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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Hetzner's:

1. Uses desktop grade hardware (i.e. no ECC, single socket, limited networking, etc)

2. Is located in Germany (i.e. high latency for your US user base).

Don't get me wrong, the pricing Hetzner provides is unbelievable.

I just wish a US based hosting provider was available that used server grade component who was even 2x Hetzner price because it'd still be a steal.

(For those of you unaware of their pricing, you can get a Xeon E-3 with 32GB of ram for just 79 euros/mo.)

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1. Uses desktop grade hardware (i.e. no ECC, single socket, limited networking, etc)

To be fair to them, they do offer servers with ECC for a (slightly) higher price:

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

Does ECC really make a difference in practice? Is it even worth the price? I don't have ECC in my iMac and I'm sure it'd do quite well if I used it as a web server...

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35162.html

tl;dr, yes, ECC does matter— a lot more than you'd guess!

It depends on your data, if you don't mind single bit errors in your data non-ECC is fine. If your data has to be perfect then you probably need ECC.

Do you run your iMac 24/7/365 and have customer data on with such data being frequently accessed?

ECC exists to prevent data corruption so that you don't have to restart your server.

Since I imagine you restart you iMac near daily, not having ECC isn't a problem.

I actually never restart my iMac. Once every 3-4 months I'd say. And not because it crashed, because I need to for software updates.

The value of ECC memory has little to do with how long your computer runs or how frequently data is accessed. Restarting a computer won't prevent the problems that ECC corrects. ECC memory is designed to detect and repair memory corruption caused by electrical/magnetic interference or problems with the memory hardware.

That kind of blows my mind. No ECC by default? Is it really a server with no ECC?

You can get servers with ECC RAM. All our servers there are 16 GB ECC RAM. I have been with them for a few years now and they have always acted very promptly on network issues (most of the times you don't even notice them)

ECC - very nice. Last I looked at Hetzner, ECC wasn't an option.

Question: (since your the OP), how do you deal with the huge latency to Germany from the USA?

This is more of a physics issue ("speed of light") than anything else.

how do you deal with the huge latency to Germany from the USA?

In some cases the location is actually an asset. Surprisingly, not everyone lives within the US.

More helpfully, the partial solution is to use either the Rackspace or HPCloud CDNs. Both of them are pretty cheap and both use Akamai, which gives you PoPs everywhere that matters. In my case (Australia), Amazon doesn't have a PoP for Cloudfront nearby so I using Amazon means I'm stuck with either West Coast US or (even worse for routing reasons) Singapore.

If you are big enough then you might be able to find yourself a better CDN deal, but most of the cheaper ones don't have a POP down here.

There is certainly higher latency but you can mitigate the effect by

1. Making lesser HTTP requests by using best known practices (for example YSlow recommendations) 2. When you start growing, moving static assets to CDN etc 3. When you grow even more move servers to US :)

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