Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering and very good prices. While the cloud providers invested in innovation in software, they focused on optimizing the hardware and data center techniques and engineering (something very German, btw).
Now that Cloud is a pure commodity and companies are learning about how to be truly 'multi-cloud' they come out of nowhere with a very interesting proposal at incredible pricing.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems they have built the solution on top of opensource technologies like Ceph (100% sure) and OpenStack (not so sure...). OpenStack and Ceph have been around for 7 years, so they don't have to deal with their (sexy) immaturity of the early days. I miss some key features that premium cloud providers have, like a firewall (security groups), private networks (VPC or SDN style networks), and of course Windows. But the funny thing is that it fits perfectly with my multi-cloud approach, and we are going to test it and if it works, we will move our loads from the AWS Frankfurt region to them. And saving about 80%.
Nice move, Hetzner!
Been using Hetzner for years, their hardware's has been rock solid, predictable pricing with sweet price/performance ratio resulting in large savings from consolidating existing AWS EC2 instances.
Still using AWS for Apps which rely on cloud features, e.g. SES/RDS/etc but for static servers Hetzner is now our goto.
Super exciting to see them entering the cloud space and offering easy snapshots + backups, should open it to hosting more stuff on there.
The one difference is noticeable latency from their DC in Germany vs the instant response times I was getting from AWS's N.Virgina DC. Would obviously love it if Hetzner could open a DC in the US.
If they open a DC in the US, then - by the US laws - their US company will have to provide the data even from German DCs when requested by the US government. So it is maybe better not to enter the US...
I don’t mind the latency. I rent a a large GPU server from them for my own machine learning experiments. Their prices are so reasonably inexpensive that this is affordable. I think it would be more expensive for them to provide the same service in the USA - I base this in pricing. OVH is the only local provider I have used that is somewhat price competitive.
in my previous gig we used hetzner server to have several VMs and storage of that server failed , resulting that all our production servers went down. luckily we had backups, and restored partially our production, but after that incident we moved everything to DigitalOcean, just to not risk anymore. so our experience was bitter with Hetzner.
I recently tried Google Compute Cloud and concluded it's got almost as awful and crufty an interface as AWS. Almost. What is it with cloud providers, they can't hire a designer? Or they don't take them seriously? This stuff is terrible.
So I'm still sold vs. AWS, and I have to run some nodes, and I think great, I can put the business credit card on a cloud account and run stuff. But then Google refuses to let me sign up because every time I try it says "Unable to verify with this phone number.". This could be because I can only access Google via proxies and they are not in the country of my phone number (China or HK). So perversely I am left in a situation where to get Google to allow me to give them money I have to first open a proxy compute node with another Google account in the jurisdiction my phone number is in, install a proxy, then access them through that. But you'd think they probably block their own IPs, so that probably won't work.
If all you’re using is EC2 or GCE (ie: plain VMs) you’re just wasting money anyway. You’d be better served by going with one of the cheaper alternatives that only do VMs, so Hetzner or Digital Ocean or Linode or whatever doesn’t really matter...
I have used GCE, AWS, Hetzner, and OVH. On the face of it, while the GCE interface seemed very strange (e.g. can't rename most resources after creation), I have come to the conclusion that it is the best of the cloud providers. The flexibility of being able to upscale/downscale a machine, setting it up and then shutting it down until needed for free, the sustained use discount, and the fast startup keep me coming back. That said, I run a lot on Hetzner and love the fact that it just works. Edit: syntax, addditions for Hetnzer.
Since Hetzner appears to be reading here: I have a question that support couldn't answer last time. How are your DCs connected with each other and with external peering points? I notice that some traceroutes to FSN servers go via NBG. If one data centre region goes down (as OVH just experienced), will all peering still work on the other or would that kill some peering points?
Having some kind of network topology (like OVH's weathermap) would help with that, esp where to position servers that rely on certain peering points.
"How are the Data Centers connected to each other?
The two Data Center Parks are both connected to Frankfurt (FFM) and each other with dark fiber. Thus, a redundant loop is formed, which ensures the availability of a Data Center should one of the connections fail. The n10 Gbit/s connections provide ample bandwidth between the Data Centers.
The bandwidth of the connections between Nuremberg-Frankfurt, Nuremberg-Falkenstein and Falkenstein-Frankfurt are at least 120 Gbit/s. Through the Frankfurt location data is transported to the peering partners at DE-CIX and also to the uplinks Noris, GLBX, Aixit, AMS-IX, Init7 and Level3. At the Nuremberg location there are connections to Noris, KPN, Init7, Level3 and N-IX.
In each Data Center several Juniper EX Core switches, each with 64x 10 Gbit/s ports, are operated and bundle the streams of the Data Center to the n10 Gbit/s backbone and then over the various uplinks. "
I hope they grab enough market share to force other providers to lower their prices, Hetzner is like 10x cheaper and on better network and hardware then their competitors.
I was just speaking with their customer support about this and it appears (if I understood correctly) that this offering will be replacing the current CX line, which has a lot of SSD space at a competitive price (unlike the new offering). Since I really need the SSD offered by the current/previous CX line (it was the #1 reason that made me move to Heztner) it seems that I'll have to find a new cloud provider...
My experience with Hetzner is/was great, but as a customer it's impossible to rely on a service provider that extinguishes a whole service line in a few months and forces me to move a whole infrastructure at a whim...
For those of you looking for competitive prices with servers in the U.S., take a look at SSD Nodes—a bootstrapped hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. I'm the founder and CEO, so I'm a little biased, but we're offering 16GB of RAM plus KVM for a price that's more than competitive with Hetzner, and have clients posting excellent benchmarks, like 1.1 GB/s throughput and 480K IOPS[0].
two things kill it for me - annual commitment - I'm just playing around and I have so many options to choose from without the commitment.
Mind you, we're spending $10k+ on AWS right now, but it all started with a free tier.
Another thing is we're based in Europe and you only have servers in the US.
Good luck in the ultra competitive market.
Quite impressed so far, the interface clean and straight forward. We've been using Hetzner for years, mostly because the PX121 machines offer excellent performance for cheap. We'll be doing some in depth testing of this new cloud offering in the coming days/weeks.
Provisioning is already impressively fast, especially if you're coming from EC2 where it feels like an intern has to press a button or something to get an instance online.
However, what keeps me on Linode is that they have a London datacentre with excellent peering. I've seen 9ms pings, 150 miles away. Makes for seriously fast websites (in concert with good development processes).
Hetzner responds in 31-35ms from here. That might be Good Enough™ for many applications but it's not as special.
I've never been this tempted to jump ship though. Hopefully some of these features will become industry standard.
I am also on Linode as its price point is its strength. Really considering if Hetzner would charge forex on US cards, otherwise, seems like a good plan.
I'm in the UK and host things both in a colo facility about 2 miles from me in London, and at Hetzner, and the roundtrip difference is not noticeable for normal workloads unless you're doing something extremely latency sensitive.
I am using their previous "VServer" offering and while it is not easily visible on their landing page it is possible to reboot their VPS into either a Linux based or a FreeBSD rescue image and install your favourite Linux distro or FreeBSD from there.
This way you can run for example a FreeBSD or Arch Linux VPS for under 3 Euro per month. :)
I'm a german development contractor and long-term Hetzner customer. These are the only two missing features, causing us to still operate our own systems.
Regarding the DSGVO: Do you support encryption of the filesystem?
"All servers that have finished their creation process will be
billed until they are deleted, regardless of their state.
This is because, internally, we allocate full resources to servers
regardless of their power state. And it enables rapid startup and boot
times for you, the customer."
(https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot in FAQ)
I don't think they have understood, what Cloud Computing means.
Wonder if using Hetzner makes you subject to unusual German laws requiring (nearly) every site to have an "Impressum" page with contact phone number, mailing address and other data that would be uncomfortable for an individual (not a company) to disclose.
Keep in mind that Hetzner has a rather lax (non-existing?) policy when it comes to stopping outbound spam, so make sure to check that IPs you get from them are not on MX blacklists.
To clarify - saying this as someone who was forced to blacklist their IPs on more than one occassion, not as someone who ran into tainted IPs as their customer.
From my experience this is false. Hetzner reacts to abuse notices and I never received a server with blacklisted IP addresses.
The only organization that caused issues is Microsoft / Outlook.com, but they seem to block every IP address by default. I was able to unblock myself by filling out a form and waiting a few hours for all my servers so far.
I'm using a Hetzner VPS to host my mail for nearly 8 years now. Never had a single problem with blacklisting. I once lost IPv6 connection because of a routing mistake on their side but that was it.
What's strange is that only RAM and disk space increase linearly with the price, not the CPU, nor the traffic. That creates an incentive to buy small instances and getting a lot more for your buck.
Probably because that's how servers can be set up most efficiently? It's probably much cheaper to run servers with a lot of ram and storage instead of having cpu-heavy machines (infrastructure, cooling, electricity).
This looks enticing. I may wish to become a Hetzner customer again.
That I am presently not one is entirely Hetzner's own doing: Some years ago, testing out their offerings (which were good!), at one point I deleted my last VPS, thinking I'd come back in a few days and actually start getting serious.
Not to be! Virtually the very second I deleted the instance, an email pinged in: No active machine, account deleted. Which sent me over the border to the French guys (Whose interface to this day is a riddle to me, every time I haven't worked with i for a week or two. I can read the French version, it's not a language thing, just a general UI disaster).
We are very happy to see that offering. We were planning to move our German SaaS from AWS to Hetzner anyway and with Hetzner Cloud we expect things to be a lot easier for us. Congrats and thanks, Hetzner team!
[+] [-] logronoide|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythz|8 years ago|reply
Still using AWS for Apps which rely on cloud features, e.g. SES/RDS/etc but for static servers Hetzner is now our goto.
Super exciting to see them entering the cloud space and offering easy snapshots + backups, should open it to hosting more stuff on there.
The one difference is noticeable latency from their DC in Germany vs the instant response times I was getting from AWS's N.Virgina DC. Would obviously love it if Hetzner could open a DC in the US.
[+] [-] pulse7|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akoncius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|8 years ago|reply
So I'm still sold vs. AWS, and I have to run some nodes, and I think great, I can put the business credit card on a cloud account and run stuff. But then Google refuses to let me sign up because every time I try it says "Unable to verify with this phone number.". This could be because I can only access Google via proxies and they are not in the country of my phone number (China or HK). So perversely I am left in a situation where to get Google to allow me to give them money I have to first open a proxy compute node with another Google account in the jurisdiction my phone number is in, install a proxy, then access them through that. But you'd think they probably block their own IPs, so that probably won't work.
So Hetzner, maybe you got my business.
[+] [-] chrismeller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abawany|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
Having some kind of network topology (like OVH's weathermap) would help with that, esp where to position servers that rely on certain peering points.
[+] [-] jo909|8 years ago|reply
"How are the Data Centers connected to each other?
The two Data Center Parks are both connected to Frankfurt (FFM) and each other with dark fiber. Thus, a redundant loop is formed, which ensures the availability of a Data Center should one of the connections fail. The n10 Gbit/s connections provide ample bandwidth between the Data Centers.
The bandwidth of the connections between Nuremberg-Frankfurt, Nuremberg-Falkenstein and Falkenstein-Frankfurt are at least 120 Gbit/s. Through the Frankfurt location data is transported to the peering partners at DE-CIX and also to the uplinks Noris, GLBX, Aixit, AMS-IX, Init7 and Level3. At the Nuremberg location there are connections to Noris, KPN, Init7, Level3 and N-IX.
In each Data Center several Juniper EX Core switches, each with 64x 10 Gbit/s ports, are operated and bundle the streams of the Data Center to the n10 Gbit/s backbone and then over the various uplinks. "
And here is a list of their peerings: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/
[+] [-] theipman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raguuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niutech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romanovcode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmngomes|8 years ago|reply
My experience with Hetzner is/was great, but as a customer it's impossible to rely on a service provider that extinguishes a whole service line in a few months and forces me to move a whole infrastructure at a whim...
[+] [-] XERQ|8 years ago|reply
Check out our pricing:
https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/
Happy to answer questions if there's any.
[0]: https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw
[+] [-] jo909|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure you'll find some customers at those prices, but it does not compare with what Hetzner is offering here just because of that.
[+] [-] xchaotic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeappiah|8 years ago|reply
https://blog.ssdnodes.com/blog/comparison-vultr-vs-digital-o...
[+] [-] adantey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OkGoDoIt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielbln|8 years ago|reply
Provisioning is already impressively fast, especially if you're coming from EC2 where it feels like an intern has to press a button or something to get an instance online.
[+] [-] iMarv|8 years ago|reply
full disclosure: am working for hetzner cloud
[+] [-] floriferous|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliwarner|8 years ago|reply
However, what keeps me on Linode is that they have a London datacentre with excellent peering. I've seen 9ms pings, 150 miles away. Makes for seriously fast websites (in concert with good development processes).
Hetzner responds in 31-35ms from here. That might be Good Enough™ for many applications but it's not as special.
I've never been this tempted to jump ship though. Hopefully some of these features will become industry standard.
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
Very different obviously if you have APIs that require low latency.
[+] [-] bootcat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hs86|8 years ago|reply
This way you can run for example a FreeBSD or Arch Linux VPS for under 3 Euro per month. :)
[+] [-] simosx|8 years ago|reply
URL: https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/
The problem with Scaleway is that they are working at capacity and are almost always out of stock.
They are expanding now (and are hiring!), https://blog.online.net/2017/11/13/scaleway-enters-a-new-gro...
The big difference between Hetzner and all the rest of the cloud servers, is that they start with 2GB RAM for their entry level packages.
[+] [-] ralala|8 years ago|reply
Are you also working on docker hosting and dbaas?
I'm a german development contractor and long-term Hetzner customer. These are the only two missing features, causing us to still operate our own systems.
Regarding the DSGVO: Do you support encryption of the filesystem?
[+] [-] amai|8 years ago|reply
I don't think they have understood, what Cloud Computing means.
[+] [-] kachurovskiy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|8 years ago|reply
To clarify - saying this as someone who was forced to blacklist their IPs on more than one occassion, not as someone who ran into tainted IPs as their customer.
[+] [-] TimWolla|8 years ago|reply
The only organization that caused issues is Microsoft / Outlook.com, but they seem to block every IP address by default. I was able to unblock myself by filling out a form and waiting a few hours for all my servers so far.
[+] [-] foepys|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _urga|8 years ago|reply
We have also had good experience with Hetzner South Africa's abuse department.
We do see plenty of spam from OVH however. On one occasion when we reported several IPs to them for sending Russian spam, they did not reply.
[+] [-] scandox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtualwhys|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkarmani|8 years ago|reply
> Above-average raised floor system
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|8 years ago|reply
What's strange is that only RAM and disk space increase linearly with the price, not the CPU, nor the traffic. That creates an incentive to buy small instances and getting a lot more for your buck.
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foepys|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interfixus|8 years ago|reply
That I am presently not one is entirely Hetzner's own doing: Some years ago, testing out their offerings (which were good!), at one point I deleted my last VPS, thinking I'd come back in a few days and actually start getting serious.
Not to be! Virtually the very second I deleted the instance, an email pinged in: No active machine, account deleted. Which sent me over the border to the French guys (Whose interface to this day is a riddle to me, every time I haven't worked with i for a week or two. I can read the French version, it's not a language thing, just a general UI disaster).
[+] [-] cygned|8 years ago|reply