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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

Reading comments from the past few days makes it seem like dealing with Hetzner is a pain (and as far as I can tell, they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors).

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> (and as far as I can tell, they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors)

Can you say more? Their Cloud instances, for example, are less than half the cost of OVH's, and less than a fifth of the cost of a comparable AWS EC2 instance.

even free servers are of no use if it’s not usable during a product launch. :) You get what you pay for i guess.

But i do agree, it is much cheaper.

To be fair what use is a server if you can’t afford to keep it running. This is especially true for very bootstrapped startups.

We all start somewhere. :) Hetzner can be a good fit for many small companies.

But let’s also be honest, if you’re THAT bootstrapped, you probably have no business running kubernetes to begin with. If the company has a short runway, it doesn’t make sense to work on a complex architecture from the start. Focus on shipping something and getting revenue.

Depends entirely on what is your starting skillset.

K8s is my tool of choice when I am that boostrapped, because a single server with k3s thrown on it will cost me maybe 80 EUR a month and hold all environments plus CI/CD plus various self-hosted business components (with backup sent over to separate provider, just in case), and I'll be free to build my project instead of messing with server setup or worry about cloud bills.

that’s a good point. +1

I don't think so. We see the outliers. Those happens at Linode, Digital Ocean, etc also. And yes even at Google Cloud and AWS you sometimes get either unlucky or unfairly treated.

> they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors

This is demonstrably false.

What competitors are similar to Hetzner in pricing? Last I checked, they seemed quite a bit cheaper than most.

Forum for cheap hosts:

https://lowendtalk.com/

Wouldn't reccomend any of these outside of personal use though.

OVH is larger provider, servers usually not significantly more expensive than hetzner.

Honestly hetzner supoort has bren outstanding from my experience. They are always there and very responsive using email

If you prefer no bullshit communications they are great. They are to the point, terse and very German. I find this both refreshing and exactly what I want/need out of support. The few times I have needed to contact them it's been HW related. One was a SSD that was clearly having issues even though SMART reported nothing wrong, I sent them blktrace output and they said yup that checks out, scheduled disk replacement right away. The other time was a network related problem with their transit, I had some ASNs that I was trying to talk to suddenly getting some pretty damn cursed paths and a big increase in latency as a result, they sorted out the path weights super fast and everything has been great since.

The only other time I have received better support was from Aussie ISPs. Back in the day when you called Internode the guy who answered the phone was a bona-fide network engineer and would go as far as getting a shell on the DSLAM to check out what is going on. To me that is peak support, live debugging of the problem!

Similarly I called into Aussie Broadband to do my first NBN setup, explained I did "BYO" modem because I was going to initiate the PPPoE session with my Linux router and they said no problem. She even offered to send me a cookie cutter pppd config along with the info to set it up myself. Easily the some of the most knowledgeable and "can do" attitude for first layer support I have encountered.

Needless to say when I encounter damn good support I stay even when it costs more.

I was an Internode customer for many years until TPG bought the company, fired the extremely smart and talented support team in Adelaide, and offshored "support" to a call centre in Philippines that hires people who barely know what a computer is.

I actually switched to Aussie Broadband to get an NBN fault fixed that TPG Philippines refused to acknowledge existed, or escalate to NBN.

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