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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw).

My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers.

When I need to scale, I can always add servers. The only difference is that with physical servers you don't scale up/down on demand within minutes, you have to plan for hours/days. But that's perfectly fine.

I use a distributed database (RethinkDB, switching to FoundationDB) for fault tolerance.

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Similar setup to me (including rethinkdb). Why choose FoundationDB? RethinkDb is still maintained and features added occasionally (I'm on the rethinkdb slack and maintain an async php driver). It just is one guy though, working on it part time.

RethinkDB is somewhat maintained, and while it is a very good database and works quite well, it is not future-proof. But the bigger reason is that I need better performance, and by now (after 10 years) I know my data access patterns well, so I can make really good use of FoundationDB.

The reason for FoundationDB specifically is mostly correctness, it is pretty much the only distributed database out there that gives you strict serializability and delivers on that promise. Performance is #2 on the list.

How will you deal with lack of 3 AZ or FI to DE latency?

Nice to see someone still using RethinkDB.

You use vpncloud to connect across different Hetzner data centers (DE + FI)? I thought/assumed Hetzner provided services to do this at little-to-no cost.

No, I use vpncloud for a local (within a datacenter) VPN. This lets me move more configuration into ansible (out of the provider's web interfaces), avoid additional fees, and have the same setup usable for any hosting provider, including virtual clouds. Very flexible.

Not the GP, but I also use Hetzner, but use Tailscale to connect securely across different Hetzner regions (and indeed other VPS providers).

Hetzner does provide free Private Networks, but they only work within a single region - I'm not aware of them providing anything (yet) to securely connect between regions.

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