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!
OVH is great when it works but inconsistent, Hetzner stuff 'just works' and is roughly in the same price range, unless you need lots of bandwidth, then it can be very hard to find anything that can beat OVH.
When contacting OVH support in French, I generally receive very good support. I sometimes wonder how good the response is when they receive the same question in English.
Thanks for the feedback about possible confusion caused by language issues. As the company's in-house English teacher, I am always curious to hear how we're doing in that regard. If you happen to have any old support ticket numbers where English was an issue, I'd appreciate looking at them so that I can integrate them into one of my classes. --Katie, Marketing (and English teacher), Hetzner Online
Sorry for the confusion, we were discussing OVH support. I've never had that problem with Hetzner support.
> When contacting OVH support in French, I generally receive very good support. I sometimes wonder how good the response is when they receive the same question in English.
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.
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...
The US government might not agree that they are two separate entities (they're not), and could take action based on that position (e.g. shut down the US company, ask the German government to compel the German company to comply with their laws etc.)
Microsoft has contracted their German Azure region to Deutsche Telekom (which is clearly a separate company) and claims to not be able to access the data. An arrangement similar to this (where basically the brand and technology is used by an actually independent company) could be possible.
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.
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.
I don’t mind the latency. I rent a a large GPU server from them for my own machine learning experiments. Their prices are so reasonably inexpensive that this is affordable. I think it would be more expensive for them to provide the same service in the USA - I base this in pricing. OVH is the only local provider I have used that is somewhat price competitive.
A fair warning to you: IMMEDIATELY TURN OFF UPDATES FOR THE NVIDIA DRIVER
Since a few weeks ago, Nvidia changes their driver ToS, and any new versions of the driver are not permitted to be used in datacenters (except for crypto mining).
Not necessarily now, but if you decide to turn that little ML project into a startup, staying on the same infrastructure at first, Nvidia might just come after you.
Considering this is HN, it's a pretty safe assumption that people are running these side projects to turn them into startups.
in my previous gig we used hetzner server to have several VMs and storage of that server failed , resulting that all our production servers went down. luckily we had backups, and restored partially our production, but after that incident we moved everything to DigitalOcean, just to not risk anymore. so our experience was bitter with Hetzner.
I was just saying that our experience with Hetzner was not as rock solid as others were saying, that's it. Don't understand why some people are downvoting my comment. Also it happened ~6 years ago, so I'm not sure if they offered VPS at all.
Yeah, but I didn't write "Hetzner sucks because their disks are failing constantly".
One commenter wrote "Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering" and as a counterpoint I wanted to tell my anecdote which opposes that "rock-solidness". So for that I get downvotes :)
In retrospect yes, I agree that we had to be prepared for such event, to have failovers and so on.
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.
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...
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.
I have used GCE, AWS, Hetzner, and OVH. On the face of it, while the GCE interface seemed very strange (e.g. can't rename most resources after creation), I have come to the conclusion that it is the best of the cloud providers. The flexibility of being able to upscale/downscale a machine, setting it up and then shutting it down until needed for free, the sustained use discount, and the fast startup keep me coming back. That said, I run a lot on Hetzner and love the fact that it just works. Edit: syntax, addditions for Hetnzer.
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.
"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 n10 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 n10 Gbit/s backbone and then over the various uplinks. "
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).
Peering gets so incredibly stupid with consumer ISP's that it's infuriating. It reminds me of the whole Comcast-Cogent fiasco, it's incredibly unfair to try and charge other providers when the customers that are PAYING YOU are requesting the traffic.
I think any real effort at enshrining net neutrality as law instead of a gentleman's agreement needs to include provisions that prevent residential / small business ISP's from throwing their weight around with peering agreements at the detriment of their customers.
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.
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.
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.
I'm Scaleway customer and it's for sure cheaper since it offers dual cores, unmetered bandwidth and more SSD storage for the same 3 EUR/m. But these are ARM or Atom x86 CPUs, both are significantly less efficient[1] than Xeons. It's worth noting that Scaleway has introduced "Workload Intensive" instances with a sweet price point starting from 25 EUR/m for 6-cores Xeon D-1531/15GB RAM/200GB SSD.
Not if you factor in that much of the storage is not local, generally lower speed and processing power often appears relatively low per core. Never tested them myself though.
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...
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
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.
Could you please write a support request about this question via Robot? Unfortunately, our technicians do not check social media. (It's too insecure for technical support and we must comply with German/EU data protection laws.) They'll be able to give you a quicker and more detailed answer. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
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].
two things kill it for me - annual commitment - I'm just playing around and I have so many options to choose from without the commitment.
Mind you, we're spending $10k+ on AWS right now, but it all started with a free tier.
Another thing is we're based in Europe and you only have servers in the US.
Good luck in the ultra competitive market.
Totally understand, and thank you for taking the time to provide feedback.
In most cases our annual price is equivalent to 1-3 months of a competitor's monthly price. You mentioned AWS so I'm going to use them as an example, even though it's not an apples to apples comparison. Their m5.xlarge is similar to our X-Large plan (16GB RAM + 4vCPUs). I'll ignore that it doesn't include storage or bandwidth, for simplicity. The m5.xlarge (with no storage or bandwidth) costs $140/month on-demand, which exceeds the annual price of the X-Large plan. If you reserve an m5.xlarge for 1 year (paid upfront) with AWS, the cost is a little less than $1K, which is close to 10X the cost of our X-Large.
If customers cancel their server with us after the 14-day refund period, we provide a prorated credit for the remainder of their billing cycle[0]. So if someone cancels after 2 months, they get the remaining 10 months as credit. They can use that towards renewals, new services, etc. I totally respect it's not for everyone, but the cost savings can be substantial for those who are able to use our services.
We are also expanding to Europe in the near future.
It's super easy. Just log into the dashboard and select your server, then "Upgrade" to see the options. From there, choose the package you want and your KVM server will be automatically scaled up (with zero downtime).
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.
We're definitely planning on offering Windows in the future. There are some licensing headaches, and it also means having people on staff that are experts in both Linux AND Windows (for customer queries, etc). So it's a bit more involved than just having a Windows install, but we're working on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I pay Hetzner via PayPal, and I haven't had any fees attached. Online.net however charges a card directly so my bank does charge it as a foreign transaction and adds a percentage.
That's because they fleece you with the exchange rate. You're paying a many-points worse exchange rate, even against a stabilised market average.
For one recent actual example, Paypal recently gave me 1.339 USD for 1 GBP in a transaction. The raw market rate that day was 1.421. The week mean was ~1.410. Paypal already holds this cash, they're not exchanging jack on the open market.
A pre-pay FX card —shop around— would have given me $1.40/£ on that date.
Paypal work like a bookmakers. They cover the entire spread with very little risk. Nothing on Paypal is really free.
I'm in the UK and host things both in a colo facility about 2 miles from me in London, and at Hetzner, and the roundtrip difference is not noticeable for normal workloads unless you're doing something extremely latency sensitive.
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. :)
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.
From the FAQ [1]:
> Can I install Windows?
> Right now we are focusing on support for Linux as an operating system. If you wish, you may install Windows on your own, and we have seen successful installations done. However, we will not provide any support for Windows.
Currently I'm running a CX20 (primarily as mail server and for smaller private projects), thinking of switching to the CX21 (more RAM, less storage, cheaper) or the CX31 (way more RAM, more storage, price per month is around 2€ higher than the CX20).
If someone has benchmarked them against the old offerings, I'd be happy to see the result. :)
Can confirm. I'm running Arch Linux on my Hetzner VPS and it's been rock-solid (except that one time when I accidentally deleted /sbin/init, but that was my own stupidity).
Two Intel Avoton cores, quite inferior to the Xeons that power Hetzner's vCPU. (assuming they are in stock)
I wrote this in detail on another reply, but Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.
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.
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?
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
"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 in FAQ)
I don't think they have understood, what Cloud Computing means.
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.
Your server provider or server location has nothing to do with the "Impressumspflicht". For example, if you're an US citizen with an English website on a US server, but you offer any products or services for German citizens, you need an "Impressum" [0][1].
> Companies and online media outlets, such as newspapers, magazines and journals, wishing to operate within any of these countries are obliged to make this information easily available to users. This requirement also applies to legal entities registered outside of the German-speaking realm that compete on the respective German, Austrian, or Swiss markets.
I'm quite sure I read it correctly. "Fazit" point 1: You do not need an imprint if you're outside the EU and you're not targetting EU citizens. Point 2: It's the opposite, if you're outside the EU but you're targetting EU citizens.
Looks like we're both kind of right. Your original source is solely based on LG
Siegen 09.07.2013 - 2 O 36/13, which said service providers from non-member
countries don't require an imprint and the court's decision doesn't really align with what you said. However, the ruling was overthrown by OLG Hamm 17.12.2013 - I-4 U 100/13, which actually follows your interpretation of the law.
There are plenty of lawyers who love to make money out of unlawful use of the German "Impressum" and send you an "Abmahnung" which requires you to pay fees even if you comply and change your website afterwards.
True, but that is solely your own responsibility. And lawyers can't do it just because they stumble over your website. Usually it's a competitor who comes after you. And even then its a civil law case - there is no threat to the hoster.
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"
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.
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.
They do react to notices, but they don't do much about them.
Emailing abuse@hetzner.de yields:
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your email.
In order for us to process your request, we ask that you
please fill out the form at the following link:
https://abuse.hetzner.de/
Please use this form for all future complaints.
Kind regards
Abuse team
When told that they already have all the information in the original report, a human suddenly appears and replies that apparently every report needs to include a permission to be forwarded to the customer. Again, in the context of a clearly compromised box one would expect them to first block the box and then "follow up with the customer."
Still, even with this permission and several hours in, the box is still spamming, customer is "investigating" and Hetzner has done all they could to handle this incident.
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.
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.)
I'm using a Hetzner VPS to host my mail for nearly 8 years now. Never had a single problem with blacklisting. I once lost IPv6 connection because of a routing mistake on their side but that was it.
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.
Probably because that's how servers can be set up most efficiently? It's probably much cheaper to run servers with a lot of ram and storage instead of having cpu-heavy machines (infrastructure, cooling, electricity).
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).
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!
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)
Am I missing something or is Hetzner just way more competetive?
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.
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)
hetzner has a similar 'serverbidding' for older servers which can be quite a bargain, depending on the day https://www.hetzner.com/sb . i know that SYS is good as well
What really bothers me with SYS is the lack of ECC ram. Very few servers have it (and sometimes without support by the CPU). Wouldn't set up anything processing data without ECC.
I’ve been maintaining the price comparison at git.io/vps for a while now, and the answer is:
No, you’re missing nothing. Yes, DO and especially AWS and GCP are about an order of magnitude more expensive than Hetzner, OVH, and similar providers. Much more for traffic.
It’s always been like this, the cloud providers simply have much larger profit margins.
The whole architecture has been redeveloped from scratch.
We have also designed and developed an entirely new control panel called the Hetzner Cloud Console. It is and will be actively worked on to make it as easy to use as possible for our users. Feedback is highly appreciated :)
Also the new cloud servers are billed hourly instead of monthly, as the old VPS were.
Full disclosure: I work for Hetzner Cloud as UX Designer.
After all the positive sentiment in this thread I signed up with the cloud service for a side project.
I have to say the UX is beautiful and easy to use. Also, the setup was easier, and performance better than any other provider I was testing. I'm sticking with hetzner.
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.
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.
1. Pings within Europe can be a bit longer than to other providers, they lack peering with some providers. However, nothing noticeable (10-20ms max) and behind cloudflare TTFB wasn't longer than with other providers. Keep in mind that this is central Europe, ~15ms more from the US compared to Google Cloud BE or OVH in France and around ~20-25ms longer latency to the US compared to UK/Ireland. I've never experienced downtime but follow their status on twitter and they sometimes have (announced) maintenance for vhosts, think they don't live migrate customers. But I've also experienced that with AWS.
SEO is dependent on response times and the provider shouldn't make a difference.
2. That shouldn't be an issue and they peer with Amazon in Frankfurt. Expect 20ms round trip per db query (from a European DC). Can make a difference for websites with a lot of small queries. I would keep webserver and database closer together and rather keep Apache also on Hetzner.
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.
No it won't. US for European servers is no problem, round trip of <200ms is hardly noticeable (unless you have a lot of round trips and no CDN). It appears that Google looks at render times (at least that's what they communicate) and it's easy to lose 200ms by having 5 js resources even if the server is close. But Asian visitors will notice a deterioration if you had a server in US-West before. Latency Europe-East Asia/Australia is very high.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm a (happy) Hetzner customer. A few years ago I ran some services with easily guessable/forceable passwords and my host turned into a node of a cracking botnet for a day or two.
Hetzner got nasty mails from a couple of "victim" sites, forwarded them to me, helped me clean house and everything was fixed and airtight within hours.
I think it's to be expected that a few self-managed root hosts will be poorly managed (like mine was) or abused. But as far as I can tell, Hetzner does a credible job of taking care of problems.
Well one experience doesn't necessarily mean anything (on either side) but I'm absolutely surprised that that was your experience since everything we found was nothing but an amazing product that was not proportional to the price we paid in the good sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like it, according to the features/location:
We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein. And we operate our data centers in accordance with ISO 27001 guidelines while also adhering to strict German data protection regulations.
EDIT: I seem to be wrong. This is a hybrid of a EU regulation that needs to be implemented into local law, and "EU law" that has direct application everywhere. Also there are specific rules on how much stronger the member states can make their local rules. I'm leaving my error in the text below.
That is not technically correct, and the difference matters.
The EU regulation forces it's members to implement their own local laws in alignment to the EU regulation. The EU regulation can get a member state into trouble if not implemented in time or correctly. They describe a set of "baseline" data protection laws for the whole EU, but the members can still have stronger local rules. Only the local law is what can get a resident company in trouble.
Germany has (had for a long time) very strong data protection laws that are still going to be stronger than the EU regulation.
Your comment is not strictly "wrong", as you say, it's just that the law is changing. The new regulation comes in* on May 25th. Your comment correctly describes the current system, which is being replaced.
* By "comes in", I mean begins being enforced. There's been a 2 year grace period as advance notice.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
The whole architecture has been redeveloped from scratch.
We have also designed and developed an entirely new control panel called the Hetzner Cloud Console. It is and will be actively worked on to make it as easy to use as possible for our users. Feedback is highly appreciated :)
Also the new cloud servers are billed hourly instead of monthly, as the old VPS were.
Full disclosure: I work for Hetzner Cloud as UX Designer.
As for all cloud providers, you are billed by an hourly rate instead of committing to pay a fixed price for the full month. This gives the customer the flexibility to scale the required power dynamically.
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.
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.
The reasonable assumption in 2018 is that everything is always connected to the Internet, whether you intentionally connected or not, and the only thing you can reasonably control is the latency.
That air-gapped server sitting in a grounded bank vault filled with pure nitrogen gas is still somehow leaking data out, and you just haven't yet figured out when or how. Maybe little cockroaches fitted with tiny SCUBA rebreathers and brain-control chips are crawling in through a dime-sized hole and sticking their aluminized antennae into the USB ports.
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.
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.
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.
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...]
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.
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.
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 :)
Maybe you could get them to accept a notarized translation (Beglaubigte Übersetzung) of your ID. It's gonna add about 50€ up-front cost, so I don't know if that's worth the price or the hassle at your project scope.
AFAIK Hetzner and other major German hosting companies require scan of EU/EEA ID or international passport. Possibly this is required by German law. Just acquire a passport or find local reseller on some "webhostingtalk"-like forum.
That got me curious, are you saying you don't have a passport because you're Egyptian, or was that just an additional piece of information separate from the passport? (Don't know if I'm missing some international news/info here.)
Also, maybe it would be worth contacting their support about your situation, maybe some other form of identification can be used.
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).
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).
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?
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
Well, they cost very little in comparison to the big cloud hosters and have great performance. Most startups nowadays can be hosted on a single big vertical machine just fine with perhaps another machine for a hot spare.
I think the much-heralded cloud elasticity for most startups only serves to please investors "we can scale if we blow up over night!".
Well, actually they made themselves a name for their quality products. And while everybody was busy minimizing their server usage in the advent of cloud computing, Hetzner worked on lowering the prices.
Therefore, they got an international reputation for delivering high quality for a cheap price.
This new offer looks very promising. I like the simple price model of 'pay per hour' + a fair 'maximum price per month'.
They're so much cheaper than the big cloud providers that I've made quite a lot of money migrating clients off AWS and Google Cloud to Hetzner when they start getting big invoices and want to cut costs.
It's not a conventional hoster in the sense of hosting WAMP/LAMP/MAMP, but enterprises (mainly from Europe) used their dedicated servers a lot for their stuff.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Prior to this announcement, the announcement about Spectre/Meltdown migration was literally at the very top of their customer homepage. After this announcement, it is the second thing you see when you log in: https://i.imgur.com/XTSTHkR.jpg
I can't think of an approach that would be more direct to their customers than seeing it on top of their customer homepage.
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. "
Our Cloud plattform has applied all currently released stable patches. We expect to apply more patches as they are released by our vendors over the new few days and weeks. The existing CX plattform was, has, and will be updated via live migration without any noticeable customer impact --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
You can freeze a VPS, save its state and restore it later without affecting the uptime. The clock would get skewed (system time vs hardware time difference), but unless you have something that detects that you won't even notice it.
