broken by making or blocking payment. Companies will very succesfully have their contracts enforced, with any extra costs billed to you. Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.

That's technically the case in most countries, just that enforcing those contracts has a cost.

Blocking the credit card is banking on the company not bothering to follow up, or (in case of company misbehavior), forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge.

Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills. I once heard it said about the Netherlands as being attractive to do business.

> Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills.

That's the first time I ever heard of such thing, and I've lived in a few European countries. Some European countries even standardized service payments on direct debit, which worst case scenario leaves a bank holding the bag for the debt.

That's not true in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and tons of other euro countries. Not familiar with the Netherlands though.

> forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge

And showing up in court has costs, which are not guaranteed to be covered in any award/payment order, and even if you win there is still the matter of actually collecting. If it's all a matter of a few hundred dollars, most businesses will just write it off.

> Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.

Sure, but they are making these contracts with people not in the country in the first place

> Companies will very successfully have their contracts enforced

Hetzner turned off all access to my paid server due to a false-positive on their netscan/DDOS (literally it was tailscaled doing a netcheck) protection and equally incompetent technical support staff.

Can I sue them for breach of contract and subsequent damages? I moved all my hosting off Hetzner as a result, but I'm still very disappointed in their actions.

While I didn't read the contract, I'm halfway sure that it says that they can terminate the contract for any reason.

They didn't terminate my contract though, they just nullrouted my server. They even had the audacity at the end of the month to send me a bill.

Ah, that's shitty. I guess in theory you could demand a refund or file a chargeback for an amount based on the services they didn't contractually provide. As you ceased doing business with them I don't think there would have been any drawback to this. IANAL

Same here, I initially got an Epyc 1st generation server with 256gb and was happy for a while, until I figured out single core performance was important for my workflows (web development). Then I got a a 7950x3d and i'm now super happy.

On most servers there's a setup fee so people are not very likely to run without paying. (I know it doesn't exist in auction and they do have no-fee specials sometimes)

The setup fee is refunded too. Source: just had $258 returned to me after Ampere Altra server did not behave as I expected after running it for 13 days.

I didn't know that. That really cool. I didn't get to experience it because I am quite a happy customer. (Knock on wood and don't publicly cross them huh)

What was up with the Altra? I have a free instance (4 cores) on oracle cloud. Seems really capable.

I also had no problems with Hetzner's 16-core ARM cloud instances. Maybe just a faulty server.

what was the issue?

It was behaving strangely under load - worked for a few hours all right, then at some point all 80 cores invariably fell into 1GHz mode with no way to return them to work at normal 3GHz. Probably some software issue, because reboot (and only reboot) fixed it. But after reinstalling multiple kernels and much twiddling, I bailed. Otherwise, a wonderful processor.

I kind of sort of remember reading up on a throttling bug on a laptop that was said to behave like that. I think it was the GPU though.

It's the same with AWS and GCP and Digital Ocean isn't it? An active card check is performed but that's about it, you PAYG and get billed at the end of the month.

It was like this for me for years until a month I got double invoice and now it's seemingly paid in advance. It might depend on the pricing bracket (I jumped from a 40EUR dedicated to 180EUR with extra hardware around that time, too).

Their special deals are generally better than the Auction, depending on what they're offering at the time.

I've got a couple AX101s with 4TB drives at around the price for the current AX102s that only have 2tb drives.

> adding additional IPv4s is very cheap

How do you feel the pricing with Hetzner compares to others?

https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/ipv4-pricing/

It's about comparable. Hetzner's packages in general are a little bit cheaper than other major hosts though. I'm mostly talking about OVH. A factor here that HN readers might want to consider is server latency. Hetzner offers cheaper servers in Germany and Finland but the round-trip will be much higher. I get about 250ms from Australia to my dedi in Finland. If you want lower than look for a US data center. The MS is apparently quite significant if you're wanting this for e-commerence because studies show that faster page loads correspond highly with more sales. So it's worth considering!

EX101 package is a bit high-end for running those server you mentioned.

They used to require sending a copy of an ID card as proof that you are who you say you are. I guess gdpr put an end to that.

They asked to 3d-scan my face and harvest my identifying biometrics. So I closed my account and walked away.

If anyone's curious, this is the product Hetzner were using at the time:

https://www.idenfy.com/identity-verification-service/

That's wild considering I'm 100% sure their resellers aren't doing this

> They used to require sending a copy of an ID card as proof that you are who you say you are. I guess gdpr put an end to that.

That was the case for me when I registered with Hetzner, though that was a few years ago. Then again, I registered for Contabo this month and still had to send my ID and something to prove my address. Their justification was that they're required by law to verify that data (KYC or something), so I guess they have to process that data even with GDPR being a thing.

why would the GDPR end that? This is still a legitimate ask and they can do that legally.

Essentially because of data retention of someone's identity card being inherent in such a system

But they don't need to retain the data, they only need to set a flag on your account "identity was validated".

I think the return window is 14 days, not the whole month. And I also think they will block you if you do it repeatedly.

Digital Ocean seem to do this too. At least at my tiny spend level.

In my experience, some of the DigitalOcean lower end tiers have older Xeon chips that just feel slower. One of the first things I do is run `yabs` on a new droplet to see exactly where I'm at:

https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script

I might do this. The more direct approach is to benchmark your actual app, since that will check the attributes that matter (it might be more useful to have good IO to the database than a fast CPU). Probably good to do both.

Yes, good tip! I once searched for a super cheap VPS and found one, but found out the hard way that the single core performance was terrible; 3 times as slow as Hetzner.

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