But then you’re still reliant on those hosting providers not fscking up; just like with cloud providers. Literally the same complaint the GP was making about AWS applies for OVH et al too.

In fact I used to run some hobby projects in OVH (as an aside, I really liked their services) so I’m aware that they have their own failures too.

Old-school hosting providers have a lot less moving parts than cloud providers. They have their outages, but they’re usually less frequent.

Are they though? Let’s look at what the recent AWS outages have been: a single region (but AWS makes multi-region easy). The biggest impact to most people is the AWS console, something that one seldom actually needs given AWS is API driven. If the same type of outage happened on OVH then you’d lose KVM to your physical servers. But you seldom need those either.

The Azure outage was just AD service but you can roll your own there if you wanted.

Plus if you want to talk about SaaS then OVH et al have their own SaaS too. In fact the difference between OVH and AWS is more about scale than it is about reliability (with AWS you can buy hardware and rack it in AWS just like with OVH too).

Or maybe by “old skool” you mean the few independent hosts that don’t offer SaaS. However they’re usually pretty small fry and this outages are less likely to be reported. Whereas any AWS service going down is massive news.

I’m not a cloud-fanboy by any means (I actually find AWS the least enjoyable to manage from a purely superficial perspective) but I’ve worked across a number of different hosting providers as well as building out HA systems on prem and the anti-cloud sentiment here really misses the pragmatic reality of things.

Most people using AWS aren't using multi-region, as evidenced by the wide array of problems on the internet when a region goes down.

I would also argue many aren't even using multiple availability zones, as evidenced by the wide array of problems on the internet when a single AZ goes down.

I think you're vastly over-estimating how most companies are using AWS, and are substituting your own requirements for theirs.

Which is very common in tech. It's part of why people shit on cloud, microservices, and other techniques large mega-corps use on HN. People write posts with lots of assumptions and few details, then people that don't know any better just carbon copy it because hey its what Google does. Meanwhile their lambda microservice system serving a blazing 60 requests per minute has more downtime than if I just hosted it on my laptop with my dialup internet connection.

I fully believe some people are doing AWS wrong. But you cannot compare the worst offenders in AWS against the best defenders of deploying on prem - it’s just not a fair like for like comparison comparing the worst against the best.

Hence why I compare doing HA in AWS correctly vs doing HA on prem correctly.

I've had way more networking and availability failures from Hetzner this year alone then I've ever seen from AWS. They regularly replace their networking switches without any redundancy, leaving entire DCs offline for hours. They're okay for hobby projects, but I would never host a business-critical site with them

Cannot confirm, do you have details?

Yes, Hetzner upgrades DCs (datacenter buildings), but they are the equivalent to AWS AZs (Availability Zones). When they upgrade a DC, they notify way in advance, and if you set up your services to span multiple DCs as is recommended, it does not affect you.

We run high-availability Ceph, Postgres, and Consul, across 3 Hetzner DCs, and have not had a Hetzner-induced service downtime in the 5 years that we do so.

That's fair enough, I was comparing single-AZ AWS outages to single-DC Hetzner outages, since that seems to be what people are focusing on. For multi-DC deployments, I think laumars' sibling response to mine makes a much better argument—ultimately, you're still choosing who to pay and who to trust, and if things go down, there's nothing you can do to fix it. "Low-tech" cloud providers like Hetzner, Colo providers, amazon, PaaS—in a physical downtime event like this one, they're all the same.

@nostrebored Well, Hetzner never went down for the 7 years I managed a HA setup spanning three of their data centers. One of the DCs was unavailable for a few hours during a planned moving op, but we had no outages. None.

That’s not what you’ve seen recently. When Hetzner goes down nobody cares, because nobody with important workloads and brain cells is running then there.

Colo space assumes that the colo is operating more efficiently than AWS/Azure/GCP when in reality you’re comparing apples and oranges.