On hetzner it all costs less than 100$ per month. Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy?
On hetzner it all costs less than 100$ per month. Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy?
They offer some Dell Servers for those that really want them, but most of their servers have a custom mix of consumer hardware, server hardware and in-house hardware (for example they use their own racking system), optimized to minimize lifetime cost in a datacenter. For example most servers use datacenter SSDs, but consumer CPUs.
Saying that from looking at the dmidecode output from some of our dedicated server currently with them:
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: ASRockRack
Product Name: B565D4-V1LSource: dmidecode
TANSTAAFL
1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction.
2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course).
3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency.
4. You are your own most important customer. Statistically, you are not The Clouds's most important customer. When The Clouds has a fault, it gets resolved based on its business model.
Engineering decisions are specific to a specific problem and all of them come with tradeoffs.
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"
(I had to look it up, figure I'll save someone else yhe trouble)
This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means you have something for your money spent.
I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates.
I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing.
Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.
Exactly.
I am running a server at Hetzner which has a CPU that was discontinued about 7 years ago. I don't know the exact age of the machine because it was already used when I got it 4 years ago, but based on the CPU availability it's at least 7 or 8 years old, potentially even older.
Nothing on that machine has failed in the last 4 years except for HDDs (the spinning platter type), which are immediately swapped when broken, RAID rebuilds, everything's fine.
3 years is no time for hardware nowadays. It can live much longer, especially if storage is solid-state. And the performance improvements often aren't substantial enough to warrant a swap within anything shorter than 5 or 6 years.
And both offer service agreements.
And Hetzner is a straight line expense while a Dell might be a depreciating asset.
And either both or neither may offer discounts off retail.
And so on.
Because that’s the nature of actual decisions versus online arguments.
Not the same as waiting for dell to RMA your GPU over days.
This is what you expect prices to be when a vendor is buying in bulk.
Cloud vendors should be like "Costco" (buy servers in bulk and can pass along those savings & this is what Hetzner does)
The trick AWS (and other cloud vendors have done), is charge "Uber Eats" pricing for Costco items.
Which is basically what happens with everyone terribly afraid of managing VPS that these days it's only AWS, Azure and GCP. First the excuse is "it's too small to bother doing it myself", then it becomes "it's too large to run it ourselves".
Some can afford 3x daily Uber Eats, but we should stop discouraging home cooking. It is not that scary.
For some Hetzner servers (especially from their "Server Auctions"), for domestic customers the cost of electricity alone, disregarding the hardware cost, would sometimes be higher than the rent Hetzner wants.
In my experience the largest difference is distribution cost. The mandated distribution monopoly charges a lot (regulated price) to small customers.
Residential customers use highly variable amounts of electricity and typically pay a base rate in addition to usage which can have different tiers so additional use may get cheaper if you exceed a certain threshold. Often these contracts also offer month-by-month cancellation or may include a certain period for which the price is guaranteed not to change.
Industrial customers instead often buy bulk volume commitments. Instead of paying per use, they commit to using a certain amount and pay for that exactly. They also generally have much longer running contracts. There are also contracts that directly tie the price to the daily (or in some cases even hourly) market rate, which is usually not an option for residential customers. Their energy use is also generally more predictable than the load required for residential areas with the equivalent consumption so the cost for running and maintaining the grid is lower. Additionally there is a recent trend towards DC power delivery, further cutting costs.
Rooftop solar panels and domestic EV charging actually contribute to the cost of maintaining residential grids because they add to the peak load and variance, both of which have to be compensated for. In other words, per unit of energy sold, residential customers simply have more overhead than large scale business customers.
https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre...
sorry for being of topic
This isn't to say your local utility isn't wasteful with its ratepayer money; it totally can be. There isn't enough pressure to lower rates. It's just worth saying that these specific "taxes" do have an intended destination, not just general govt.
In the summer, I have to pay to run an AC to get it out of the envelope.
There are very very many reasons to prohibit exactly that type of usage pattern.
Also keep in mind that hetzner is mostly a beowulf cluster. See e.g. this press picture from their newsroom page: https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/IMG-0546-91.jpg
They do have dell servers, too. But don't expect to run on one of these nodes unless the machine type has Dell / PowerEdge in their name. This means the management capabilities are minimal (but usually enough). A fully licensed management card can do way more.
Their renting pricing is ridiculously cheap though. Hardware failure is more common than on cloud providers (see cluster hardware), support has been helpful in the past. Overall IMHO a good choice if you are price sensitive. But even then consider development vs. deployment vs. running (server) costs. Servers might make up less of the total cost of a service than you expect.
Therefore, I'd argue that if you require continuous, raw computing power, Hetzner is indeed cost-effective. However, the cost-effectiveness elsewhere really hinges on your usage patterns.
I think you would be surprised.
So if you look at a 2 year horizon and want to keep cutting edge (or prefer operating expenditures to capital expenditures) then it's cheaper whereas looking at a 5 year horizon the capital expenditure will pay off.
Hetzner is very bare-bones compared to regular clouds (a friend who was after performance but wasn't prepared for this ran into some issues when a disk died), so you need some procedures for backup/replication in place but if your procedures are in place then you can save big compared to the regular clouds.
Another video showing the custom racks and other infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
However, the killer isn't the purchase price. You have to put it somewhere with a lot of bandwidth, UPS, generators and cooling. To use your Hetzner example, you can't get co-lo for less than $119. That's 14U, which is more than you need for one server of course, but then there are usually charges on top of that.
So yes, for small installations it's hard to beat renting. You need to be using several racks for the equation to tilt towards purchase.