Hetzner introduces new server product with insane parameters for 59 EUR/mth

[Uchikoma]

I'm using Hetzner for 10years, with very very few major problems (I only remember 1).

I compared them some time ago to EC2 pricewise:

http://codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-virtualized-servers-cloud...

And setup of a new server is quite fast too.

[LogicX]

The awesome article "The Five Stages of Hosting" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526767 from yesterday should be mentioned. I brought some price-point discussions in the comments. Some good rebuttals lower down regarding EC2's committed cost options.

[ergo14]

I agree, in every calculation I make, cloud seems to be too expensive for me.

[iusable]

I agree. Been using Hetzner for over 2 years & loving it. Great value for money IF you know what you are doing.

[LogicX]

My issue with Hetzner is that by the time you add in management options necessary for a remote dedicated server, your monthly cost isn't that much better than other options.

Example: To have remote KVM/IP you'd need to first pay 15EUR for their flexipack for the privilege of adding additional features. then 19EUR mo and 149 EUR setup for KVM/IP Now you're up to $122USD/mo + almost $400USD for setup.

Compare to Incero's WebHostingTalk offer: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1121998 which is $99/mo paid in quarterly batches. Which is server grade, better CPU, ECC RAM, with KVM/IP and is in the US (Texas).

Hetzner is still cheaper overall with the 32GB -- because they're not dealing with much more expensive server class ECC RAM, but I just feel its important to bring the initial low number you see: 59 to a realistic place...

[avar]

I've been using Hetzner for about a year after migrating off Slicehost to Linode and then to Hetzner.

I'd recommend Linode if you need really good service (they once tracked down and patched a kernel bug for me), but if you don't want amazing support and just want some really good specs at a good price Hetzner is great, especially if you're in Europe.

[meow]

Is this host trustworthy ? Feature wise it seems too good to be true:

Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quadcore incl. Hyper-Threading Technology

    RAM 32 GB DDR3 RAM
    Hard disks 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD
    7200 rpm (Software-RAID 1)
    NIC 1 GBit OnBoard
    connected at 100 MBit
    Backup Space 100 GB
    Traffic Unlimited*

[samarudge]

They are one of the largest hosts in Europe (~50k dedicated servers if I remember correctly). Large doesn't always mean best, though. Similar to OVH, they provide good hardware, reliability and a decent enough network, but if anything goes wrong you best know how to fix it yourself. I also believe their network isn't /as/ good as somewhere like Rackspace however with CDN's etc. that's probably not as much of an issue.

TL;DR; Yes they're trustworthy, generally speaking

[ergo14]

Traffic is limited ie. they cap you too 10mbit after you exceed 10TB, (you can buy more uncapped traffic ofc.)

And yes the "host" is a very big datacenter, I have one server with them for 3 years, with pretty good uptime. 2-3 outages on their end over last 3 years. You need to remember that you need to buy additional packages for hardware raid or failover that will cost you about 20-30 EUR - if you need them, still it's one of best offers out there and def. best in Europe price wise.

[lusr]

I've used them for the past year with zero issues, but I then I haven't done anything too hardcore. Network is excellent although I've noticed one site (oron.com) cannot be routed to - haven't bothered figuring out if maybe this is because it's Germany and there's a block, or if there's something else going on. I've also been impressed with their server management tools (web-based VKVM access, you can boot into a rescue system if required, etc.).

[Loic]

I used to live 3 km from their datacenters here: http://www.datacenterpark.de/ Basically in the former East Germany. They are doing things the right way. I am not hosting with them at the moment, but I have been for a couple of years without issues.

You must also know that the EU paid some good money to get the datacenters there as part of economical development initiatives. Hetzner is operating since 1997.

[matthewcford]

It's where we host all of our staging servers for client apps now, pretty good value if you ask me.

[rsynnott]

In general, I've had nothing but good experiences with them. They're reasonably bare-bones, though; don't expect miracles in terms of support.

[davidw]

They've been around for a while, and are fairly well known.

[Intermediate]

Yep, it's a well known german datacenter.

[alexro]

I know many people who recommend it

[imaginator]

We host all of buddycloud's servers on them and they really do rock. Support is good. No outages in over three years. Very solid.

[egze]

I love Hetzner. I got the more cheaper one a week ago http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4

[gommm]

Anyone knows a good cheap dedicated server company like this in Hong Kong? I use Hetzner and love it but I need another dedicated server in Hong Kong or Singapore.

[slig]

Do people outside EU get 19% off from VAT?

[sek]

A German company would get 19% back from the Government, but AFAIK a foreign company doesn't have to pay it in the first place, so you can calculate it out.

Incredible, maybe they made a mistake on their site. Hetzner has a very good reputation here in Germany, otherwise i would expect something fishy.

[dasrecht]

I did yes... and even without asking them... it was like SOP

[jusob]

I'm French, but live in the US. I am an Hetzner customer and do NOT pay VAT.

[_urga]

I started hosting with the South African branch of Hetzner (http://hetzner.co.za) for several years starting in 1999, back when the owner was manning the support line himself. In that time they were always service-oriented.

[fierarul]

I don't see an explanation about VAT, but outside Germany you shouldn't need to pay it, which makes the actual price about 50 euro/month + the one-time 125 euro setup fee.

Sadly I just reserved an instance for one year with Amazon the other month but this looks quite a good offer.

[gokhan]

Yep, we're out of EU zone and got one server with them. We don't pay VAT.

[dberg]

Is there a US version of this ?

[ergo14]

The closest match would be http://leaseweb.com/, which is more expensive but they do have US based boxes too.

[LogicX]

See my other threads for my touting of Incero.com's WHT deals which get close IMHO.

[timc3]

Have been using them for just over 6 months with 3 machines currently. Highly recommended, no problems at all.

And you can run VMware esxi on these offerings.

[dotBen]

For those wondering, at current exchange rates and with the VAT removed, the price for non-EU customers is US$65.29/m

[attheodo]

We use EX4 from Hetzner along with Amazon's Cloudfront for static files and we're REALLY REALLY satisfied.

[zerathul]

can anyone explain how is this even possible considering how expensive that piece of hardware is?

[ergo14]

I belive I saw some posts on webhostingtalk or some other forums that stated, that their method of operations is to buy tons of hardware - single platform (mobo) that they build their offering on - with greatly discounted prices from manufacturer. They will provide it for a year or so, and then they will create new platform again after a while after they are out of stock, this happens once every year I think. Also keep in mind those are not "server grade" components so don't count on expansions to the servers/ECC RAM - this kind of stuff - you want to scale - just buy more boxes, there are upgrade possibilities, but they are limited to my understanding.

[ypcx]

It's a promo offer, they will only offer a limited number of them, and in few months introduce a better one.

Also I've been given faulty hardware at Hetzner and the support was quite ass-hatty. I said fuck it, replace the drive and reflash the OS, but they no, the RAID must rebuild. At the end of day, MySQL was still crashing under a heavy load, but that could have been software problem, not sure if I can blame Hetzner. What I didn't like, if you open the contract eg on 15th, then cancel a month ahead, eg on 10th, they will still bill you till the end of the month, 15 more days. They're still one of the best non cloud hosts though.

edit: now I remember - they actually insisted on the faulty drive (that I reported based on mdstat logs) to be hardware-checked in the machine while the machine is offline. Mind you, this drive was faulty from the get go.

[latch]

As long as the price > operating cost, they'll eventually make money on it. You could say that they take a different approach to say Rackspace or Softlayer which try to recoup the initial investment during the first month.

[ergo14]

Additional single-IP 1 €/IP you can have up to 4 of those ;-) so no - no need for flexipack at this point

[ergo14]

Interesting, I missed that, my older server with them server had 2 public ip's

[pbrumm]

I got an extra ip from them for just 1EUR a month. flexipack not required

[jusob]

I have an EQ4 wit them (8GB RAM), anybody has experience in moving from one server to another within Hetzner? I don' think they have anything to facilitate such a move.

[vintagius]

Pity one can't pay using paypal.

[halayli]

[nirvana]

Been planning to set up a cluster with Hertzner using the EX 4, so the 4S is like getting 16GB more RAM for 10 Euros more a month. This is great news.

One thing I have wondered about is whether hosting in Germany is a good idea.

First is the latency issues. Will serving web pages to customers on the west coast of the US really suffer? (this is in the minimum viable product stage-- we're not google yet)

Secondly, I'm not all that familiar with all the laws of the EU. I don't want to run afoul of them, but I haven't found a good summary of best practices for services hosted in the EU.

[njs12345]

Off the top of my head, one thing you might need to worry about is privacy/data protection - the EU laws on this seem to be a bit more stringent than in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

[lignuist]

Check out http://heise.de (one of the faster german sites), to get a feeling of the latency.

[lsb]

For ten more € a month, get error-corrected memory: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6

[ergo14]

I have some applications logging to my server in hetzner from US (softlayer datacenters), and some from china. So far we didn't had any single issue with latency.

[rsynnott]

The data protection directive might be an issue for you; protection of personal information is much stronger in the EU than in the US.

Less likely, but because it's Germany, if you're hosting bigoted content, particularly Nazi-associated content, that will be a problem.