Hetzner's new server offer: 1 Gbit, 2 x 240GB SSD, 32GB RAM - 59 euros/month | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner's new server offer: 1 Gbit, 2 x 240GB SSD, 32GB RAM - 59 euros/month

hetzner.de

97 pointsrmoriz83 comments

Also have had a great experience with Hetzner, 100% uptime for the 11 months since moving http://www.servicestack.net over to them. They ended up 1/4 cheaper than the previous dedicated leaseweb server with our redis benchmarks now completing in 1/8th of the time.

"One time setup fee" of the order ~ 100 EUR per server is enough to deter me from setting up and try out the servers/bandwidth/availability claims etc. on an immediate basis. This fee clearly separates these pretty good prices from Digital Oceans equally good server prices.

The performance of DO has absolutely nothing to do with a dedicated box.

Maybe. And I'm curious to find out exactly how good the performance and connectivity of these boxes is compared to DO boxes, especially at these attractive prices. But these rather large per-box setup fees are a clear deterrent for a cash-strapped startup to even try things out.

I'm a customer of both and the author of two rubygems (one for the Hetzner API, one for the Digitial Ocean API). From my experience Hetzner is 10x faster, more reliable and more professional.

e.g. no changes to production APIs without notice, no radical product changes (as seen with NL based vservers at DO) and much more.

If you're looking for something in the US, you probably want to go with DO but for Europe only OVH can beat Hetzner (only sometimes). Both offer 1Gbit/s uplinks and direct connection to the largest and most important CIX in Europe (http://de-cix.net/)

Hetzner and OVH are no startups burning money anymore. They make huge profits and are in business for over a decade. They know how to build, operate and scale things efficiently. They will not be gone in a couple of years. They are not as fast in providing "new stuff" (think of OpenStack IaaS/a Cloud Platform like AWs) but I bet this will change, too.

What happened with the NL based DigitalOcean servers?

They stopped provisioning some of them for a couple of weeks. no word on their status and/or offer page. API calls just failed. Turns out that they ran out of IPv4 space but were not able to communicate that to their customers in a professional manner.

I'm curious as well, what happened with DO NL?

Most startups choose AWS for their hosting, where they're paying a ~10x premium over dedicated boxes. Budget obviously isn't the deciding factor even for cash-strapped new tech companies, not when we're talking about just 100EUR.

I find AWS pricing rather high (for the actual performance on offer) too. That's why my comparison was with Digital Ocean.

Cash-strapped startups are not choosing DigitalOcean, they're choosing AWS. That's their point of comparison. Your assertion was that 100EUR would be a barrier to startups, not just to yourself.

http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/09/24/who-hosts-the-y-combi...

Heh... ok dude. Yeah, aws bad... hetzner good. Got it.

Off-topic but do you get mistaken for the lecturer Dan Grossman? Especially around here since he did a coursera functional programming course earlier this year?

Ping on my ex-4 is 200ms from California. My OVH box in Canada is 80ms by comparison. Latency is an issue.

    California <-> Germany : 200ms
    California <-> Canada  : 80ms

What's the problem?

If you need decent response-time everywhere in the world, you go and buy Co-Location. http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/racks

No, the problem is I don't need decent response-time everywhere in the world. I need decent response time in California. That's where the majority of my visitors are from. Latency is the tradeoff you make when you buy overseas servers to save money.

Just fyi. OVH AND Hetzner both got hacked multiple times. If you're an old OVH Customer, you probably know it.

Maybe then don't want a lot of people trying out their service for a single month? A higher entry barrier means more predictable usage patterns.

A similar "machine" on DO, with 120GB less disk, costs more than 4x as much (245 EUR) and likely has poorer performance due to virtualization overhead.

Hetzner clearly seems to focus on long term relationships but without long contracts. The longer you're a happy customer the more profit they can make out of a one time hardware expense.

I've seen 100% uptime from Hetzner for the 6 months I've been a customer (can't say the same for any of my other servers elsewhere).

German law provides a 14 days cancellation period. If you're from abroad read the T&C and try asking Hetzner support upfront about that.

Also, Hetzner has an auction platform for used servers without setup fee (of course not the latest ssd models yet): http://www.serverbidding.com/

Thanks you. Yours is pretty much the only useful and informative reply in a sea of responses designed to make me feel bad for questioning the magnitude of the setup fee.

This is actual, cold hardware that will be provisioned for you if you buy it. I guess thats why there is a setup fee.

Hetzner pre-provisions systems. If you're a existing customer in good standing and don't have special wishes (e.g. you don't enter something in the "comment" field of the order) your system will be ready in ~5-10 minutes.

They build their own PXE setup and assemble the hardware themselves. iirc they have >100.000 physical servers on 2 locations. Each location consists of ~10 buildings like described here: http://www.datacenterpark.de/images/rz_modell.gif

Here is a screenshot from BING maps (link doesnt work): http://i.imgur.com/6zNvBz1.jpg

Here are more official details about their data centers: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung...

Just purchased this, I'm paying the same price for the same specs with Hetzner, just without SSD.

So I copied over my data, then cancelled my old plan. Good deal for the same thing but with SSDs.

Yeah that's double what they did charge for a 4s setup ($49 euro). I wonder why the increase?

They start with a higher setup fee when new hardware gets introduced and lower the setup fee during the lifetime when hardware gets cheaper.

In the hosting world, I see set-up fees as a sign of quality, i.e. a service that isn't aiming for the lowest common denominator with free trials and whatever else. They create a hefty barrier to discourage casual users and scammers.

Digital Ocean is much more expensive for the same setup...

What do you mean equally good? Hetzner seems to give you a much more resources for the same price.

Digital Ocean $80/month: 8 GB, 4 Cores, 80GB SSD, 5TB Transfer

Hetzner $77/month: 32 GB, 4 Cores Haswell, 2 x 240 GB SSD, 20 TB Transfer

I don't see those equally good.

And Hetzner gives you physical machine that you can virtualize by yourself, ie. buy one and install for example 4 virtual guests on one box. You could compare it to 4xDO = ~1 x Hetzner.

Has anyone run into problems related to Hetzner's servers that use non-ECC RAM (which is most of them)? Reading stuff like [1] has made me wary of using non-ECC RAM for servers, but a lot of people seem to be getting by without it, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

[1] Google estimates that 8% of DIMMs per year will produce an ECC-catchable error: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

Amazon does not use ECC RAM in its AWS servers and the internet seems to work ok.

Are you sure? I could not find any reliable source for this, only things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898660

The same person claiming it then, also claimed that ECC RAM can be twice as expensive, which is far from typical -- it's quite common to see differences of less than 15%. Maybe he was confusing ECC with FB-DIMM?

The RAM itself isn't much more expensive, but if you're trying to build a cheap Intel computer then it will get much more expensive with ECC, since there are no cheap Intel CPU/mobos with ECC.

Isn't AWS well known for being unreliable, though? One postmortem claims that their average AWS instance dies after 200 days [1]. People use it, but within architectures that plan for unreliability of any individual instance. In that case I wouldn't expect anyone to care about ECC, either, since it's a quite different use-case from wanting a reliable dedicated server. Although it's interesting that Google uses ECC anyway, despite a massively redundant server cluster.

[1] http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...

Do you have a source for this statement?

Because Amazon doesn't want to confirm it I'm pretty sure they don't use ECC.

(My team owns product management for the Amazon EC2 instance platform)

I wanted to clear up all the confusion on this topic and am cross-posting on other threads where this has come up recently.

All the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory. In our experience ECC is a necessary requirement for server infrastructure. We will be updating our detail pages/FAQs with that information.

Scary attitude. Lack of ECC in servers has bitten me personally at work to that extent I even use ECC in all of my home desktop computers. Heck, I've been looking for laptops with ECC - unsuccessfully so far.

Anything can happen, and it's all up to luck. And I don't want to rely on luck.

Although I guess it's ok if all you're doing is serving somewhat unimportant static resources. That said, I think AWS servers do have ECC, but I've got no proof.

It would seem odd for them to run Xeons and not have ECC RAM with it.

Amazon reached out to me via email and stated they do use ECC RAM on all servers.

It really depends on your application. If you're fault tolerant, then it's irrelevant. If even a single random error will throw everything down the drain, then you'll obviously want every precaution.

Most web applications don't need that kind of protection, simply because if the page load screws up, well, the user will just hit refresh and keep going.

The user might just hit refresh and keep going. Your customer will just go.

> Your customer will just go.

You're right, I agree. And again, I'll stress that it depends on the circumstances.

Running a dedicated server with ECC memory costs $$$. Is that client worth it or not? That's only something you can determine based on your circumstances.

ECC RAM is about 10% more expensive than regular. And RAM is typically 10% of total server hardware costs. Is 1% saving really worth risking it?

32 GB ECC: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DE...

32 GB non-ECC: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DE...

ECC RAM by itself might be cheap, but it goes with Xeon motherboards (1.5-2x more expensive) and Xeons (2-5x more expensive)

Well, there's a good chance the same misbehavior or error will happen again and again, until the server is rebooted. Memory errors are not necessarily transient.

Since when is an advertisement "Hacker News"?

I stopped reading slashdot regularly when this started happening there...

Not an advertisement, but a price list full of technical information.

Just read the title. Clearly ad.

AKA an advertisement.

Since a sufficient number of people decided it was worth upvoting this item.

You mean like every time there is price update announcement for AWS or linode, or the next android or apple product announcement?

Every time AWS blogs and an Amazon employee submits it.

Every time the YC network artificially pushes each other to the front page or posts a job.

Every time some startup writes about random startup shit completely unrelated to whatever they're selling just to pull traffic from HN.

Every time publications including ITWorld, ExtremeTech, Geek, MacObserver, DailyDot, BetaBeat, etc, have had undisclosed employees shilling their links.

I'd much rather hear what Hacker News readers have to say about hosting providers that what Slashdot readers have to say. That's why I upvoted the conversation. That's how I learned about Hetzner in the first place, and I'm happy I got a server there. Don't need to upgrade yet, but it's nice to hear what sensible people think of their latest offerings.

This post is free advertising for Hetzner, but I do think they deserve the attention for the unique value/price offering. Let alone that, their servers are not right under the nose of the NSA (although probably not that far away either).

NSA, GCHQ, BND,… probably spy on every DC in Europe and the USA anyway… :/

People are complaining about this being an advertisement and it kind of makes me sad. I don't often invest time in looking at dedicated hosting offers so for me this was neat. Heck it actually got me excited considering moving some of my old ideas to this infra at an affordable price.

Why is this making headlines? It's European, so you suffer the transcontinental latency, and OVH offers superior dedicated servers in either their North American or European Data centers. EU: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/

NA(Canada): http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/

Not everyone on HN is from the US. Also, in what way do you view OVH as superior? From a quick glance it appears you get better hardware for less money with Hetzner compared with OVH.

OVH is a french company. Their NA data center is relatively new.

There's no real direct comparison on hardware between the 2 vendors, but there seems to be little exciting about the price point in the OP.

I can't comment why it's on the frontpage. But transatlantic latency is in the eye of the beholder, and when you say "superior servers", you're probably ignoring the prices. The Hetzner server mentioned here costs 59 EUR/month. For that price (or a bit more 54 GBP -> 62 EUR) your .uk link gives:

- A CPU two generations older, without hyperthreading (i7-4770k vs. i5-2400k), with 25% less cache and 10% lower frequency

- Half the memory

- HDDs instead of SSDs

- A 100Mbps connection instead of 1Gbps, and half the guaranteed bandwidth

If you wanted 32GB and the SSDs, at OVH it'd be 83 EUR vs. Hetzner's 59 EUR.

True, OVH is more expensive, (and their backend is downright primitive comapred to Hetzner's Robot UI), but that transatlantic latency just doesn't work for things like gaming servers. >300ms on a good day won't cut it for TF2.

Right, but as I tried to point out too subtly, the latency depends on your location.

You, and the original post of this sub-thread, seem to be assuming that the right way to measure latency is from the US. But this isn't purely an American site, and it's silly to assume that all posters are from the US. There are billions of people who will have lower ping times to Europe than to America.

You should compared to OVH in Canada instead. The Price are roughly the same when you take into account Hetzners 99EUR Setup fees. OVH also gets you a very decent Anti-DDOS for free. No more shutting off due to DDOS attack.

The higher up plans they have recently got a brand new, decent Hardware Raid included as well as the latest Intel DC 3500 SSD.

So I dont understand why these make HN headlines when only 1 week ago OVH US introduce some much better plans and no one cared to mention it.

That depends which continent you're on.

Similarly I wonder why those new easy payment startups make the news, since they're US-only.

err. It's European which means the US government can't do whatever they want with your data.

There seems to be a lot of noise at the moment with people re-evaluating who is in control of their data, this is just another variation of that theme.

Is this being up voted because Germany is seen as a safe haven from the NSA?

Edit: Since when has a question here attracted down votes? Oh, more down votes for that one I suppose.....

I really hope Hetzner expands to the US/Canada. If the level of service is comparable, this represents a ridiculous savings over Softlayer.

They probably won't but have you seen http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/ yet?

And I thought my hosting was bloody cheap... Jeez

... or their Kimsufi section http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml !

I have, but I've heard mixed reviews of their service when hardware fails, etc.

Was about time after Hetzner getting hacked the 2nd time.. My friend owns two of their largest dedicated boxes for some years now. His sysadmin is exceptionally good and his pay aswell (250€/h), I mean he can secure that box the best possible way, but he cannot do anything about Hetzner getting hacked.

Now guess how afraid they were when they heard that their project (6y effort) could be in risk.

I mean they have good offers and so on, but I wouldn't trust them after that. That's my opinion, maybe they changed or improved security. However I don't know a better alternative either.

Hetzner's prices include 19% German VAT. If you order from outside of the European Union Hetzner doesn't charge VAT, so you only pay around 50 Euros instead of 59 Euros.

Pretty much the same, if you're a VAT registered business in the EEA.

Just moved my startup to hetzner. Used my win 2012 iso image, installed everything without any problem. So far so good. Previously i was on ec2 and azure vm, but those cloud operators have really slow hdd and cpu for twice as much $ (expectable of course). But, because of Hetzner commodity hardware (no ecc, asus/msi motherboards, onboard lan, software raid,...) i had to add special backup procedures, if anything goes wrong, and I'm keeping one Azure VM on standby.

I've been with OVH for the past 3 years, I can't say I am not satisfied with the performance and stability but this price is too tempting. Anyone here jumped from OVH to Hetzner can tell me about their experiences?

Worst pricing page I have ever seen. It took me 2 minutes to figure out the prices. If I war the CEO with such an offer I would take some mesures to make sure this page is very easy to read.

How did it take you two minutes? The prices are written on the top.

Shame I can no longer purchase from them because they banned me for asking for a refund on an incorrect order they messed up...

There are no bandwidth limits on Hetzner's servers which are a BIG plus.

They do actually have a bandwidth limit where they'll either throttle you down to 10Mbps or similar, or ask you to start paying by the TB. However, they set that limit at 20-30TB (depending on the server type), which most people won't come anywhere close to; to hit that you'd have to average ~61Mbps continuously for the entire month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com