Hetzner switches to new billing model
docs.hetzner.com
docs.hetzner.com
With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank.
And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible.
For (some) dedicated servers, I think. Last time I checked the lowest tiered dedicated servers didn't have any setup fees. If it's not mentioned, assumed it'll remain.
https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1agom04/are_there_...
Are you new to Earth?
It's easy to shut down virtual servers and continue from the same position. It's not that easy to do the same for servers.
The linked page is very unclear about this.
If you decide to stop completely with the server halfway through the month, you'll pay for the hours.
Of course, a shut down server that's yours is still yours and you'll be billed for it.
Hetzner bare metal already deploys in a couple of minutes when renting existing hardware, and there is plenty of precedent for hourly-billed bare metal services around. I think they're intending to move all their bare metal over to hourly billing.
Previously you could only rent physical servers for an entire month. If you’re doing this the price is still the same. But going forward it will be possible to rent for a portion of the month only (x amount of hours).
If you turned on the server, it's being used.
> Do you bill servers that are off?
> Yes. Until you, the customer, delete your servers, we will bill you for them, regardless of their state.
Like, it's completely unreasonable to expect to pay more.
> How precisely does Hetzner calculate the hourly billing?
> The beginning of the hourly billing starts as soon as the product becomes available to you.
So for a dedicated server you start paying once the server has been commissioned to you. You stop paying once you return it.
Besides, for some reason I always thought they charge hourly but show pricing in monthly format for easier pricing.
I had posted about it on HN awhile ago and had to provide proof to Dan to be able to be allowed to share my story.
They responded to my HN comment apologizing and trying to claim that those people shouldn't have been interacting with customers, don't work for the company anymore and blah blah, but there is no way I could trust a company a second time after losing a month's worth of work.
It was the not apologizing and doubling down on their mistakes that put me off.
and run MITM services*, yes.
> This structure will be similar to our Cloud billing.
It says it here, but I glanced over it :)
Otherwise the VM possessive reads like:
Cloud = VM’s Robot = bare metalBut tech people love to come up with new definitions for the same terms all the time, so anything goes.
Just need to replace this one (the same bad story $$$ as Netlify recently): https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server
Managed servers are something different entirely.
at digital ocean, 12$: 2GB RAM, 1vCPU, 20GB SSD, 2TB transfer
at hetzner, 10,50$: 8GB RAM, 2vCPU, 80GB SSD, 20TB transfer
I've been a Hetzner customer for nearly 10 years now. I just checked – first invoice in June 2014. And during that period, Hetzner's support – which I needed maybe 3 times since things generally just work – has always been stellar.
I've used Linode too, and their support was comparable (=also great). But Hetzner wins on pricing, hands down.
I actually appreciate Hetzner hasn't join the BS enshittification gimmick train (yet). If that's your complaint.
Hetzner would be far more appealing if they ever decide to muzzle their rebid support team.
No, they were German. Knowledgeable and efficient, but they won't coddle you or pretend that their life depend on your miser account. If you have a problem that can not be solved by their standard process, they will rather drop you than try to accommodate you.
The workaround (to their subpar system) was a single line at the end. Very opposite from German efficiency if you ask me.
That said, I did switch newer deployments to another cloud provider who is more professional, so it really does seem that they do not care about my measly account :-)
Cheers!
yeah they dropped my account and kept the money, now I know how they can be that cheap
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11036554
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596138
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29600320
If the thing has power, network, working hardware and is able to "boot into there rescue-system" that is all they care about. And for that support has been stellar including preventive disk swaps, moving disk into new chassis and such with feedback and action within minutes basically 24/7.
But the software end is ofc. entirely on you, down to the BIOS where they roll you a network-KVM-Cart to the box for some hours after requesting it with a click. They wont fix your HTML errors, nor your php syntax errors, or explain how to setup SSL on your apache, nor will they help when you dont know how to operate ssh/putty ;) and if "with such an issue" one bothers the 24/7-datacenter guys (and not just "8-16/5 normal customer support") I may even understand that it seems a little rude ;-)
Usually clouds offer additional higher level features, in addition to basic VMs, such as load balancers, object storage and managed containers. Though Hetzner currently offers very little in that regard.
Hetzner Cloud uses local NVMe SSD storage. They used to have Ceph based network block storage, but deprecated that around 2 years ago.
In hetzner speak you want a "shared vCPU server".
That's roughly what others offer as VPS, just more clearly spelled out (IMHO). You get fractional CPU usage that should be burstable and roundabout one core.
Then why don't they just ask for ID if you want port 25 unblocked?
Doesn't add up.
Hetzner was the only provider where I was banned despite providing everything I was asked for. I've deployed services on plenty of providers (AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc) without issue.
Apparently, this has been an on-going struggle for them. A few weeks ago they were even called out on an episode of the syntaxFM podcast for this behavior after one of the hosts had his account banned [0].
It's still a bit of a mystery to me honestly. Is their fraud detection so poor where they're forced to ban new sign-ups in this manner? How can Hetzner's competition tell that these accounts are legitimate (without ridiculous requirements such as passport) and Hetzner can't (even when provided with full home address, passport, etc)? I'm assuming Hetzner can't because they've seemingly developed a reputation for banning legitimate developers and the only reason I can think of where they'd be fine with that is if they actually have a very difficult time telling whether an account is legitimate or not.
[0]: https://twitter.com/stolinski/status/1750226126499139665
None of those have anything to do with demanding that customers expose themselves to identity theft risk.
That’s nice, I guess.
> we have decided to no longer send invoices to all of our customers on the same day. Instead, we will spread them out throughout the month. You will always receive your invoice on the same day of the month. But this day will be different from customer to customer.
It’s not clear to me when the billing moth starts. Is it the day the invoice is sent or is it a regular calendar month? Either way it might be confusing.
>What is important after the changeover? • We want to be able to offer you even better customer service in the future. For that reason, we want to change the date of your invoice. This will make it easier for us to quickly answer questions about your invoices. Starting in April, your new permanent billing day will be the 12. of the month.
I think they have just spread the billing day out across the month for all customers
[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... [2] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my...
Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
I think for most people and organizations, auto-deletion of a server _is_ the surprise ;)
Does anyone else have this issue?
Dear Mr David Allison
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
Also everything forbidden by German law results in a cancellation. So if you would have for example posted something before 2017 about a state leader that might seem like an insult your server might be gone. ( https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/ger... )
https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf Section 8.3
I'm awaiting donwvotes, but honestly, if they don't give you a reason, everything can be one, and refusing a service on arbitrary grounds seems illegal to me :D
I imagine the laws in Germany are similar to the laws in Poland in that regard, both countries being in the European Union.
In USA, I really doubt any company could refuse to serve black people. Or women.
I wonder if the downvoters of my previous message share your (I'd say quite wrong) opinion or there's another reason for the downvotes - I'm up for a discussion!
protected factors are: race or ethnic background, gender, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation.
belief has a very high bar to meet, you are for example still allowed to discriminate against members of a political party.
discriminating based on location matching ip adress or not doing business with certain countrys is fully legal
Can we get some context please, there must be a reason.
Were you able to backup first?
I received the above email entitled 'Rejection of Your account XXXXX' on Mon, 19 Jun 2023, 09:15.
I didn't follow up further. No backups required as I hadn't purchased anything
That's why none of the fraud prevention systems, be they at a tech company or a bank, tell you exactly why you've been banned/denied.
Either way their reasoning is flawed. An actual fraudster will simply keep trying and find out themselves, because they have nothing to lose. Therefore it's security through obscurity at best. Meanwhile legitimate customers/prospects suffer.
I setup 5 x $220/month servers and I wanted to make sure my payment method worked, contacted support a couple of times, wanted to make a prepayment or something.
No dice, they didn't want to take my money until the billing period closed, luckily everything worked fine.
It wasn't their cloud offering though, it was for the dedicated servers (Hetzner Robot), I don't know if that makes a difference.
They didn't even do me the courtesy of emailing me to tell me about it, I had to ask support:
> > When I try to log in to my account it tells me that my credentials are invalid, and when I use forgot password it tells me that my account is disabled?
>We recently did some routine reviews of our customer accounts. We noticed some suspicious information in your account.
>We have some concerns regarding this information and we have decided to close your account.
>We do not share details about why certain accounts appear suspicious. Publishing this information would make it easier for people to create fake accounts and abuse our services.
I even went through their live-video face verification and passport scan and they didn't budge on this.
What they should have made more clear is, for existing customers - will this be cost neutral or cost more.
Ideally, this is cost neutral for existing customer and gives the flexibility of paying partial month for partial usage.
I'm shocked PE hasn't bought them yet and raised prices.
P1 call having to explain "what's an ip address" to their 'engineers'.
About 6 hours after we moved prod over, they brought down my EIPs for like 4 hours because of a route they didn't understand and flagged as spam, and in the end we rolled back the migration and cancelled the contracts.
Bummer for them; we ended up scaling out to several hundred thousand euro a year in OVH, which has been absolutely fucking exemplar.
So while some people really do rave about them, I was so annoyed by that experience that I will almost certainly never use them again.
Being a German myself, I'm 90% sure it's because the support is based in Germany, where technology goes to die.
If you are referring to the eth stuff, everything to do with crypto is banned on hetzner
Wonder what's the shortest possible latency between those points?
Alternative, more interesting question: Assuming Hetzner have a data center in Germany and one in Finland, where should their next data center be in order to reduce latency as much as possible, in the most countries?
So probably East Asia?
But it's super confusingly written and presented. Why is this an essay with CAPITAL LETTERS to try to simplify things. It looks like they put in a ton of effort to make sure people aren't confused, but this doesn't seem like the thing to give people to ensure that they aren't confused.
I’m with a provider now who is phasing them out.
https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated...
OVH has a datacenter in Toronto which may close enough to the US for many people. They provide dedicated servers.
Their business was always a bit chaotic but the technical side of the organization was competent. We were colo'd in one of their datacenters so it was nice to be able to rent additional capacity in the same facility. Servers were manually provisioned, but manageable as you'd expect via online portal after provisioning was complete.
So... not a glowing recommendation I guess, given their corporate instability? But a recommendation nonetheless, the corporate instability never impacted our technical operations and the product was good.
I guess I can tell the IRS that Hetzner has a problem with their cron jobs or with the uniform distribution of their accounting people workload.
> Which data centers does Hetzner operate?
They're shipping their specialized server systems to select providers for housing, essentially. Most maintenance is done remotely... aside from replacing faulty hardware etc
I know it's not a like-for-like comparison, I am particularly curious about the price differentials though, AWS is often a premium.
Originally they just went with AWS because the developer who did infrastructure stuff was most (only?) used to it and had some certification or similar, without really thinking about why AWS. Reached out to me when they started to wonder why things were so expensive for what they were doing.
You've pointed on very good point on scaling up/down vs cheap overprovisioning.
If my memory serves me well, for medium sized DB of 2TB/160GB RAM/20+ cores, it was something like 2000$/month on RDS and around 230$ on Hetzner (with AX161, actually having 2x3.5TB NVMe disks and high iops capacity and 32c/64t EPYC CPU).
That project was never been in AWS/"cloud" though, so savings are made in upfront.
I have not done any traffic calculations, though - I actually forgot that AWS can charge you for that as well.