
Hetzner introduces new server product with insane parameters for 59 EUR/mth - ergo14
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4s
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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...](http://codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-virtualized-servers-cloud/)

And setup of a new server is quite fast too.

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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.

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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...

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jorisw
What would you need remote KVM/IP for? If your ssh ever dies, you can reboot
the thing into rescue mode, log in over remote console, fix whatever's broken,
and reboot the system.

I have been using an older server offer of theirs for years now, and never had
to pay for anything other than the said fee.

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mtarnovan
What if you upgrade to a kernel which doesn't boot ? Trust me, KVM/IP gives
you peace of mind, for 10-15EUR/month it's worth it. On some server configs
it's even included in the price (EX8).

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ergo14
then you boot from recovery image - GRUB broke for me completly after routine
debian update (imagine that!), and i fixed it using recovery images - you can
also request LARA for up to 2h for free.

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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.

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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*

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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

~~~
tluyben2
OVH definitely does not provide good hardware; we have more broken disks and
NICs there than all our other hosters combined.

Edit: I see we might be exceptions. We have been using OVH since 2005, running
up to 40 servers about 2 years ago. We are also running at iWeb, Softlayer,
Amazon and Leaseweb. Hardware wise the only one we have issues with is OVH,
and i'm talking every 2 weeks since 2005 (in 2006 they managed to lose all our
data on 2 clustered RAID machines; one died, all corrupted, then when we were
busy setting up the replacement, the other one died...). But they are so cheap
and easy (like the easy OS installation which is cloud-like, already for many
years) we stick with them for some projects which need high spec hardware in
clusters. Note: the SSD drives are great, no problems with those so far (knock
on wood).

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mst
Somebody always has a bad experience with any given company. What I keep
wondering about is how to effectively get the collective knowledge out there
to figure out whether you're the exception or the rule.

I sort of wish hosting companies would publish the hardware failure rates -as
seen by them- too - though I don't know how much of a competitive advantage
that would be, if any.

~~~
tluyben2
Well yes, but this is not getting some bad support a few times; this is
consistently bad hardware on our part.

I'm kind of wondering now if we are running different workloads; we are
running very high IO and network stuff. Maybe we just hammer a lot harder on
the disk than others are? With HP DL360s @ leaseweb we are running the same
loads without any problem (since 2006...); 1 broken disk that ended up not
actually being broken.

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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.

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

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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.

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slig
Do people outside EU get 19% off from VAT?

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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.

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dav-id
Within the EU you need to pay the VAT.

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hlidotbe
Not if you are a business... we don't pay VAT on anything we buy outside
Belgium.

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veeti
You need to be VAT registered in your own country to be able to buy things
with 0 VAT.

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jorangreef
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.

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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.

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

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dberg
Is there a US version of this ?

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ergo14
The closest match would be <http://leaseweb.com/>, which is more expensive but
they do have US based boxes too.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

~~~
calloc
I had two failing drives in my Softlayer box (was about three years after they
were put in service ... so not bad), and Softlayer insisted on running the HD
diagnostics on our machine taking it down for an hour.

We just ended up purchasing a new box, migrating over and letting them take
the old one offline. We ended up paying less per month for twice the specs...

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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.

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vintagius
Pity one can't pay using paypal.

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halayli


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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.

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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>

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nirvana
Thank you. This presents some implications I'm going to have to consider in
developing our application. Fortunately, in the early days we'll be collecting
no personally identifiable data.

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mjwalshe
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