Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware.
I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud.
Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.
VPS business is very different than the "cloud" space.
Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different.
For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.
Hetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52.
Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.
Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
rglullis|1 year ago
Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.
hirako2000|1 year ago
Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different.
For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
iruoy|1 year ago
justinclift|1 year ago
mysteria|1 year ago
Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.
Xunjin|1 year ago
weinzierl|1 year ago