I used to run a service that hosted about a terabyte of video content and at its peak did 1 TB of outbound traffic in 24 hours. Cost 25 €/month with Hetzner.
With AWS, that amount of money would only cover about 300 GB of outbound traffic. No compute, no storage, just egress to last like a third of a busy day.
It is interesting to see comments expressing extreme concerns about US employees being able to access Hetzner servers, but then I'd wager: 1) they're probably using Google/US services at their companies with almost a gaurantee 2) Germany has ties with US for surveillance 3) Hetzner uses US servers (Intel, AMD, Micron) and a whole bunch of other components in their servers. Or worse, Chinese components.
I guess I fail to see the logic in all of this, appears to be uninformed security theatrics.
I think it's just about latency. If most of your users/employees are located in NA, it doesn't make much sense to give them degraded network experience to save few Euros on hosting costs.
Hetzner has been known in Germany for quite a while now. They are a very cheap but reliable hosting provider, not really a cloud service. A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).
They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
The thing to remember with Hetzner is that they are cheap. Low prices and good infrastructure but you have to do quite a bit yourself and many features one expects from a cloud provider aren't available. Last time I checked they don't have an API to change DNS settings for your domains. You can write GPG signed emails to a bot but I don't know how well that works.
> A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).
AWS offers that with placement groups for EC2 [1].
It's also probably worth mentioning the Dedicated Hosts [2] and Dedicated Instances [3] features of EC2 in this context which allow you to ensure that EC2 instances run on the same physical hardware.
> They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
I think this information is outdated - I just did a quick and dirty test and it took 8 seconds to have a new instance up and a second to shut it down.
I would (and will) jump on Hetzner as soon as they build datacenter in UK. Seems like amazing cloud alternative for companies that cannot justify prices of the big 3 (aws, gcp, azure).
> Seems like amazing cloud alternative for companies that cannot justify prices of the big 3 (aws, gcp, azure).
It is. The big 3 can be crazily expensive and there are many use cases where you can happily go with a less features but more affordable option. Also traffic is generally way cheaper.
Hetzner has been providing me with a suspicious amount of value for my money.
I've had a really great experience since switching over from DigitalOcean after Hetzner opened their Virginia datacenter.
DigitalOcean was a nearly perfect experience for eight years - I can only say good things about them. And then Hetzner went and gave me twice the value with comparable reliability. Frankly I feel spoiled.
> "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
their marketing is always extremely, how should i phrase it.... old? i'd seriously doubt their PR department is even remotely aggressive enough to even think of influencing social media.
> I've been seeing a suspicious amount of mentions of Hetzner on HN lately. (Just an observation.)
I never get tired of praising Hetzner. Their prices are remarkably a fraction of AWS's equivalent products,and their pricing model is completely rational.
I get that this is an upgrade, but it is a 'change' to the configurations that the customer set up their instance with. It would have been outrageous if they opted everyone is without their consent.
They probably have many happy customers in Europe. At least I'm one. And now they finally have an US data center, so now it makes sense to talk about them.
