+1 for Hetzner, they have an amazing suite of services for excellent prices.

Hetzner's robot marketplace[0] changed my (operations) life.

[0]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

Be very careful with those - they do not use ECC memory and thus suffer from the many potential security attacks and your software needs to handle the odd memory error.

> Be very careful with those - they do not use ECC memory and thus suffer from the many potential security attacks

ECC hyperbole much?

When you've decided to put your personal data somewhere in a cloud on the other side of the internet, this kind of stuff should probably be absolutely on the bottom of the list of things you need to worry about.

Not true at all, you can simply filter for "ECC" and get offers starting at 26€ for a 6TB of storage, 16GB ECC RAM.

Many larger (64 GB RAM and more) servers from Hetzner Robot in fact do have ECC memory.

so exactly like your average desktop? whats the problem it isn't like you share the hardware with others

How did they do so?

tl;dr - Shifted my knowledge of the hosting market by exposing me to cheap dedicated servers

I had previously thought that dedicated servers were doomed to be too expensive/heavy weight for me. I also felt like most VPS providers charged too much (especially true in the case of AWS -- $10/mo for a t2.micro is ridiculous).

I first found INIZ (http://iniz.com/) and was super happy with them, then someone introduced me to Hetzner Robot Marketplace and I was blown away by the affordable prices (+/- setup fee) and have had one ever since. Hetzner also has a cloud offering that is also pretty great -- slight limits on operating system choice and some other features and you can have very competitively priced machines in a more cloud-friendly fire-up-and-go format.

I wrote about the revelation here (including link to HN thread where it happened): https://vadosware.io/post/fresh-dedicated-server-to-single-n...

Now I have a ~6 Core (12 vCore/hyper-thread) 24GB RAM monster that I can run experiments with for a decent monthly price.

If you go to other providers like Packet, OVH or Amazon, you're going to see way higher prices -- I'm don't have too many requirements so Hetzner worked for me.

I use a time4vps storage server, it's less expensive. I also use it as a borg destination, among other things.

https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881 (affiliate link)

https://www.time4vps.eu/storage-servers/ (straight link)

I created an account with them recently and they asked for my passport or id card for authentication. Is this usual?

Yes, very usual for EU companies. Make sure to blank anything sensitive. If this seems weird, consider how many places require your Social Security in US.

Not in my experience. Hetzner is the only one out of a dozen that I recall asking for ID.

It's generally finance related that requires a social security number. If a hosting provider asked they would get 123-12-1234

Yep. OVH (The French) have a pretty strict ID policy too. Nothing to worry about.

I didn't have to provide ID with OVH, just fill out my address.

You must have been lucky then.

I had to go through a manual send photocopy of my ID process etc.

Usually hosters do this so they have some verfied name or address in case of abuse.

> they asked for my passport or id card

This is often for tax reasons -- specifically, whether VAT can be waived.

What do you mean with "not cloud-based"? You mean IaaS rather than PaaS?

Hetzner is a bare-metal company operating since 1997, which hasn't released a cloud-based storage yet.

"Your files on Storage Boxes are safeguarded with a RAID configuration which can withstand several drive failures. Therefore, there is a relatively small chance of data being lost. Please note, however, that you are responsible for your data and there is no guarantee from Hetzner against potential loss of data. The data is not mirrored onto other servers."

https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Storage_Boxes/en#Reliabili...

Thank you - so it‘s just less redundant than e.g. Backblaze (I assume). That‘s an important distinction. See, I‘m not a fan of using buzzwords to describe anything in more detail. „Cloud“, „AI“, „Big Data“, „NoSQL“ etc. is (sometimes) fine to get non technical people interested, but useless to say anything meaningful about a system IMO.

I can't find any guarantee on reliability for Backblaze, their SLA ( https://www.backblaze.com/company/sla.html ) has

"Backblaze will make commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that B2 Cloud Storage is available and able to successfully process requests during at minimum 99.9% of each calendar month. "

Can I ask, what makes that setup "not cloud" vs Amazon S3? Amazon doesn't make public their hardware setup, merely that they offer various "9s" of reliability against data loss.

What if, for arguments sake, Amazon's secret setup is exactly the same as Hertzner hardware wise, with Amazon merely putting a number against the reliability that setup offers?

> Can I ask, what makes that setup "not cloud" vs Amazon S3?

"The data is not mirrored onto other servers." says it all.

It's like renting some shared space on a dedicated server with auto-monitoring.

How is the reliability?

It's colocated hardware, with a thin service layer on top so they set it up for you as a service. The service and hardware are quite reliable, but you can (and will) still lose all your data in case the hardware fails. You have to create your own processes and layering to get to an adequate number of 9s for whatever kind of reliability you're looking for.

After the launch of Hetzner Cloud six months ago, Block Storage and Object Storage might be on their way[1].

[1] https://github.com/hetznercloud/terraform-provider-hcloud/is...

"but you can (and will) still lose all your data in case the hardware fails. "

Can you elaborate this? I mean besides if the center burns down? They offer "snapshots". If the drive fails, they can not recreate the last snapshot?

I suspect these are like ZFS snapshots -- they're not backed up, but allow you to restore your data to a previous point in time (like git history).

I think that basically the guarantee exists as long as the raid array within the box is operating. There's no other safety.

Unless I'm mistaken (entirely possible), it's not colocated hardware -- Hetzner own both their data centres and the hardware in them.

Right, I meant to say it's "like colocated hardware". Hetzner own the hardware, but the service guarantees are similar to where you own the hardware. If the hardware fails, tough luck.

Big power outage in May (at least on some dedicated servers).

https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1712750

https://www.golem.de/news/rechenzentrum-falkenstein-serverau...