Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

All good points. What do you recommend for the "small potatoes"?

Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small.

Why do I say Hetzner?

It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.

For individuals, probably.

For SMBs spending $10k - $100k a month, I would absolutely advise against that.

A lot of those are spending 10-100k a month when they could be spending 1k-10k a month with a more lean infra

Why is that? I've seen couple of small firms using hetzner very successfully and saving a lot of money compared to whatever cloud offering.

Back when we were spending 100k/mo on AWS, I calculated that equivalent infra would be $15k-$20k/mo at Hetzner.

Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host I've ever used in 20+ yrs of using different web host. Spending hours trying to do basic things, and even AI couldnt help. Switched to one of their competitors after 2(!) days of trouble shooting and got the same basic task done in ~10 mins.

    > Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host

This is the first negative thing about Hetzner I have read on HN. Does anyone else dis/agree?

    > one of their competitors

Can you share which one?

Digital Ocean. I should add going into the whole situation I had a positive feelings about Hetzner and negative feelings about Digital Ocean. It's why I tried Hetzner first. I didnt like D.O. or want to use them. But in the end their interface was way easier to work with.

I chose Digital Ocean. I just need a tiny Debian server I can run a couple self-managed services on and DO gave me exactly that for $4/mo.

I was with Azure before that and good lord was that a mistake. Miserable experience if all you need is a single VM.

I built a small project on Cloudflare and it just works. I've had only one issue where I ended up contacting support and they were very prompt in addressing it.

I've been using Scaleway and cannot complain yet, don't know their region reach though..

I'd go with a smaller VPS-focused provider like Vultr.

OVH - they are cheaper than AWS and bound by the EU privacy law (GDPR).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com