German discount host Hetzner launches new servers
hetzner.de
hetzner.de
Clarification: I had bad experiences with disk reliability, I told different friends, that in turn had very bad experiences including multiple disks in RAID breaking in the same time range.
Of course, that doesn't make parent's claim any more true; just pointing out that this is probably not the reason.
Also be aware that their abuse department shoots first and asks later. I know of servers that were off the grid for multiple days without access because of abuse on a friday - everyone relevant went on weekend.
They _are_ cheap and that comes with a few trade-offs. Doesn't make the product bad, necessarily. If you are cash-strapped and need raw power, buy without hesitation.
Blaming providers for the inability to secure your server is incredibly irresponsible. Unless service was interrupted because Hetzner misread an abuse report for another server (which is highly improbable and most likely is not what you implied in your original statement), you shouldn't ever be pissed that your host took action to prevent abuse from occurring.
things that warrant disruption of service and are defined as abuse:
1) any type of DoS attack
2) phishing
3) malicious activity (ssh brute force, port scanning without consent, etc)
4) cp
5) anything that generates a court order with jurisdiction, including DMCA if you have anything to do with the US
6) spam/spamvertised site
there are more things that can be defined as abuse, but the others are more or less discretionary, imo.
The problem is that relevant persons assisting you in resolving the problem (e.g. giving access using a secure connection) are not reachable over the weekend and take their time. That is a problem of the provider.
If you ignore the 24 hour limit, it will just escalate the case to a support person, who then decides what to do. There is no automatic shutdown, especially not for multiple days.
Not being available for resolution is a different thing.
Also the procedure to get the disk replaced is insane and involves you dealing with disk IDs... It's a RAID, then should just check what is the broken disk and replace it, end of the story.
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracud...
So beware of having those installed, under high I/O they will fail at a random instant.
However, support is acting incredibly quickly, within 5 minutes of sending the support request they got to work on the server.
Because of missing data we asked for a data cable replacement first (instead of just replacing the disk) - and it worked. Even more, it works without problems since. YMMV of course.
BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.
> BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.
I'll second this. Support is/was often a horror story for me, but so far Hetzner has been absolutely impeccable.
Contrast this with Mediatemple, where I once had to engage in a lengthy support battle with a chain of incredibly ignorant and condescending support staff before being escalated to a senior person who finally, finally admitted I had found huge problem with the cluster. This took several days of intermittent outages, dozens of emails, and a lot of energy...
After the disk failures, however, some of the virtual images I had on there had trouble booting. They were complaining about bad blocks. After running fsck they ran again.
The whole experience made me realize that I really need to run on a filesystem with checksumming. Just plain RAID-1 only helps for a limited subset of errors, and only if it is able to detect which disk failed correctly.
Needless to say, rebuilding 3 TB raid took a long time and downtime and pain... but all in all, it was worth it, considering the prices.
I can also confirm support was quite fast, even if some of the replacement drives were not new and some even came with bad sectors lol ... such is life.
The DB server has pumped over 10 TiB of data in the last 80 days (mostly non cached) and the index is rebuilt constantly and well over 1.5 TiB in size.
Anecdotal I know but another data point to consider.
These days I just expect it to go bad, so I use ZFS within FreeBSD to watch for errors, and when they happen I ask them to replace a single drive, and then the other.
So far it has worked very well for me with no data loss. I've been fairly lucky in that both drives have't failed at the same time.
Can anyone recommend a solution? Is there a good software that works as good as their managed version, e. g. keeps itself updated and has a more or less tight security package out of the box? Or do I need to hire a system administrator?
I do have some Linux/command line skills, but I don't want to put a lot of time in it.
* First time was only a hanging connection to the server, because the machine was still performing disk checks (they didn't tell us that, we had to request local access), second time the hdd crashed and we learned the hard way that they are unable to configure a software raid properly (but tell you that the root servers are preconfigured with raid), which resulted in a complete data loss. External backups saved us here.
1) offsite backups
2) potential that things go sideways during maintenance
3) offsite backups
Them external backups are always worth the cost!
4) offsite backups
And yes, it is reasonable to expect the customer to provide the licenses for the software, but hosting companies can also sell monthly software usage to their customers - we ended up choosing a host that did exactly this. The monthly cost we pay for Windows + MSSQL will not reach the total cost of a full MSSQL license for three years.
This: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
Old: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
Sections 6 and 7
That being said, I'm sure the 4770 is great for Minecraft or as a testing server (lack of ECC ram makes them a bad idea for serious use).
Or they just quickly whipped up some consumer-grade Haswell servers to offer while working on more reliable offerings of the higher end segments.
Hetzner usually discards their old servers on their server bidding robot [1], I'm surprised these 920's haven't been moved there yet.
Some Opterons require EEC, some don't.
http://serverfault.com/questions/433221/does-amazon-ec2-and-...
>AWS does not comment on this question. The general consensus (based on seeing this question asked on SO, HackerNews, Reddit and so on) is that, unless AWS specifically tells you the instance type is running ECC memory, you should assume it is not.
>Although unscientific and inconclusive I suppose this makes sense - ECC is a selling point, and the fact that AWS does not plaster "all our instances run ECC" on their info pages certainly suggests that they are not.
Is there any way of getting VMware or Xen on thus? I have a project ( http://www.opentestsearch.com/ ) that currently uses 9 small virtual machines, running some different operating systems and software that can't easily run on the same server. Currently colo has been the only viable option. Cloud servers would be too expensive and no cheap dedicated host I know about support virtualizations systems like VMware or Xen.
Perhaps that's all been fixed now though.
I've got a virtual server running there flawlessly for the last five years. Customer service is amazing (all communication is english and german), and I can only remeber one single downtime for a few hours in all the years.