Hetzner Cloud Expands to Singapore | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner Cloud Expands to Singapore

hetzner.com

Thanks to the OP for posting our good news! We really appreciate it! :D Just in case anyone would like some more detailed information about our new cloud location:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

Hetzner Docs, Cloud locations: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations Hetzner Docs, Cloud Networks: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/networks/faq#can-networks-spa... --Katie (Hetzner Online)

Thanks for posting about our good news! Here's some additional information about the new location: Hetzner Docs, Cloud locations: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations Hetzner Docs, Cloud Networks: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/networks/faq#can-networks-spa... What's new, Cloud: https://docs.hetzner.cloud/whats-new --Katie, Hetzner

Just asking: it'd be nice to have some discount based on committing (and maybe pre-paying) on resources.

I'm evaluating moving some of my personal stuff to Hetzner and if I do so I'd likely stay there for years.

It'd be nice to be able to commit to, say, keep a virtual server (or some block storage) for one year (or more?) and get a nice discount.

Any chance we'll see something like that in the future?

To the best of my knowledge, we do not provide discounts for agreeing to longer contracts, and we don't plan to do so in the near future. We try very hard to keep our base prices as low as possible and hope that customers will choose to stay with us because they have a positive experience. Depending on your use case and how many resources you need, it may be worthwhile looking at some of our dedicated servers, which you can use together with our cloud servers. For example, if you want a server with beefier storage, you could get a dedicated server and put it in a private network together with your cloud servers. Many of our cloud servers have setup fees, but VERY low monthly fees. So over time, the longer you use a dedicated server, the more you save. We also have dedicated servers on our Server Auction that have NO setup fees. Dedicated servers: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ Server Auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ --Katie

I maintain a list[0] of tunneling software a la ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel and open source alternatives. I'm considering entering the commercial market and offering a hosted solution.

These services tend to have very low CPU/RAM requirements, but relatively high network usage. This led me to comparing network usage pricing across VPS providers.

Somewhat ironically, Hetzer's pricing (20TB/mo for a $5 VPS) is so good that it makes me worried to build on them, because I could go from huge margins to losing money overnight if they ever raised them.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

The other person deleted their comment to you about Hetzner accounts being randomly terminated before I could reply, so I'll send my reply here:

This happened to me when I tried to sign up for Hetzner on a whim in June. I'd heard they have ARM offerings and wanted to try them out, so I got through the account registration process and set up a machine. I'm not exactly sure what I did wrong – I think I was trying to change my primary email address, or maybe set up billing – but I was promptly logged out and my account was deleted. They sent me the following automated email:

> Dear Joshua Harms

> 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

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/rPrZka2

I suspected it was because I was using Apple's Private Relay VPN while creating the account, so I turned that off and signed up again with a different username/email address. No issues with the new account so far, but I continue to hear about other people having their accounts terminated.

I haven't moved anything serious over to Hetzner yet, but to be fair I wasn't intending to unless their ARM CPUs become available on private instances.

Hi there, thanks for sharing your experience here with others. Generally, we ask customers to not use a VPN or proxy when they create their account. We also have some other tips here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1cmhvzs/new_accoun... Like any serious web hosting company, we need to take measures to try to reduce abuse as much as possible, and our experience shows that being somewhat overly careful with new customers helps us to do this. Perhaps your use case isn't large enough to warrant it, but we also have ARM-based dedicated servers. They have a setup fee, but you can cancel them on an hourly basis. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx/ --Katie

I appreciate you responding here. I might be in the minority, but if you really wanted to impress me I would love to see a response to the sibling's comment about "unlimited" data usage.

I know every company sells unlimited plans that actually aren't, but that's never going to change unless somebody starts being honest about it. Hetzner could really set themselves apart by making that clear. You could have a simple "why we don't have an unlimited data plan" to explain that other companies aren't being honest. Could be good for PR.

Thanks for the reply! The VPN thing makes sense, I've run into trouble using VPNs before which is why I suspected it was the issue. I'll check out your link on dedicated ARM servers! I didn't know those were an option at all.

If you go for one of their "unlimited" traffic options, beware that it's not actually unlimited:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242987

It's cheap but it's not fast. Try benchmarking it first. I was getting better speeds with a commercial VPN provider then my own Hetzner server (both over wire guard). That's for a single person

As a data point, you can put a lot of VMs onto a single dedicated server, depending (of course) on how you spec it out:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax

Their dedicated servers also have "unlimited" traffic, though as a sibling comment mentions, there might be some kind of unstated limit after all.

I think I'd end up more limited by data usage than speeds, so the VPS route might actually make more sense. 10x VPS might actually be higher aggregate throughput than a single dedicated 1Gbps line as well.

You can get 10GbE uplink connections for dedicated servers at Hetzner. ;)

How much though?

Seems to be €42.90:

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...

    The monthly fee for the 10G Uplink is € 42.90 and includes the 10G NIC.

Traffic costs seem reasonable, at least to my thinking:

    The included traffic volume for outgoing traffic is 20TB. There
    is no bandwidth limitation. Overusage is billed with € 1/TB.
    Incoming and internal traffic is unlimited.

I hope storage boxes come to Singapore, they're ridiculously affordable for backups. I don't see it happening though, considering the US datacenter still doesn't have them available. I can dream I guess - the ping from AU to EU/US is so high that it takes months to backup to them, but nothing else is affordable unless you're only backing up a few TB.

>the ping from AU to EU/US is so high that it takes months to backup to them

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a jumbo jet full of hard drives flying on the gulfstream?

How big is the raw data set you're backing up? :)

R.I.P. G Suite Business. I had an incredible run with it.

Hi there, As a general rule, we don't publish roadmaps on upcoming new products/features/locations/etc. However, I can offer to send a +1 for you for our customer wishlist for Storage Boxes in Singapore. If anyone else would like this, please just upvote it, and I will pass that feedback on. (Several other people on reddit requested this, so you're not the only one.) --Katie

80% higher cost and 20x less bandwidth. Holy cow. Singapore servers are expensive.

As with all of our locations, we strive to keep our costs a low as possible. Traffic plays a major role in the costs of our cloud servers. Our analyses have shown that the majority of users tend to require less traffic. Therefore we adjusted the included traffic. This means that the many users with low consumption do not pay for the few users with high consumption, and we can make the prices fairer overall. --Katie

Do you expect the traffic price to come down over time for Singapore, or not really? I'm based in Australia, and will need to get a server set up sometime in the not too distant future, so Singapore might be a good option.

I have a small suggestion: I found it confusing that the price was € 7.40 in the infobox, but € 8.14 in the Traffic section. The infobox mentioned it's exclusive of tax, so I realised the latter figure includes GST for me, but it was a little confusing at first, having it shown two different ways.

We don't expect the prices for Singapore to decrease in the near future. Thanks for considering us as a viable option for your future server. Thanks for the feedback about the prices/taxes. We're always working on how best to display/communicate that because we know it can be confusing. The price that you see displayed on Cloud Console (once you have an account) automatically takes all of the factors that affect your price into account. --Katie

I'm also based in Australia and I've been using their West coast US location

Asian traffic are generally expensive. OVH (their competitor) offers unlimited bandwidth, except in Australasia where it's cutthroat (1 TB for their lowest plans) and from what I heard OVH's Asian servers are worse in some ISP combinations, for example with Telkom Indonesia, that ironically their European servers are faster (it seems that ISPs are just extortionate here).

Love Hetzner. Can vouch for them. I run a very beefy machine on them and use Pocketbase and that is a multimillion dollar business.

How beefy is "very beefy"? :)

I use one of these https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/brands/matrix-d...

Cool. When I've looked at those they seem decent, but more expensive than putting similar spec'd equipment in co-location (with Hetzner) and let it depreciate over a bunch of years.

Can you explain more? What percentage costs can you save on average?

Sure. Keeping things to round figures for simplicity. :)

Lets say you buy a given Dell server for US$10k.

If you plan to run that server over (say) 5 years then you can effectively consider the hardware cost to be ~US$2k per year.

As a lot of enterprise flash drives are rated for 5 years, that's a decent baseline. (and for the stuff I do, the drives are only lightly loaded so they'll last much longer)

Then it becomes a matter of comparing the yearly cost of your configuration to the Hetzner provided ones.

And if you're patient and know what you're doing (ie build your own servers), you can get some end-of-year model (and similar) servers with lots of memory and storage for "fairly" cheap compared to sticker price.

Seems quite pricey to me:

CPX11 - 2 shared vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB, 1TB bandwidth, €7.90 + VAT

CCX13 - 2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB, 1TB bandwidth, €21.50 + VAT

For comparison with Germany, Finland and US with 20 TB bandwidth: CCX12 is €4.35 + VAT, CCX13 is €12.49 + VAT

People have been asking for other regions for a long time, but Hetzner is usually extremely good price for the specs but in this case the bandwidth allowance is very low (and €7.40+VAT/TB overage) and there are other providers (e.g. greencloud) who can beat this with their standard prices and massively beat this when they run promotions.

APAC transit costs :shrug:

We strive to always make our prices as fair as possible. We did the same when we set the prices for the new location in Singapore. We didn't want to offset the costs there by making other locations in Europe and the US more expensive. You can also see this philosophy at work in the pricing for our dedicated servers in Finland. The energy prices there are lower, so the monthly price for our dedicated servers there are lower too. --Katie

How does Hetzner manage to be so much cheaper than AWS & GCP? Are the other cloud providers just making THAT much margin, or does Hetzner have a special angle?

IIRC, they produce their own hardware (including using consumer-grade components, if I'm not mistaken) and optimize every bit for efficiency. Managed services also come with an extra fee. From my experience, they're also more selective about clients.

They're also based in Germany, so they don't have to pay the hyper-inflated SV salaries and probably don't overhire, but I'm only speculating here.

Don’t AWS and GCP also produce some of their own chips and hardware?

But basically you’re saying, yes, AWS and GCP are making just as much, maybe more, margin as Hetzner?

AWS, Azure and GCP have much higher margins than Hetzner. So while I use these services when working for my employers because they pay me to do so, when I spend my own money on my startup I use Hetzner exclusively.

Consumer-grade is too expensive. Best price/performance with high utilization is Epyc 9654 based system. We build at roughly $7k/box for 96 cores, 768 GB RAM, 8 TiB of NVMe. You can't buy that yourself, though. You have to go through an integrator. We built our own because near 100% utilization on HFT sims and training.

One thing that I like about working at Hetzner is that it is privately owned, so we don't have a bunch of investors expecting an ever-increasing return on their investments. We can re-invest profits in the company itself, in our infrastructure, and in our crew. --Katie

We get asked this question a lot, so we wrote up an explanation: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-prici... --Katie

> We try not to cross subsidize our products or services.

Could you then at least start offering object storage on top of your regular storage offerings in the cloud? You have repeatedly stated you won't do this, but I don't understand why. I think people using your services would pay a premium for an AWS compatible storage API.

There are actually hints they're working on S3-compatible object storage:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/14e8asj/object_sto...

If/when we are able to provide object storage in the future, we will announce it on our social media channels, our customer forum, and our customer newsletter. We are also always very grateful to anyone who posts our good news here on HN. --Katie

I have an impression that EC2 instances are priced so high to discourage their use and instead steer customers to managed services: S3, CludFront, Lamda, RDS, SQS, Fargate e. t. c.

I really like the tier of service Hetzner is targeting. You can rent powerful servers for relatively cheap from them, and build your own infra on top if that's your thing. Really depends on what you want to optimize for. You can even do a hybrid setup with a cloud provider AND Hetzner, connecting them using a private net.

Great news though I wonder why we're continuing with 7002 in new locations.

I get the consistency but by now that's 2 (almost 3) generations old. Would rather have a new start. The 7002 is due for an upgrade. At some point it's no longer a price advantage when the hard is so behind.

A lot of careful thought and planning went into choosing the hardware for the basis of our cloud infrastructure in Singapore. One of the important factors was the reliability of the hardware. This allows us to provide a very reliable product to a very competitive price, which fits in most use-cases. However, we are still developing and testing new platforms. But as always: We can not share details about a roadmap. --Katie

I spent last night migrating ERPNext 80G's box from Hetzner US, Hillsboro to Singapore.

I love the seamless experience.

- Take a snapshot from US's box.

- Restore US snapshot to new Singapore box.

- Wait about 15min and it's done.

The prices are still nice, compared to Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode.

Thanks for that feedback! I will make sure to share it with the teams! That streamlined experience is something that we work hard to achieve. --Katie

At this point it would be cool if Hetzner would have not only a floating IPs but also Multicast IPs.

This would be on my Wishlist super high up and it would instantly solve a big issue in routing with a robust solution.

Discussed a few hours ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41168836

Do they still require a utility bill to open an account?

Hey there, As with most other reputable web hosting companies, we have a KYC (know your customer) process. With some customers, we may ask them to provide documentation to help us verify their identity/customer information, and we accept many forms of documents to help us with this. Some customers will indeed use a utility bill to help us do this. We understand that going through any KYC process isn't fun, but it does help us to reduce abuse, and that is something we take very seriously. --Katie

Well, that's a lie. Before COVID, I was a digital nomad and didn't have a permanent address, and you refused to open an account for me because I couldn't confirm my address with the limited options of acceptable documents. I guess it's just a German thing with the Anmeldung's and all that...

I see intel variant shared vps are cheaper than the amd in hetzner. When we can get Intel variation in Singapore also?

Hi there, I can add a +1 for this to our customer wishlist for you. --Katie

Sure thank you. Intel variation will be awesome. It will be much cheaper than existing AMD variant i think. And any idea when we can get ARM vps?

> I see intel variant shared vps are cheaper than the amd in hetzner

What does cheaper even mean when it is a lot slower...

Those were old Intel CPUs...

There are many services for which we dont need that much faster processing speed. For those it intel variants are enough.

Nice.

wow! great news!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com