
Hetzner Cloud - CSDude
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
======
logronoide
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!

~~~
dx034
And without the OVH cloud interface which has horrible loading times and
sometimes randomly switches to French.

~~~
logronoide
Well, you can always learn a new language

~~~
erric
Not when it's French

/ducks....

~~~
drcongo
Canards.

------
mythz
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.

~~~
pulse7
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...

~~~
C14L
Good point. Maybe if they opened a DC in Greenland or Iceland.

~~~
dx034
Iceland would theoretically be great, ideal location for US and Europe. But
they'd need to lay a cable first, traffic Iceland-US is currently routed
through Denmark/UK.

~~~
Tepix
Iceland also has cheap renewable energy. There is the Greenland connect cable¹
built in 2009 that goes from Iceland to Canada. Sounds like it currently has
60GBit/s.

\-- ¹
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect)

~~~
dx034
At least when I was in Iceland traffic to the US was never routed through that
cable (from traceroutes).

Quebec appears to be the better choice for cheap renewable energy.

------
contingencies
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.

So Hetzner, maybe you got my business.

~~~
chrismeller
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...

~~~
infinitone
Not if you need specialized vms like a p2.

~~~
chrismeller
Hence “plain VMs”. EC2 does offer other things under the umbrella, but if OP
has tried GCE and is considering Hetzner he’s clearly not using those, so he’s
wasting money every month.

------
dx034
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.

~~~
jo909
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindun...](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung/en#How_are_the_Data_Centers_connected_to_each_other.3F)

"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 n _10
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 n_10
Gbit/s backbone and then over the various uplinks. "

And here is a list of their peerings:
[https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/](https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/)

~~~
dx034
Ok thanks. So it appears that most peering is done in Frankfurt and available
directly. Didn't see that wiki entry before.

Let's just hope that they get more peering partners over the medium term.
Peering with Telekom would be very helpful, pings from within Germany can be
close to what you get from the US East Coast (from my not representative
tests).

~~~
TimWolla
See this on why they won't peer with Deutsche Telekom:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10645577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10645577)

~~~
dx034
I know that Telekom has a horrible attitude towards peering. But they're the
only provider of high speed internet in many regions of Germany. Other cloud
providers (e.g. OVH) also pay so I doubt Telekom will change soon.

~~~
benger
They offer Deutsche Telekom traffic. You just need to enable it
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en)

------
theipman
Interesting speeds:

    
    
        -------------------------------------------------
         nench.sh v2017.06.01 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
         benchmark timestamp:    2018-01-23 20:03:56 UTC
        -------------------------------------------------
    
        Processor:    Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
        CPU cores:    1
        Frequency:    2099.998 MHz
        RAM:          1.9G
        Swap:         -
        Kernel:       Linux 4.4.0-112-generic x86_64
    
        Disks:
        sda   19.1G  HDD
    
        CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
            3.249 seconds
        CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
            5.604 seconds
        CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
            2.970 seconds
    
        ioping: seek rate
            min/avg/max/mdev = 32.9 us / 63.2 us / 4.71 ms / 22.5 us
        ioping: sequential read speed
            generated 22.2 k requests in 5.00 s, 5.42 GiB, 4.44 k iops, 1.08 GiB/s
    
        dd: sequential write speed
            1st run:    391.96 MiB/s
            2nd run:    311.85 MiB/s
            3rd run:    315.67 MiB/s
            average:    339.83 MiB/s
    
        IPv4 speedtests
            your IPv4:    94.130.181.xxxx
    
            Cachefly CDN:         81.40 MiB/s
            Leaseweb (NL):        134.69 MiB/s
            Softlayer DAL (US):   6.10 MiB/s
            Online.net (FR):      88.06 MiB/s
            OVH BHS (CA):         7.12 MiB/s
    
        IPv6 speedtests
            your IPv6:    2a01:4f8:1c0c:xxxx
    
            Leaseweb (NL):        92.31 MiB/s
            Softlayer DAL (US):   4.22 MiB/s
            Online.net (FR):      79.54 MiB/s
            OVH BHS (CA):         6.79 MiB/s
        -------------------------------------------------

~~~
raguuu
My Digitalocean comparison:

    
    
      -------------------------------------------------
       nench.sh v2017.06.01 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
       benchmark timestamp:    2018-01-24 04:11:01 UTC
      -------------------------------------------------
      
      Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz
      CPU cores:    1
      Frequency:    1799.998 MHz
      RAM:          992M
      Swap:         -
      Kernel:       Linux 4.4.0-112-generic x86_64
      
      Disks:
      vda     25G  HDD
      
      CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
          4.450 seconds
      CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
          7.930 seconds
      CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
          2.435 seconds
      
      ioping: seek rate
        min/avg/max/mdev = 37.2 us / 62.3 us / 15.8 ms /   67.2 us
      ioping: sequential read speed
        generated 26.4 k requests in 5.00 s, 6.44 GiB, 5.28   k iops, 1.29 GiB/s
      
      dd: sequential write speed
          1st run:    619.89 MiB/s
          2nd run:    775.34 MiB/s
          3rd run:    774.38 MiB/s
          average:    723.20 MiB/s
      
      IPv4 speedtests
          your IPv4:    165.227.96.xxxx
      
          Cachefly CDN:         183.84 MiB/s
          Leaseweb (NL):        11.74 MiB/s
          Softlayer DAL (US):   6.29 MiB/s
          Online.net (FR):      11.81 MiB/s
          OVH BHS (CA):         34.46 MiB/s
      
      IPv6 speedtests
          your IPv6:    2604:a880:800:xxxx
      
          Leaseweb (NL):        12.01 MiB/s
          Softlayer DAL (US):   4.41 MiB/s
          Online.net (FR):      23.50 MiB/s
          OVH BHS (CA):         36.51 MiB/s
      -------------------------------------------------

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
romanovcode
scaleway seems even lower and is pretty popular.

~~~
jmngomes
Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're
in for if you buy their service.

I'll quote a different customer's opinion (on those forums) that summarizes my
experience using their service: "Whenever I've tried to use Scaleway for
something serious, I regretted bitterly".

My experience was essentially this: Scaleway advertises that you can have
virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a
virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days,
the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.

Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes
matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more
chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available
only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to
start the server until it works".

To add to this, Scaleway started billing me for the (unused) volumes attached
to a server that cannot be started because, according to their support, they
didn't have the resources to provide it.

So, I certainly didn't feel assured that they are able to provide what is
advertised on their website (virtual servers with up to 10 ssd volumes). My
key takeaway from this experience was that if you have a platform on Scaleway
and you need to add servers to cope with growth/features, they may not have
the capacity/stock to provide it. Even if you have only 1 server, which was my
case, they may be unable to say when you'll be able to start the server on a
physical instance.

------
jmngomes
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...

~~~
Hetzner_OL
You can still order the previous CX line of servers (the "vServers") via the
customer administration interface. There is no official EOL posted yet for the
previous CX line. --Katie, Marketing

~~~
jmngomes
Thank you, that wasn't clear from my previous interactions.

It would be great to have an EOL warning at least a few months before a
service line is discontinued, just to provide enough time for customers to
move critical/production workloads to another infrastructure provider.

~~~
_jcwu
I seriously don't understand why the support reply got downvoted ...

~~~
jmngomes
Me neither. I upvoted it.

------
XERQ
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].

Check out our pricing:

[https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/](https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/)

Happy to answer questions if there's any.

[0]: [https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw](https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw)

~~~
op00to
Gonna give a Hacker News discount? :)

~~~
XERQ
The 16/32GB RAM options are actually the lowest we offer. We did the side deal
thing in the past, but having different pricing on the main site and a landing
page just made things more complicated and led to unhappy customers.

------
danielbln
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.

~~~
iMarv
Maybe we just have more interns than amazon ;)

full disclosure: am working for hetzner cloud

------
oliwarner
That's really cheap. With really good features.

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.

~~~
bootcat
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.

~~~
bootcat
Does anybody know if Hetzner charges forex on US debit/credit cards ?

~~~
dx034
They charge in € so you need a card without FX fee.

~~~
snuxoll
Discover and Capital One are probably the best cards to use for foreign
purchases if you live in the US (I only use my Discover IT or Capital One
QuickSilver for purchases in foreign currency or that charge from a foreign
bank), some banks offer no-FX fee cards but typically they're tied to specific
rewards programs (often travel) that might not be as useful.

------
hs86
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. :)

~~~
clan
I am running FreeBSD on their VServer (and dedicated) too.

Anyone know if the rescue system is available on the cloud offering as well?
(So alternate OS can be installed)

And do the "cloud" have the same painful setup with the gateway outside the
subnet?

~~~
mtmail
Yes, I created a cloud server and see the rescue system is available. Once you
created a server you can also mount ISO images. I see "FreeBSD 11.1" among
others listed there.

------
simosx
Compared to Scaleway, Scaleway gives you two vCPUs (not one) and 50GB storage
(not 20GB) for their entry level cloud server, at around 3€/month.

URL: [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/](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...](https://blog.online.net/2017/11/13/scaleway-enters-a-new-growth-
phase/)

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.

~~~
rubenfonseca
Scaleway is using Intel Atom cores.

~~~
tombrossman
Atom cores and IIRC all network disks, with some peculiarities. For example,
reboot means waiting while your instance's 'local' drive is copied to some
other type of storage, then your instance reboots, then all the data is copied
back, THEN you can access your instance again. When I tested them last year
reboots meant 30+ minutes of down time.

Their setup is interesting and I really wanted to like it (I did like the
pricing), but it was a dreadfully slow experience. And those Atoms really
suffered when benchmarking HTTPS connections compared to almost any other
provider. Not even close.

------
ralala
Congratulations! Nice step.

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?

~~~
Hetzner_OL
Thanks for the suggestion about Docker/dbaas. I have passed it on to our
development team. We don't usually publish what new products and features we
are developing until they are ready, but we will continue to post information
about upgrades as they develop.

Regarding the DSGVO: Do you support encryption of the filesystem? -> Hetzner
Cloud servers are fully virtualized. So the customer can even fully encrypt
the whole server. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online

------
kachurovskiy
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.

~~~
Zekio
couldn't you in reality just use the data from WHOIS protection on a domain?

~~~
kuschku
People need to actually be able to contact you with that, by letter, fax,
phone, email, etc.

All WHOIS protection services I’ve seen until now either ignore fax, phone and
letter, or just respond with "this method of contact is ignored, please use
the email"

~~~
dewey
But you can put your real data as an administrator contact on the whois entry.
It doesn't always show the domain provider's information.

------
huhtenberg
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.

~~~
TimWolla
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.

~~~
bobince
FWIW: I block Hetzner.

They have an automated abuse-handling system that sends your complaint to the
spammer and asks them politely to stop. This often works for small-time
operation on a single IP address, and for compromised servers, but it's
completely inadequate for dealing with large customers and rogue resellers
spamming over large netblocks, and against darker-coloured-hat spammers
engaging in reprisals.

Replying to the automated mails can get you through to a human, but their ops
are stuck on a limited script so they're not really any more use than the
automated systems. They have no interest in investigating wider patterns of
abuse than a single spam from a single IP.

I regret having to blacklist but it's not worth the time and frustration of
trying to engage with them.

~~~
kuschku
Considering you said you also block Amazon,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494970),
I don’t think your opinion will have much weight on this topic.

~~~
bobince
I don't aspire to weight, but I don't really know what you're getting at here
- amazonses is commonly blocked as its abuse reporting is a brick wall, much
worse than Hetzner who are at least trying, if ineffectively.

(Not talking about all of Amazon, just SES - AWS for example is a different
animal.)

~~~
kuschku
Considering how many legitimate services are on SES, if you block SES you
might as well go with a whitelist for email.

That’s what I’m trying to get at here.

------
amai
"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](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot)
in FAQ)

I don't think they have understood, what Cloud Computing means.

------
virtualwhys
Uh, what? 14U colo rack space for 100 Euros per month[1], that's insane -- I
must be missing something.

[1]
[https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack](https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack)

~~~
dx034
Yes, you pay German retail electricity prices, i.e. 24c/kwh. But they've
always been that cheap.

~~~
chaz6
What is the pricing per additional TB after the first 2TB?

~~~
dx034
€1/TB

[https://www.hetzner.com/colocation](https://www.hetzner.com/colocation)

------
bufferoverflow
Great prices.

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.

~~~
foepys
I don't think Hetzner makes a promise w.r.t. the CPU clock. So lower end VPS
might be hosted on high-core, low-clock machines.

------
interfixus
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).

------
cygned
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!

------
hit8run
Can anyone compare their service to Linode or DigitalOcean? I'm currently
using Linode but the Hetzner prices seem way lower:

For 35€ a month I get 32GB RAM, 8 vCPUs, 240GB SSD + 20TB Traffic. The
comparable 40$ plan for Linode offers 8GB RAM 4 CPU Cores 48GB SSD and 3 TB
Transfer (See:
[https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing))

Am I missing something or is Hetzner just way more competetive?

[https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing)

~~~
dx034
Hetzner is easily 30% off OVH and half the price of other hosting providers
(VPS and bare metal). So nothing surprising here. They have a cheap cost base
(data centres in rural areas and wholesale electricity prices aren't that high
in Germany) which probably explains most of that.

OVH had basically the same price but their heavy investments in new DCs have
made them more expensive. Since Hetzner doesn't invest a lot (at least in new
buildings) they don't need to raise prices for that.

~~~
latch
Worth mentioning SoYouStart, OVH's low-end brand. I believe the way it works
is that OVH is current-gen hardware, and SoYouStart is the hand-me-downs
(which I think is a great model)

~~~
zerostar07
hetzner has a similar 'serverbidding' for older servers which can be quite a
bargain, depending on the day
[https://www.hetzner.com/sb](https://www.hetzner.com/sb) . i know that SYS is
good as well

------
jorangreef
I would prefer Hetzner to concentrate on dedicated machines and expand
datacenter locations (Asia, Canada).

~~~
chillidoor
Yeah, I'd like them to be a better dedicated server competitor to OVH as
competition is normally good for the consumer. But I guess there's more demand
for cloud computing these days.

------
superasn
For someone who knows about networking can you please comment on the
following:

1\. What would be the downside of hosting my Apache server on Hezner instead
of AWS? Will it affect load times, website SEO, downtime?

2\. Hosting Mysql Server on CX31 on Hezner instead of AWS? If my Apache server
is on Ec2 and I make a connection to a Mysql server on Hezner will it affect
performance of my sites because they're hosted on different places?

I have a very basic understanding of networking, so appreciate any comments
from someone who knows about these.

~~~
TimWolla
1\. Load time depends on the location of your visitors, see #2. Downtime is
hard to evaluate, I expect the cloud to be fairly stable based on my
experience with Hetzner.

2\. For sure of you are using AWS in US: Traffic across the atlantic will
incur at least ~65ms latency per roundtrip.

~~~
superasn
Thanks. So it would be best to host on Hezner too. That's fine with me.

Can you comment if the location of my IP will affect my website SEO wrt to USA
visitors?

~~~
TimWolla
SEO is a black box, so there are no definite answers. It will affect load
times (the 60ms) and that could have an effect on search engines.

~~~
r3bl
Highly doubt Google and others would punish you for having a slightly bigger
latency to your server and back.

If that was the case, all the companies that are hosted in the US would
already be punished in Europe.

------
Hetzner_OL
Update: When creating your Hetzner Cloud server, you can now inject cloud-init
data. You can find more information at
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Can_I_use_C...](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Can_I_use_Cloud-
Init_when_creating_servers.3F) \--Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online

------
azifali
I've used Hetzner and my general experience has been good.

------
kawsper
Does anyone know if they offer per-customer, or per-project local networking?

It is something I can get from Packet.net, but not from Linode or DI (Although
Linode promised that it was in their pipeline, I have yet to see it), OVH does
offer this but I only experienced pain with their interface and service.

~~~
aloisamae
Not from what I can see in the control panel. I personally use zero-tier to
connect my servers on a virtual Ethernet adapter. But you probably want to
avoid getting an ipv4 if I'm guessing correctly, so I don't think that would
work for you.

------
simosx
Had some fun trying out these new cloud servers,

[https://blog.simos.info/a-closer-look-at-the-new-hetzner-
clo...](https://blog.simos.info/a-closer-look-at-the-new-hetzner-cloud-
servers-by-running-lxd/)

(not affiliated with Hetzner)

------
wingi
Do you support any other PaaS-API (E.G. CF) instead of your own hcloud cli?

~~~
Hetzner_OL
We offer a Terraform plugin: [https://github.com/hetznercloud/terraform-
provider-hcloud](https://github.com/hetznercloud/terraform-provider-hcloud)
\--Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online

~~~
wingi
Wow - great!

------
DrSarez
Cool - renting two CX31 instances plus a BX40 storage box seems to me a good
solution running a private OpenShift cluster for under 50€ a month. Id need to
figure it out!

~~~
digianarchist
Can the BX line be used as a network drive? It says "Useable as network drive"
but what is the performance like?

------
phil42
I can‘t seem to find any FreeBSD but just Linux images when trying to create a
CloudServer. Is it correct that right now they just have different Linux
distros available?

~~~
iMarv
Hi, after creating a server you can boot it with various images provided by
hetzner into a rescue system.

disclosure: am part of the frontend team of hetzner cloud

------
Tepix
I just wish Hetzner would start offering cheap low-end dedicated servers like
OVH's Kimsufi or Online.net's "Personal family" Dedibox offerings...

~~~
Hetzner_OL
Are you familiar with our server auction?
[https://www.hetzner.com/sb](https://www.hetzner.com/sb) \--Katie, Marketing,
Hetzner Online

------
ksec
I can remember Hetzner has been around for as long as OVH. Why has OVH
expanded now way beyond France to US, Asia etc while Hetzner still EU only?

With Google, Microsoft Facebook as well as Amazon leading the way in layering
out cables across continent, having a server in US means you have a high
probability most ISP in the world has tuned the networking route around those
traffic. The same cant be said for EU.

------
DisposableMike
Is Hetzner not known to generally be a "bad" host? I have suffered so much
abuse at the hands of their clients (DOS attacks, aggressive spidering/SQL
Injection probing) that I've blocked their entire IP space on the majority of
my client networks. I've never received a single response from their abuse
report email/tool.

~~~
ralala
I guess the reason might be that their machines are cheap and thus they
probably have many semi-professional / personal customers who leave their
systems insecured.

Nevertheless, I have made very good experience with their hardware, network
and customer support - so they are also suitable for professional customers.

------
iwakura
One often overlooked detail, which I just could not figure out by looking at
their product page is which virtualization software they use. I haven't made
particularly good experiences with OpenVZ in terms of flexibility and would
rather have them use something like KVM.

------
teekert
I'm thinking soon "enough" (as in: personal server) compute/ram/disk will be
free and you can play with servers for nothing riding completely on the backs
of larger paying customers. Like with wordpress.com or any service with a free
tier really.

------
realPubkey
Is the location of the cloud-server still Nürnberg/Falkenstein? The prices
seem to be very low.

~~~
Maakuth
They are also in process of building out in Finland
([https://www.cinia.fi/en/archive/hetzner-data-center-park-
hel...](https://www.cinia.fi/en/archive/hetzner-data-center-park-helsinki-
takes-form-next-units-to-arise-in-2018.html)). There's a direct GER-FIN fiber
link laid in the Baltic, owned partially by Hetzner
([https://www.cinia.fi/en/services/international-
connectivity-...](https://www.cinia.fi/en/services/international-connectivity-
services/c-lion1-submarine-cable.html)).

~~~
dx034
Makes Finland sense if you want to connect to Asian customers? Is there a good
link Finland-JP/Korea/Singapore?

Otherwise I fail to see why Finland makes sense, unless you need cheaper
energy for applications that don't need low latency.

~~~
Maakuth
We do have cheap energy (from nuclear and mostly renewable CHP), cheap
cooling, availability of educated workforce and stable state. And good network
connections to Russia in addition to Nordic and Baltic states and continental
Europe.

~~~
dx034
But latency to Russia and Baltic states isn't that different from where
Hetzner already is. I just try to understand why people would choose Hetzner's
new DC in Finland over that in Germany unless they offer cheaper prices there.

------
bla2
Tried it out. You can't sign in with your email address, you have to use a
user name they assign to you. My assigned user name is more secure than my
password and impossible to remember. I suppose it's good for security, but
it's also super inconvenient.

~~~
thescarzy
Password manager sounds like something you could employ for this?

------
floatboth
2gb ram minimum, nice. Do they still require a scan of your id/passport
though?

~~~
Hetzner_OL
Yes. We check IDs of our new customers. We find that this is one of the most
effective ways of preventing abuse. A short time after we have verified your
ID, the personal data we collected to process your order will be deleted in
accordance with German data protection laws. After your first order, you don't
need to provide your ID again. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online

~~~
omnifischer
Can you confirm that you _delete_ the ID after verification? Your sentence
seems like a lawyer's answer.

~~~
icebraining
What's ambiguous about that answer? "the personal data we collected to process
your order will be deleted" sounds pretty clear. Obviously a copy of an ID is
personal data.

------
simosx
When you create a new cloud server, there is a tab called CEPH (for the Ceph
network filesystem).

It does not have any options and it looks like it is not active yet. It would
be great if they offered network storage through Ceph.

~~~
Hetzner_OL
This is another product type runnning on SSD-backed Ceph storage instead of
NVME SSDs. Thank you for pointing out this hiccup in our user interface. I've
passed that information on to my team members. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner
Online

~~~
kaixi
When you switch tabs, the same server you selected should remain selected.

------
Un1corn
It seems like the option for backup space (external storage) does not exist
like in their vServers. I hope they will return it because they offered really
cheap storage compared to Vultr and DO.

------
maufl
Why do I see a higher price in the web console than on the product page?

~~~
hmage
Because product page doesn't include VAT. But once you login the VAT is
applied on the prices.

~~~
maufl
Makes sense, but not how it's usually done in Germany.

~~~
zyx321
It's primarily aimed at a B2B market, so the prices shown to guest users
exclude VAT. Once you are logged in, they can tell whether you have a tax ID
on your account and will show you the appropriate price.

------
zython
Whats the difference to their VPS's ? I had one until last month with pretty
much the specs of the cx21 but it cost a little bit more ?

Are they just lowering their prices or am I missing out on features ?

~~~
bufferoverflow
You can't rent a VPS with an API call, can you?

~~~
iMarv
Or directly from your terminal :)
[https://github.com/hetznercloud/cli](https://github.com/hetznercloud/cli)

e/ am part of the team working on hetzner cloud

------
nimos
Loving the competition in the market. Object Store would be nice. Can't wait
to see what happens when NAND/DRAM markets start clearing and there are
multiple competitive 7nm nodes.

------
gradschool
Does anyone know off hand whether whether it's possible to install nixos on
Hetzner cloud servers, either manually or using nixops?

~~~
max-m
The cloud servers can be booted into a rescue system.

[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Hetzner_Rescue-
System/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Hetzner_Rescue-System/en)

From there you can do pretty much what you desire.

------
Dolores12
Hetzner require your ID before you create any server. This is huge
inconvenience. So i opted to DO and scaleway and never looked back.

~~~
vidarh
They require ID _the first time_. It's inconvenient, but given the price
difference vs. DO, it's very much worth it.

~~~
zzzcpan
I think it's more complicated than that. I was able to create an account and
start a server without an ID whatsoever.

~~~
vidarh
It may very well be the restrictions depend on products and location etc., but
the point is anyway is that _even when_ they ask for ID, it's always been for
the initial order only.

------
benevol
Anything using virtualization is still less secure than dedicated machines.

If you want security, use dedicated servers.

~~~
lemagedurage
And don't connect to the Internet

------
romanovcode
Can you upload ISO files?

~~~
Elrac
Once you have your own server, you can of course upload whatever you want. But
you're probably asking about booting from an ISO image. As a few other people
have said, Hetzner offers a "boot from rescue image" service which apparently
lets you boot from an uploaded ISO. I never tried this on my own Hetzner
server though.

If you're hardcore, you can also do what a friend of mine did: Use the
provided Linux system (Debian, Ubuntu, there's a bunch of choices) to fiddle
its own boot loader, possibly re-partition the disk, upload your favorite
system and reboot into that. You're root, you can do what the hell you want;
at worst you might end up bricking your system to the point where you need to
re-install from the rescue system.

~~~
romanovcode
The reason I ask is that I have some specific Windows software and I would
like to upload Windows ISO with VirtIO drivers and use my own cd-key instead
of paying additional 16 EUR per month for a license that I already have.

~~~
jlgaddis
Per their FAQ, you can do that.

~~~
romanovcode
Nope, just checked - you can't.

------
simplyinfinity
What i would love to see offered by hetzner is loadbalancers :)

~~~
dx034
Shouldn't be too hard to set up yourself. As their traffic is so cheap,
external vs. internal traffic doesn't really matter.

~~~
simplyinfinity
I need a newtwork load balancer so i don't have to spend 25 eur for additional
server to act as a loadbalancer in simpler and budget restricted scenarios.

~~~
e12e
Why do you need a load balancer if you don't have enough traffic to justify a
beefier dedicated box with a few tb data included and a proper gb uplink? Are
you streaming game/3d data or something where each request is really compute
heavy, but data is less than 100mbs?

[ed: never mind - 20tb included for the cheapest box. That's a bit of a
departure from earlier. That's 60 mbps sustained 24/7 for a month. That's
probably hard to meet with a full regular web stack running on a single tiny
vm..

Oth, should be able to just ha proxy on one of those - or two-three w
heartbeat...]

~~~
simplyinfinity
If one machine goes down (updates, hacked, hardware failure) i still need to
have a second one that can handle the incoming requests

~~~
dx034
Either you use a third-party service like Cloudflare or you need to address
this via DNS. A load balancer just adds a potential point of failure.

------
kim0
Any answer to AWS's spot instances feature?

------
myf01d
I would really like to try Hetzner since it's a respectable company and offers
much lower prices than DO or Linode, however, they need an ID verification.
Since I am egyptian and have no passport, I cannot register. I hope they find
a more resilient way for registration.

~~~
phihag_
Why don't you get a passport, government ID, or driver's license? I'm honestly
interested, if that's not too personal to ask.

~~~
myf01d
I showed them my government ID but they refused, understandably because it's
in Arabic language. They asked for an English passport. But since I didn't
have one, I couldn't continue the registration. It's really frustrating. Why
isn't my credit card enough to verify my identity? Almost all top cloud/vps
providers don't ask such questions.

~~~
simplyinfinity
Because of stolen credit cards? They are minimising potential damages like
this. Malicious actors are less likely to give their ID to send spam and ID
cards are harder to steal than Credit cards :)

~~~
Dolores12
Be assured malicious actors got plenty of stolen ids.

------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
No clue about this new product, but their previous virtual server offering had
NATed IPv4 and they generally have an idiotic IPv6 policy (only small
prefixes, you have to pay extra to get anything remotely sensible--like,
default /64 even on dedicated servers, you can get a /56 if you pay for it,
more isn't supported).

~~~
Tepix
Could you explain why a /64 is too small for you? I'm really curious.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Because that is the size of a single subnet, so you cannot do any useful
network design with that.

Also, mind you that they have a /29 assigned from RIPE, so they would have
sufficient space for 134,217,728 /56s or 524.288 /48s. They choose to leave
all that address space unused for nothing, forcing their customers to work
around a completely artificial scarcity of address space. Exactly the opposite
of why they got a /29 from RIPE (and they could easily get more if they did
actually manage to use it up).

------
mtgx
Is it me or does this look more like those "Cloud VPS" type of services other
companies offer. If you use 5x more than your initial plan in a month, does it
just scale up automatically or do you have to contact support to upgrade
first?

------
startupdiscuss
Anyone know why this was upvoted?

I can't tell it apart from the dozens of other "good" cloud providers
(Lightsail, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode)

~~~
StavrosK
We (I) just like Hetzner a lot, they have cheap and reliable (from the little
I've used them) bare metal servers.

------
dbancajas
Can someone benchmark this please? Probably nbench or something..

------
billysielu
Why is there advertising on HN?

~~~
Tepix
It's a new product that's of interest to a large part of the audience. Just
like a new Google Phone etc.

------
baybal2
Hetzner used to be a rather big conventional hoster. I'm surprised to see them
up and running these days when all big co seemed to have migrated to that
cloud thingy

~~~
chillidoor
There is still a demand for dedicated servers, although it is becoming more
and more niche, I think.

~~~
baybal2
Companies with actually performance constrained software without a doubt.
There are not so few of them.

There is a big pit in between own DC, and a lot of VM's in terms of economic
scalability.

Own DC pays pack when you have 500+ to 1000+ machines in a single location.

~~~
dx034
Isn't 500 servers still colocation range? That's only 30-40 racks, hardly a
whole DC? Or are scale effects that low that DCs of that size make sense?

~~~
baybal2
Depends on colo costs. In quite few places, a budget dc (no uninterrupted
power, hvac, and less flexible switching setup) makes sense

------
csmattryder
Looks like they're taking on LowEndSpirit, except with a slightly better
offering. Not quite beastly EC2, or piggybacking a VPS on someone's Nokia
3310.

Any current clients know how fast provisioning is on these?

~~~
mythz
From their website:

    
    
        "Our quick and clever Cloud Console lets you create server instances almost instantly, usually in under 10 seconds."

~~~
csmattryder
Duh, I should've read the page when I wasn't as busy... Thanks!

------
tobltobs
Good to see Hetzner catching up to OVH. Some crude comparison of their offers:

Hetzner

    
    
        CX11
        € 2,96
        1	vCPU
        2 GB	RAM
        20 GB	NVMe SSD
        20 TB	Traffic
        
        
        CX21
        € 5,83
        2	vCPU
        4 GB	RAM
        40 GB	NVMe SSD
        20 TB	Traffic
        
        CX31
        € 10,59
        2	vCPU
        8 GB	RAM
        80 GB	NVMe SSD
        20 TB	Traffic
        
        CX41
        € 18,92
        4	vCPU
        16 GB	RAM
        160 GB	NVMe SSD
        20 TB	Traffic
        
        CX51
        € 35,58
        8	vCPU
        32 GB	RAM
        240 GB	NVMe SSD
        20 TB	Traffic
    

\---------------------

OVH

    
    
        VPS SSD 1
        1 vCore(s)
        2 Go de RAM
        10 Go SSD
        3,99 €
        
        VPS SSD 2
        1 vCore(s)
        4 Go de RAM
        20 Go SSD
        6,99 €
        
        VPS SSD 3
        2 vCore(s)
        8 Go de RAM
        40 Go SSD
        12,99 €

~~~
dx034
You're comparing OVH's SSD where they don't guarantee speed and have 100mbit
connections. Speed on those can be incredibly slow. For a fair comparison
you'd have to use their public cloud instances which are 2-3x the price of
Hetzner.

~~~
tobltobs
My understanding has been that OVH offers guaranteed bandwidth of 100mbit and
Hetzners has a 10 Gbit network connection, but I would guess that this
connection is shared and doesn't offer any guarantees. Hetzners free traffic
is also capped at 20TB. Therefore I left this details away as it is difficult
to compare. If would love to see a detailed comparison.

~~~
dx034
Hetzner has internal and incoming free. I only need that kind of bandwidth
when I restore backups or load large datasets. That's either internal or
infrequent and so far, I was always able to max out their bandwidth (haven't
tested the cloud product yet).

------
insomniacity
Hetzner still haven't said anything to me about Spectre/Meltdown, or rebooted
my VPS, so I'm not sure I trust them any more!

~~~
Findus23
They have written an extensive article about it here:
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Spectre_and_Meltdown/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Spectre_and_Meltdown/en)

~~~
jo909
In the context of renting one of their VPS this is fair criticism. The
information handed out by Hetzner is not adequate regarding their exposure and
timeframe for patching. It's been several weeks since the public disclosure,
and if they are still vulnerable for meltdown this puts all customers systems
at massive risk.

"The host systems will be updated to fix the vulnerabilities as soon as
possible. The necessary reboots will be announced on Hetzner Status. You may
subscribe to be notified. "

