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Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

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