I failed. They silently suspended my account after i made payment for verification. I tried to register again, they asked for scan of my passport, i sent it, and they suspended my account again. No replies from support regarding that issue too. Funny, because i went through validation process 2 times already (when i rented dedicated servers from them) and now i can't create account to use their cloud offering (and dedicated servers too)
The HDD thing is (was?) definitely an issue with Hetzner. I had the same experience some years ago. Best option was to get hardware raid and SAS disks, those were datacenter quality instead of consumer and worked great.
Got a letter in the mail a month ago that they had sent the broken account to a collections company in the US.
- crappy network (advertised 300-500mbps, usually lower)
- crappy cpus ("benchmarked" several providers, hetzner was lower end on cpu-bound loads)
Dedicated ones are baller though, unfortunately no US.
Re: CPU, if you were comparing them with the VMs from "the big 3", you should look under the "Dedicated vCPU" tab: https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud
From my experience, at Hetzner you are very rarely limited by their network. Usually only by poor peering from transits. Peerings with all the big names are great tho, so no reason to complain for me.
And from what I know from someone near Hetzner, they don't cheap out on peering at all.
10G speedtest to a swedish telco provider I ran just now: https://i.imgur.com/9ARZqOP.png
Linode/Vultr/DigitalOcean/Hetzner/Terrahost
I can easily imagine cost savings on Hetzner could benefit certain loads, of course. It's always "depends".
How did I come to it? Measuring performance of my node.js service I need to run on it, iperf, speedtest.
I think Hetzner's dedicated servers product started from the consumer demand for Counter-Strike servers, maybe it's because Counter-Strike wasn't as popular in the US? Not 100% that's why Hetzner has been succesful with dedicated servers but I don't have another explanation.
I still have Hetzner for a dedicated server in Europe, and it's fine. I've had it for several years now with no issues.
Before getting this job, I noticed that most dedicated servers in America are from smaller companies that re-sell their dedicated servers or colocated servers from companies like my work's or other data centers (who mainly specialize in colocation services instead of selling their own hardware.
I suppose in America, the main people companies target are for simple cheap VPS servers or "cloud scaling" services. You can also make a lot more imo by stuffing as many customers onto 1 server instead of dedicated hardware for each customer. Also a lot less management and support needed. At work 99% of our maintenance and support is for individual dedicated servers. The VPS side of the company requires very little intervention on our end.
Dedicated is starting to make more sense as cloud prices are kinda nuts + tooling is better now, so ‘roll your own cloud’ is becoming more feasible.
It just doesn’t get as much press as the big cloud offerings, and most of them are relatively local players specializing in their region (and associated network/property). OVH has several large DCs selling dedicated hardware for rent here in the US.
The first one I clicked on has options around $50 too: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/dedicated-servers/our-pric...
https://opennebula.io is worth looking at for that sort of thing (not that it's new). You don't have to do it that way, but its "edge" support for simple provisioning on bare metal providers doesn't include Hetzner; I think it assumes you can get instances on demand. That sort of solution isn't complex or expensive enough for my site, and doubtless others, though. Especially when you just want compute, I can't see the point in the pain (which surprised us) and expense of AWS et al.
Ftfy. :)
Yes, they do, unfortunately. I am still hoping for some regulation / fine to put an end to this.
I am extremely cautious of the sources of UGC I host publicly on my Hetzner machines. In addition to the fact that Germany lacks freedom of speech/publication (thus obligating a German organization like Hetzner to censor content that is legal to publish in most places, but not Germany), I imagine it wouldn't take many legitimate/normal UGC-related issues (e.g. properly-responded-to-by-the-box-customer DMCA takedowns) to make my customer relationship turn negative ROI for them.
I wouldn't, say, run a social media site open to the public on Hetzner, even if I responded to DMCA and other legally-mandated takedowns in single-digit minutes, 24/7/365. I just can't imagine they'd accept the overhead of such a customer.
That said, it's great for hosting big files that CloudFlare's TOS prohibits (video, podcasts, etc), just as long as you're certain nobody at Hetzner's going to get a call over one of your URLs.
Freedom of speech is article 5 of the German constitution.
What you mean is that it differs from the US version.
You can't have "mostly" free expression. It's either abridged or it isn't. Germany censors harmless digital art that the government deems inappropriate for adults to be able to see. It's a classic slippery slope (modern Germans defending their government's censorship and lack of free expression will usually cite Hitler/racist stuff, but that's not all that's banned).
It doesn't really matter what the constitution says, if in practice you don't have those rights. It's sort of like how the 2A in the USA says that the people have the right to keep and bear arms, but I don't suggest attempting to exercise that right in Central Park, because you don't actually have it. Same goes for free expression in Germany.
From https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/19123 :
> Germany is one of the strictest censors of violence among the world’s video game consumers. Due to its history and a cohesive national opinion, the legislature limits content severely, much more severely than the surrounding European nations. This results in international developers choosing not to market to Germany, creating censored titles specifically for the German market, or finding themselves on a list of banned titles illegal to buy or sell.
[1]: there's also no indication that racist publications were responsible for WW2 (versus, say, Hitler himself), making this censorship-for-censorship's sake. Many other countries do not prohibit racist literature and have not committed a holocaust. So, of course, they banned violent video games too, because those don't cause violence either.
Why leave out the for the maintenance of a well-regulated militia part?
Because the text of 2A does not indicate that the right is contingent upon participation in a militia (and indeed 10 USC 246[1] legally defines the US militia as all able-bodied male citizens of ages 17 to 44 inclusive, as well as all female citizens who are members of the National Guard, even if it did), as 2A actually specifies RKBA as a right of the people (not "people of the militia", just "people").
> In contrast to the NRA’s rigid opposition to gun control in today’s America, the organization fought alongside the government for stricter gun regulations in the 1960s.
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...
https://www.schnittberichte.com/svds.php?Page=Indizierungen&...
The US First Amendment version is the only one that is worthy of the name.
The US ranks lower than Germany in the FH and RWB freedom of the press indices [1], which while not quite the same is highly related to freedom of speech.
Bad counterexample? CloudFlare did just that, triggering a strangely pro-censorship round of hacktivism in the form of #OpISIS.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/19/cloudflar...
Moreover, how is DMCA relevant? Copyrighted works are outside the bounds of free speech.
DMCA, and in general the US legal system are extremely relevant to me as a user. If I have a theoretical right to free speech, but in practice any big US media company could kill it then I'm much better off in another country where maybe the theoretical right is 10% less but I can actually practically enjoy that right.
In the USA, Neonazi publications are allowed, while in Germany they are illegal. Therefore, the US has a freer press than Germany. Freedom House would disagree, and they are simply wrong.
De facto and de jure of course being completely different things.
Sure but that ship sailed years ago. Their constitution is also supposed to guarantee a right to a fair trial but obviously the legions of drone victims didn't get one.
https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/german-...
An appropriate German name is one that is first recognised as a proper name. It cannot be associated with evil (e.g. Satan, Lucifer) or deemed religiously insensitive (e.g. Christus or Jesus). A name cannot be a product, brand, surname or a place name. Finally, German names have to indicate the child’s gender and they are not allowed to cross (one exception is Maria, which can be used as a boy’s second name). Neutral names (e.g. Alex, Kim) must be followed by a second name that indicates the child’s gender.
California like several other states bans the use of diacritical marks on official documents. Last year, the state took up a bill that would have allowed diacritical marks, but it stalled out when a $10m price tag was attached
We don't really like if somebody thinks Hitler was kind of a cool guy and that he should have continued "his work". Besides that you can say lots of things in Germany without getting too much trouble.
For example, from Wikipedia, "agitation" is not allowed.
Merely disagreeing with a politician can be considered hate speech.
It does not take a lot of effort, either, just using certain words can be sufficient.
Germany now also seems to have the concept of "protected groups" that you can not critizize in any way, which I think is probably new. I am not a lawyer, though.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/pimmelgate-hausdurchsuchung-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act#Critic...
It is not an "anachronistic law", it is a new law that came into being very recently.
What they enforce is Nazi shit and pro child abuse publications being banned. Really not objectionable at all. If you must be angry, there are many countries that are significantly worse than this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29475379
(tl;dr: Germany censors harmless depictions of gory violence in video games.)
I don't like that fact either but to ignore facts because they don't mesh with my politics is bad.
Germany lacks freedom of expression.
This may be a concern (regulatory risk) for companies who are customers of hosting companies that are subject to German law.
I'm a big fan of OVH, they've never let me down.
Sorry, had to poke fun a little bit, obviously there's always a chance of having a bad experience. I've only had to interact with Hetzner support once, and it was positive, we determined that a consumer grade CPU was aggressively going into some sleep mode the Linux kernel wasn't waking up from, and the Hetzner support guy agreed that was the problem and determined it was possible to disable that feature in the BIOS, and went ahead and did that for us.
And of course the fact that that was necessary was on us for running our production on their consumer grade CPUs.
I believe Hetzner and maybe also OVH have a much bigger role to play in the deployments of the future. The big cloud players are overplaying their hands, and it's becoming more and more attractive to run on bare metal as devops tooling improves.
I recall there being discussion about it on HN before and a lot of people being confused as to why anyone needs it though.
No issues so far, but OVH's network seems to be better, especially for people in other continents.
Edit to add:
- I'm using their Germany DCs, not the Finland one (which is cheaper but peering is worse).
- Using a CDN does improve the latency/speed for users outside Europe, but it still influences performance as CDN exit point often connect directly to the origin to fetch uncached content.
- I lost a VPS with OVH's DC fire, but I had backups somewhere else and fixed it quickly. A good thing about the lower prices is that I can have backups on multiple services (also cheap - Backblaze B2, for example) and still save money compared to AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
Currently have 10+ dedicated boxes at Hetzner and I'm taking time to write this comment because I like them that much. I only contacted support a few times during my 10+ years there but it was immediate response and to the point. I remember waiting 24h+ for OVH support with my service down (it was 5+ years ago though) and for Hetzner it was always in minutes.
Can you elaborate why do you think they are unskilled?
But besides that, both the cloud and dedicated support are very good. Last 10 - 20 HDDs we needed swapped were swapped in under 30 minutes each, and in some of the more complex issues, they were able to guide our engineer wherever they needed to be quickly. I've dealt with much, much worse hosters at multiples of that price.
They're as on fire as their datacenters
Of course for larger deployments you'd have to take care of fail-over and all this, so it's not really an option unless you are up for setting this up all by yourself.
Networking has been occasionally unstable for me, though. Their vlan stuff being 1400 mtu is also annoying.
does this suggest that their networking gear is also dirt cheap or is this just an artifact of legacy compat and/or not wanting to wory about jumboframes?
Can AWS Spot Instances really beat this? https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax
Our first cloud server (supposedly to be a test) is runing since march 2018 We have managed more than 15 dedicated servers since 2012
Never an issue
I've only had them for a few years but I've yet to experience any issues with their great value (e.g 2TB €9.90 /mo) storage box servers. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
Only issue I have with them is the latency of their Germany DC's from the US, if they end up offering dedicated servers in a US DC I'll be moving over my existing Hetzner and AWS (non RDS linked) App servers over.
You're leaving yourself open to having something exploited. Have a look at your ssh logs where "people" are constantly trying to get in.
https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/top-10-li...
Another reason though to reboot every so often is for the server to do filesystem checks on the root partition(s).
Yes, I check my logs and see the constant stream of breakin attempts. Basic security precautions seem to keep them out.
It's always been good to me when I was using their European data centers, but that was always a bit of a bummer because of latency. Now that they have a DC in the US, I just can't think of a single good reason to use other cloud providers for smaller deployments. They're pretty much the best bang for your buck you can get anywhere.