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Comment by GavinAnderegg | Hacker News Reader

Might be a stupid question, but why did Hetzner take off? I feel like I’d barely heard of them before last year, but now they’re the go-to hosting suggestion from many. Are they just a solid host, or do they offer something extra? Their website makes them looks almost generic, so I assume it’s not marketing.

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They have been around for a long time. I heard people praising them already in startup events 10+ year ago (I'm not that active in the scene myself any more). They are known for great price/quality ratio for the dedicated servers. There are some gotchas, as you might get random crappy hardware or whatever. The firms I have been working for and which decided to go build their infra mostly with hetzner, I would estimate that they have saved millions in comparison to common cloud services. The staff often complains because managing your own dedicated servers is a bit more work than going with something like AWS, but if you put in the numbers, the amount of money saved in the end can be insane.

I was with linode for a loooong time for my personal VM-in-cloud (like 15 years). But I got an itch to check around to see if there was a cheaper option earlier this year and found that Hetzner would give me literally twice the machine for about two thirds the cost. ($6/mo vs €4~/mo, 1gb nanode vs. CX22 so 1vcpu/1gb to 2vcpu/4gb and 25gb disk to 40gb)

So far I'm happy with the service. Linode wasn't bad per se, Hetzner just offered more for less. Their admin console is a bit more spartan in comparison to Linode's, but that's not a place I spend much time anyway. If Russia glasses Finland and Germany I'd have to find another provider but I'm pretty sure I'd have bigger problems at that point than where to park my wordpress blahg and irc session, lol.

I think if they glass Finland/Germany, then they know the US will next attempt to glass Russia, so they will launch it all at once, which of course results in all of Russia, nearly all of Europe, and the USA all being glassed and China picking up the pieces. So it’s probably better to learn Mandarin and find an AWS like data center there.

They've existed since 1997 and have always been a solid host with good pricing on both bare metal and later VPS services. They seem to have managed to survive the Cloud onslaught as well by continuing to provide reliable service for good prices.

Perhaps you heard less about them because they're based in Europe and thus less hype sorrounds them?

They became a serious VPS contender amongst DigitalOcean, Linode, and other similar providers. DigitalOcean raised prices while Hetzner gave more powerful server capacity (read double) at lower price points. Hetzner has been increasingly popular in self-hosting communities.

I started using their services since last year for some of the operations, including business, and it's been rock solid. I plan on increasing usage, but will hold on this new object storage offering.

The pricing is much better than other providers, while being a reputable company. Pretty much the best value for non-enterprise workloads.

I've associated them for a while with uber cheap hosting, while also being allegedlly* reasonable (Most of the time) and reliable

* Couldn't tell you, as they flagged my account and asked me for an ID Document I couldn't provide, Maybe I could have sorted it with Customer Service, but instead I just picked a different german hosting

Their accounts department is egregious. Amazing offerings but it's so frustrating.

I had some servers that I had autopay setup for I thought. But the bill went over as unpaid and they shut off the servers. Then I noticed & tried to login to their web account system but my account was locked. Support wanted me to send a wire transfer. I begged and begged, told them how it would cost as much as by debt, and they opened my account for ~36 hours, but after some delay, and I was away vacationing. I sent them the wire transfer almost two months ago now & still nothing from their accounts/billing people, even though the transfer had the account & payment #'s. It's been so frustrating, & so unnecessarily over the top bad & they seem to love making it worse every step. What the hell Hetzner?

I've been with them ~15 years, and they have been solid. Back then I had a dedicated server I was developing an online multiplayer java game on, great fun! until the whole java webstart certificate fiasco. A few years back I was porting that old game over to wasm, and they added the mime type support within a few hours of asking. They are some very knowledgeable engineers, and maybe that is reflected in the simple website design. But I like that simple productive interface, and dread the day the MBAs or marketing teams get their hands on it.

They are cheap. People have more of a focus on cost recently which pushes back against AWS. As far as vibes go, more people seem to be getting back into managing their own machines and self-hosting. I think Linode used to fill that void but for various reasons they relinquished that opportunity.

Hetzner is well known and beloved in Europe for a decade or two, so it didn't really start out of nowhere. Maybe you (and most of HN) became aware of them, when they opened their American datacenters in 2021 & 2022, and became a viable option for people outside of Europe.

It's very cheap. They've been around for years. I've been using them for my personal server for the past 2-3 years without problems. The only problems I have seen from them are the control plane API going down (so, like, creating new servers isn't available).

I got a pretty nice dedicated server with 2x3 TB HDD + 20 TB/month of traffic for just 25€/month. Was great for hosting >1 TB of video content publically.

I don't know about the last year, maybe they ramped up their marketing. But they've been pretty popular in my circle for the past 6-7 years, mostly because price/performance ratio is really favorable. I use it for the past ~3y.

great value and reliability

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