

European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon - rmoriz
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10

======
tdr
Great hosters!

    
    
         - cheap prices for lots of power
    
         - everything "just works" (only contacted for questions)
    
         - quick, friendly & to the point support service
    
         - great uptime
    
         - they are eco
    
         - 14 days money back (for root servers)
    

Drawbacks

    
    
         - bigger latency for US/Asia/...
    
         - you do your own backups
    
         - they bill only after the end of month. had problems when card expired

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Did you measure the latency difference by any chance? I am really considering
buying one host there, would love to get an idea on this.

~~~
tdr
NY: ~100ms

CA: just under 200ms

Asia: even +300ms

didn't check Southern hemisphere

~~~
ot
"Speed of light sucks" (John Carmack)

------
pja
I've never seen anyone running a reverse auction to rent their old hardware
out before:

<https://robot.your-server.de/order/market>

I guess if they're not short of space for hardware & cooling then this is a
profitable way to put old hardware to use until the demand falls below the
running costs. I wonder what the reliability is like?

~~~
dotBen
Thinking about scraping this data and calculating performance-to-€ ratio to
identify good deals/unclaimed bargains etc. Perhaps even calculate the mean
average price a given server spec sells for etc.

If they have an affiliate scheme that would make s nice side project

------
irahul
I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card
photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious?

Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was
greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't
feel like doing business with them anymore.

I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I
already have shared my card number, I figure I can attach the card photo.

And even if I comply with the ridiculous request of providing a photograph of
my credit card, most of the times I use a virtual credit card. My bank lets me
creates virtual credit cards and link with my card/account. The card doesn't
exist physically and it lets me reset the transaction limit. I reset the
transaction limit before making a transaction ensuring I can't be overcharged.
They would turn me down because I am concerned about my financial
transactions?

~~~
abhaga
I am from India, have a server with them and was not asked for any
documentation. May be it is a recent change.

Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk
for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.

~~~
jsnell
It's definitely not a recent change, they required a copy of a photo ID as
early as 2005 when I got my first server there. Don't remember being asked for
a credit card scan ever though.

~~~
petercooper
I didn't have to give them anything (I'm in the UK) but a client in Australia
did. So maybe there's an EU thing at play (or just a risk assessment based on
countries' fraud levels).

------
mufumbo
Right now I have three servers in hetzner. I have been using them for 5 years,
but only last year my startup "boomed", so I had to cancel my old server and
move it in the same rack as the other servers. If your startup has already
"boomed" just make it sure to rent all your servers in the same rack or pay
the reservation fee ($10 per server).

Hetzner prices are great for any software engineer. Having that powerful
server waiting for my projects is one of the reasons that I had the chance of
succeeding. I used to say that this is our profession and having a dedicated
server is a mandatory thing.

Even with one server from hetzner I was able to virtualize it into 8 machines
and create a real production environment that made it easier to scale. After
you learn XEN it's faster than going through amazon interface.

From my past experience I always worked with people who wanted to use amazon
or google appengine. I was always against it and said that the prices were
ridiculously expensive. My colleges said that they didn't wanted to manage
servers and the cost of appengine was only $2 per day, etc. This is a real
story and when the time of high traffic came the $2 became $50 and now we pay
$1500 in something that could be handled with ONE $100 hetzner server. After
using hetzner I would NEVER advise appengine and I would only advise amazon if
you must have the servers in the US.

For those who say that the site would have too much latency if it's in
hetzner: just use a cdn for static content, <http://www.maxcdn.com> is very
cheap and probably much better than just hosting in the US.

------
ashleyw
Their VPS service looks fantastic also:
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-
produktmatrix)

Their 2GB plan is 3x cheaper than Linode…and you get over 4x the data
transfer! Does anyone know how the performance compares?

~~~
meskyanichi
You could also just get a dedicated server with a good chunk of ram. Say, 32gb
or the new 64gb one. Then install XEN or KVM on it and run your own VPS farm
instead. It'll save you $800-1600 USD/month in the long-run once you fill up
the whole box with VPSs.

Another thing to note is that the new 64gb instance trucks a hexacore (6) core
CPU and includes hyper-threading. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe
this means you can run 12 virtual cores in your XEN/KVM instances with this,
instead of only 1 which is provided by the Hetzner VPS's. That's quite a
difference.

With my 32gb box (which is a quad core with hyper-threading) my XEN instances
can spin up to 8 virtual cores, according to the (h)top utility.

~~~
corford
What happens when the host box dies? If you build in redundancy, the costs
start spiralling quite quickly...

~~~
nirvana
Wouldn't the risk of that be exactly the same as the risk of a host box dying
at for any VPS product anywhere? Specifically I'm sure Hetzner is running
their VPS product on the same boxes, since one of their methods is to have a
very standardized, custom designed box (like google does).

~~~
corford
The good VPS providers have fail over hosts so that they can move your guest
if the primary host is experiencing issues (e.g. RAID degradation). Linode
have this for example (I know because one of my 512MB guests got moved
recently).

Edit: Leaseweb (who are on a VMWare stack) also offer something similar via
Vmotion

------
Erwin
Compare with SoftLayer which has decided to charge through the nose for their
RAM upgrades: going from 16 to 64GB RAM on their E5 servers is an additional
$1200/month.

They're far more expensive than e.g. Rackspace there for some reason.

~~~
Smerity
I haven't looked at SoftLayer's offerings re: RAM but the most important thing
to note with Hetzner is that only some of their dedicated machines have error-
correcting code (ECC) memory. Hetzner's 16GB machine[1] (89 Euros/month) has
ECC memory for example.

Whilst this might not sound like an enormous issue, DRAM errors are
surprisingly common in real deployments[2] and can result in scary things
happening to your data. If you're using a machine without ECC memory make sure
you're prepared to deal with any possible issues that might arise, especially
if it will impact your core business.

[1]: <http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8>

[2] DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study:
<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf>

~~~
jules
How common DRAM errors are is very unclear. The numbers in that paper are
astronomically high, but other sources have published numbers that are 30x or
100,000x or literally 10,000,000x lower.

See this Stanford ee380 talk: [http://stanford-
online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100922-ee3...](http://stanford-
online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100922-ee380-300.asx)

The part about DRAM errors is about 57 minutes in.

Abstract here: <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100922.html>

Also, AFAIK most hosting providers don't even have ECC ram as an option for
servers, e.g. Amazon.

~~~
justincormack
Do you have a source on Amazon not using ECC?

~~~
EwanToo
I don't think there's a confirmed source, but there's certainly indications,
for example, an AWS post that they use ECC memory for the GPUs in their
cluster GPU instance

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-
the...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-
gpu-instance.html)

Given that they list both the standard memory and GPU memory next to each
other, but only put ECC next to the GPU memory, it seems relatively likely to
me that the standard server memory is not ECC.

~~~
justincormack
But Nvidia only sell Tesla's with ECC. I don't really read that implication
into this.

On the other hand, the fact that
<https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=203167> has never been
answered suggests they do not, as they would answer affirmatively if it was
true surely. Of course they may use a mixture.

EDIT: Interesting that James Hamilton is on their team and thinks they should
use it
[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedE...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedECCMemory.aspx)

~~~
EwanToo
I can well imagine that newer machines have it, and older ones don't, and
slowly over time they'll end up with everyone using ECC.

The costs involved were a lot higher 3-5 years ago than they are today.

------
LinaLauneBaer
Germany has very strict information privacy laws when compared to the US. As
far I know many German companies cannot use cloud based solutions from
companies hosting in the US because of these laws. For example you are
forbidden by law to save user data at all. There are exceptions (eg. If the
service won't be able to function otherwise) but the discrepancy is still
huge. I wonder if you have to comply to these rules per se when you host in
Germany or not. I am no lawer. But maybe you want to consider the strict
information laws ingermany before renting big servers...

------
themichael
Hello,

we have several servers at hetzner since 2009. The performance has been
stunning. Biggest upside is probably the ability to buy 1 TB of bandwith for
6.90 €. What amazes me is the fact that they can provide such great service
and still be highly profitable. Turnover in the fiscal year 2010 was 29.68
Million € with post tax profit being 8.925 Million €.

------
meskyanichi
Purchased an EX 4S (32gb ram non-ecc) the other day from Hetzner, been running
extremely smooth. They got it rigged up in about 2-4 hours. Installed Xen to
run my own little VPS farm and it's dirt cheap compared to all the VPS
providers out there, and more performant as well since you actually own the
underlying hardware.

Just noticed they also added "1 Gigabit-Port" under "Additional Options" at
only 39 EUR, along with an additional 15TB bandwidth increase (You get 100Mbit
by default), and only 6.90 EUR for additional TB's of traffic. Pretty sweet if
you're doing some kind of video/stream hosting. Of course it has it's
downsides compared to S3 but when you compare pricing in "TB" to S3, you'll
see how redonk the S3 pricing is. Now, if only Hetzner was also located in the
US and Asia that would complete me.

~~~
ceejayoz
> Of course it has it's downsides compared to S3 but when you compare pricing
> in "TB" to S3, you'll see how redonk the S3 pricing is.

Remember, comparing "x TB of storage" to S3 is silly. S3 is designed to
replicate your file to multiple datacenters (their site promises ELEVEN nines
of durability!), provides things like a BitTorrent tracker for your files,
etc.

~~~
nolok
Unless I'm mistaken he is not comparing TB of storage, but TB of bandwith
used.

~~~
meskyanichi
Yes, I was referring to bandwidth.

------
ksajadi
If it is possible to run a hosting service as cheap as this, why is there none
like it in the US? I thought the labour, tax and VAT costs in Germany should
make it less competitive but this is just way cheaper than anything you can
find in the US. Does anyone know of any similar offerings in the States?

~~~
jakeonthemove
Yes, 1and1 - they offer pretty much everything Hetzner has and more (250 GB
free backup, unlimited 100 Mbps traffic, which is about 30 TB per month if I'm
not mistaken, and fully automated OS recovery and reinstallation, as well as
serial console, which is basically KVM-over-IP.

Their tech support is pathetic though, and the worst thing is that it takes
them quite a while if any hardware fails - you could be out for days, with no
possibility to even pay a premium fee for emergency repair... But of 5 servers
I've had with them, only 1 (the cheapest) had issues (hanged on reboot)...

~~~
ksajadi
So far as I know, 1and1 is also German (they might have data centres in the US
though) and their prices (as of now) are not competitive with Hetzner. Look at
[http://www.1and1.com/ServerPremiumXL?__lf=Static&__sendi...](http://www.1and1.com/ServerPremiumXL?__lf=Static&__sendingdata=1&preselect=managed)

~~~
jakeonthemove
Yes, they're owned by a German company, which is interesting. They are the
cheapest in the US/Canada, though, and the hardware is pretty high quality...

------
kragen
Hetzner's lowest-end server offering is €39/month, or US$51/month:
<http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x3>. I priced it out on
PortaTech, and it looks like the physical hardware costs about US$300:
[http://www.portatech.com/catalog/viewitem.asp?ID=26840&O...](http://www.portatech.com/catalog/viewitem.asp?ID=26840&O=65103)
I assume the six-month ratio is about the same for this larger server.

That seems like a pretty awesome deal, if you're doing something where you
might need the machine for a few months, but aren't sure you'll still need it
six months or a year from now. It sounds like a particularly no-hassle version
of leasing a workstation. Except that the workstation comes with a hundred-
megabit internet connection, and no monitor.

Unfortunately, it's also 250ms away from me here in Buenos Aires. Neither
elserver.com nor servilink.com.ar seems to have anything comparable (and
ServiLink's web page seems to be full of broken links and encoding errors,
which doesn't inspire confidence; if their web team are such pelotudos de
mierda, how likely are they to be able to quickly replace faulty hardware?) so
I don't know where to turn.

------
tzaman
I already lease a couple of servers with them, and I must say they are #1 in
EU when it comes to... well, everything.

~~~
lis
That is true, but you have to keep in mind that you have to get the flexipack
if you want to run more than 3 virtual machines with their own ip on it. And
honestly - if my server had 64gb ram I would want to do that. "back in the
days" I got my own subnet for free, now they are charging for it pretty
heftily.

~~~
justincormack
Welcome to the last days of ipv4.

~~~
lis
Absolutely true. Though it would be very nice of them to let me upgrade my
server while keeping my old subnet for free (which they don't). I can
understand their rational.

------
supo
How is this possible? With the HW and operational costs they have to be in
deep minus.. Eg linode.com is considered good and they seem to be more
expensive by an order of magnitude. Can somebody tell me what the catch is?

~~~
rmoriz
Hetzner AG is highly profitable. They have to publish a balance sheet at
<http://www.bundesanzeiger.de/> (German only)

Annual net profits:

    
    
        2008:  4.077.791,31 €
        2009:  4.448.824,49 €
        2010:  8.925.128,81 €
    

Accumulated profits:

    
    
        2008:  9.030.980,10 €
        2009: 13.479.804,59 €
        2010: 22.404.933,40 €
    

key facts:

\- cheap energy + human resources by building custom colocation facilities in
regions where cheap cooling+power is available

\- cheap self-made servers, no 19" form factor for decicated servers (they
have 19" racks for colocation customers)

\- hardware has to be refinanced in a couple of months. That's why the charge
149€ setup upfront.

\- growing out of cash flow

\- CEO and founder still CEO. Sometimes still interacts with customers
regarding new ideas in their forum (German only).

see <http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/presse/center> for corporate press
releases.

~~~
nolok
Similar to French OVH in a lot of way

~~~
aes256
Except OVH is a haven for nefarious use (seedboxes, etc.) and Hetzner most
certainly is not!

~~~
dspillett
_> Except OVH is a haven for nefarious use (seedboxes, etc.)_

Particularly through certain resellers, including the own "budget line"
(<http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/>). Not that I'd know anything about nefariousness,
'onest guv.

~~~
acous
Their french site has slightly better prices for some reason:
<http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/>

~~~
nolok
Kimsufi was launched to fight against french Dedibox (now online.net), which
at the time had lower price than the lowest OVH server. They stayed at the
same level as them since then.

------
ashconnor
_6.2 The client undertakes not to publish content that may violate the rights
of third parties or otherwise violate the law. The placement of erotic,
pornographic, extremist material or material not deemed in good taste is not
permitted. We are entitled to block access to the account of any customer who
violates this.

The same applies in the event that the customer publishes content which is
capable of violating the rights of individuals or groups of people, or that
insults or denigrates these people. This applies even without an actual legal
claim. We are not obligated to review our customers' content._

That basically rules out many user driven content sites.

------
rmoriz
their API: <http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en>

ruby:

    
    
        https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api 
        gem install hetzner-api

------
mrspandex
Are there legal issues to think about when storing data on German servers?

~~~
antninja
The German government is a good defensor of Internet freedoms, along with the
Netherlands and Scandinavian contries.

~~~
rmoriz
well, at least the Pirate Party is very strong in Germany. >10% in country-
wide surveys

<http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm>

------
swombat
Totally random off the cuff... I've been fighting with an EX 4S server for the
last week, trying to set up Xen under Debian Squeeze... anyone got some rock-
solid instructions which they know work? I've tried both my own recipes and
various tutorials on the web, but so far no luck. I managed to get Xen sort of
working at one point, but then the networking wasn't working. I'm about ready
to start throwing things out the window...

~~~
kenmazy
Last I checked Squeeze had a fairly straightforward Xen 4.0 package. I did
have trouble with dropped packets, but I was doing some pretty complex stuff
and it was already fixed upstream.

How exactly are you trying to setup networking? Bridged, routed, NAT on dom0
vs domU?

These two pages might help you, though both are slightly out of date:

[http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-configure-and-enable-
xen...](http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-configure-and-enable-xen-linux-
dedicated-server-with-virtual-machiness-internet-to-work-with-multipe-ips-and-
one-mac-only-solusvm-through-nat-route-and-iptables/)

[http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Xen_Networking#Two-
wa...](http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Xen_Networking#Two-
way_Routed_Network) (more out of date, but ideas are correct)

EDIT: ZFSonlinux is worth looking into as it's becoming fairly mature and
provides the perfect storage for xen instances.

------
kayoone
After over a year of hosting in the cloud (amazon aws) and spending alot of
money in the process we also made the switch to hetzner recently... The cloud
and its benefits is nice and good, but the computing power you get for 100
bucks from companies like hetzner is just incredible.. Of course there are
higher costs of setting everything up, but on AWS we had todo most of the
complicated stuff on our own anyway..

------
jakeonthemove
Interesting... the only hosting company with comparable prices and features in
the US is 1and1 (which is actually owned by a German company), but their tech
support has been pretty bad (takes them freaking days to replace hardware - on
the other hand, EVERYTHING can be done remotely)...

I wonder if hosting in Germany would affect a site's response time and ranking
on Google in the US?

------
nolok
Can somebody tell me why the EX 4S costs the same as EX 5 ? I feel like the 4S
is actually superior, but I'm no expert.

~~~
rmoriz
EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more... (I
don't understand those folks)

The EX5 is the last one with the old-gen CPU and was kept because in the early
days of the i7-2600 it was too expensive to offer high-ram servers like the 4S
(which was introduced months later)

~~~
runako
>> EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more...
(I don't understand those folks)

This seems prudent when going with a new vendor. Reduce financial risk until
you gain trust.

~~~
rmoriz
ok :) In this case I would buy the cheapest server from <https://robot.your-
server.de/order/market> or a VPS/vserver to gain trust in the company+network.

------
error
The company rocks :)

I have two dedicated servers (EX 6 with ECC) they are awesome. Until now I had
no issue with them.

I hope they continue this way.

~~~
rmoriz
Once I had a performance issue with my 100Mbit/s VDSL and asked on the forum.
CEO himself checked the peering capacity and wrote me an email. While I still
have to pay for my dedicated servers, I really love the way they're doing
business. :-)

------
hamidpalo
Does anyone know how they can provide bandwidth for so cheap? 7 EUR for a TB
of traffic is insanely cheap.

~~~
rmoriz
nearly-free peering at <http://de-cix.net/> and <http://www.n-ix.net/> to
offload a big load of traffic + bandwidth and fibres are not that expensive
here in Germany (unless you go with Deutsche Telekom).

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
That's great information. Why hasn't this happened in the US as well?

------
rmoriz
If you're outside the EU, you probably don't have to pay 19% VAT. So it's even
less than 109€...

~~~
bond
The same if you have a company outside Germany and based in Europe

~~~
ashconnor
But only if you are VAT registered, at least in the UK.

------
dow
Can anyone provide an IP of a box hosted with Hetzner? I want to measure the
latency when connecting from Middle East. That's one of things I worry about.
Linode seems to have the best peering with the region from all the providers
I've checked.

Thanks!

~~~
iSnow
78.46.92.242 This is an oldish dual-core AMD box with 2GB RAM and low load.

~~~
dow
Thanks, iSnow.

It looks good, lower latency than US East or Singapore, little bit higher than
London or Ireland.

The only thing that worries me are the fluctuations between pings:

164.622 ms 164.725 ms 166.828 ms 228.693 ms 234.214 ms

.. and it goes like this forever - bouncing between 164 and 230.

Linode and AWS are very constant between pings.

Is this something to be worried about?

Thank you

------
gaillard
For all those who care about taking responsibility for the environment, this
is what their site says:

"Hetzner Online exclusively uses energy from renewable sources to power the
servers in its data centers. Our environmental partner is TÜV-certified
NaturEnergie AG, a company that generates green energy from 100 percent carbon
dioxide-free and environmentally-friendly hydropower. The energy generated by
flowing water is, from an ecological viewpoint, considered to be the best form
of power generation for the environment."

------
runako
Would anyone care to comment on the quality and English skills of their
support?

We considered Hetzner, but were concerned about the potential pitfalls of
doing low-level support with a language barrier.

~~~
tdr
Tested and it's very good.

They also answer quickly and document pretty well the problem/reason.

------
vanessar
We migrated our infrastructure to Hetzner at the beginning of the year and we
are very happy with the change. Also, the support is great (and fast).

------
Uchikoma
10 years satisfied customer.

------
tomx
Is "hoster" a valid word? I do not see it listed in dictionary.com.

If you hosted a party, would you be a "party host" or a "party hoster"?

~~~
hej
It is in Germany (but you are right, it’s incorrect if used in English).

~~~
OzzyB
It's incorrect, until _enough_ folks start using it, then the Oxford
Dictionary gets an update :)

------
Egregore
Network availability 99% is very bad, it's about 3 days/year of downtime. (If
you have clients - they will kill you)

~~~
corin_
Personally I pay little attention to network availability promises - all they
mean is that you get pro-rated refunds if downtime exceeds them. 3 days
downtime is possible wherever you go, and if it happens I don't care a huge
amount if I get a refund of 10% of a month's costs or not - the damage is in
the downtime, not the wasted money.

What's important is the company's track record, and the likelyhood of that
record changing, and from what I've heard Hetzner look pretty good in this
area.

------
knotty66
Question: If I host the domain for my UK business on one of these (and say it
is a generic .com - not a .co.uk domain), will it influence my google.co.uk
SERP ranking massively ?

How would Google know my .com site is UK based?

~~~
polshaw
I am not an expert, but my understanding is that it would have _some_ effect
(worse than UK hosting, presumably better than outside EU), but I doubt very
much. Faster hosting should have a positive effect, too.

------
ra3don92
Does anyone use <http://burst.net/> ? I've found them to be one of the
cheapest VPS providers. May want to check them out if hosting in Germany is
not an option.

~~~
yatendra
I use it to host <http://livepost.in> since last month. Pingdom reported some
small downtimes but other than that it was ok. You get what you pay for, but I
think burst.net is value for money.

------
fpp
Anybody having experience with running ESXi on these dedicated machines.

Their online documentation says that it supports ESXi 5 and they put in a CD
when you tell them with your order.

~~~
oellegaard
I have an ESXi 4 server on one of their servers, the setup was rather tricky -
but it ran since ESXi was made free and had absolutely no problems.

------
macca321
any ideas why it has a 32GB limit for windows?

~~~
tiernano
Windows Standard edition is capped at 32Gb... if you want to use more, you
need to use Enterprise...

------
nirvana
Hetzner is nirvana for pre-ramen profitable big data startups. You can build a
cluster for a whole lot less than Amazon-- in many cases 1/10th the cost
(depending on which resources are higher priority, for us.)

The question is-- can you host in germany and serve a customer base that is
primarily in the USA? Our application isn't too latency intensive... but this
is my primary concern.

Would it be stupid for an american startup to locate there?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has direct experience.

~~~
Roritharr
Don't forget that "hosted in Germany" is a quality mark with which you can
advertise. Especially International Customers don't like the idea of their
data being stored in a country where the Patriot Act is a present reality.

~~~
dirtyaura
It's not even about a choice, as companies from EU countries can't store store
user identification data of EU citizens in US servers. So you are more or less
legally forced to have (some) servers in EU.

~~~
jahewson
Actually any US company can self-certify under the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor
Framework and be eligible to store data from the EU.

