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Comment by tdr | Hacker News Reader

Great hosters!

     - cheap prices for lots of power

     - everything "just works" (only contacted for questions)

     - quick, friendly & to the point support service

     - great uptime

     - they are eco

     - 14 days money back (for root servers)

Drawbacks

     - bigger latency for US/Asia/...

     - you do your own backups

     - they bill only after the end of month. had problems when card expired

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I'm also a customer for quite some time with various servers.

Pros:

- virtual private servers (VPS) have a tun/tap device so that you can use the VPS as a VPN server. this is not necessarily common with all hosters

- good speed/connection/reliability

- good hardware for a fair price

Cons:

- I usually don't need to talk to customer support often, but I rent a managed server and once in a while, they shut it down for a major update. This is totally fine and they even try to do this in the night, but it happened already twice that they couldn't tell me the exact time (in a range of minutes) in advance when they shut it down and they just said something like "server is offline sometime between 7am and 11am". I have paying customers on my server and I want to put the website in maintenance mode to prevent data loss. "Sometime between 7am and 11am" is NOT an acceptable answer. The downtime itself is a matter of 5 minutes, but I would expect an accurate time to shorten the maintenance period.

- They announced a server downtime for "Tuesday night" once. So what is "Tuesday night"? Is it the night from Monday to Tuesday or Tuesday to Wednesday? Guess what, I put my website in maintenance mode in the wrong night. I hope, next time they'll get that straight and announce the correct date and time.

- They stored passwords for their managed server customers in plaintext until September 2011 and got hacked. I hope they learned from that, but still, extremely stupid.

> So what is "Tuesday night"?

I agree they should be more specific, but most people would reasonably assume Tuesday night to be Tuesday->Wednesday, as Monday->Tuesday is Tuesday morning.

I also don't see why you would assume Tuesday night to be early on Tuesday.

Because most people assume night follows day.

> you do your own backups

they do offer 100Gb storage space though.

> they bill only after the end of month. had problems when card expired

you blame them when you don't update your payment information? i've been there long enoough to go through several cards, never had problems.

I didn't blame anyone:

> Great hosters!

And I mean it.

The payment problem appeared after my card expired (the second month of using Hetzner) and the new one didn't arrive. They understood the situation and allowed me to fix the situation in a couple of days.

The only issue we've had with Hetzner was related to billing. Our payment failed on a Friday afternoon, and even after updating the details, payment wasn't taken and the server resumed until Monday morning.

Apart from that one hicup, it's been very reliable so far.

I have been using hetzner for all my servers for about 2-3 years, and have been very happy with them. I can remember only one, brief downtime.

Did you measure the latency difference by any chance? I am really considering buying one host there, would love to get an idea on this.

NY: ~100ms

CA: just under 200ms

Asia: even +300ms

didn't check Southern hemisphere

Great, thanks!

Australia ~350ms

"Speed of light sucks" (John Carmack)

South Africa, ~210ms

That's what typical response times look like: http://i45.tinypic.com/qq1xmd.png

(this measures the total time to download a static Hello World HTML page 325 bytes in size hosted on IIS from an EX 4S server in Hetzner's DC15 data centre).

Thanks for providing a screenshot - exactly what I needed to know!

But also you could use Cloudflare to make your site faster in these regions :)

250ms to Fibertel in Buenos Aires.

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