Hetzner provides unbelievable value but didn’t get much US attention since they were only located in Europe.

3 months ago they launched in the US, and as such - they are starting to get more attention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29092715

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.

It’s not a few euros. It’s easily a factor 10-20 in costs.

Compared to AWS et al, sure. But there are plenty cloud services with datacenters in USA that are similarly cost-effective.

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.

They are cheap because they are huge, and because they design almost everything themselves, from rack sizing to cases to cooling systems.

der8auer has a somewhat recent video on yt about one of their data centers for the curious.

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Really enjoyed the video, thanks for the suggestion!

That's outdated information, Hetzner launched a cloud service a few years ago.

Provisioning of cloud instances is pretty much instant.

They also have a REST interface [1] and a command line tool [2] to do those operations (and others) without having to use the website.

[1] https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ [2] https://github.com/hetznercloud/cli

Plus there's a Terraform provider for it as well: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hetznercloud/hcloud/...

Not to mention they also have a terraform provider. So you don’t need to use the website if you don’t want to.

(the bare metal offering does not have terraform support)

Edit: ahh someone already mentioned this. Didn’t read that comment before posting

> 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.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placemen...

[2]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...

[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...

Dedicated hosts and instances are super expensive especially compared to Hetzner.

> 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.

Very good to hear. When they launched I remember them saying that it will take up to 15 minutes for the VM to be ready.

My small Hetzner VM has been reliably running for years now, so I'm super happy with them, don't get me wrong.

OVH is also nice. They're French I believe. And you're right, they're mostly like old school VPS providers.

In US there is https://phoenixnap.com/

In UK there is https://www.heficed.com/

I am sure there are more.

Yeah, HN really likes: Postgres, Rust, Linux, Hetzner topics dislikes: google search, crypto, aws outages

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).

> Yeah, HN really likes: Postgres, Rust, Linux, Hetzner

You forgot SQLite.

> 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.

Out of interest, what's wrong with Hetzner's data center(s) in Germany?

GDPR, as UK has its own rules (maybe it would be okay as well, but our legal team has huge backlog and for now on-premises works just fine)

Ah, I see. Somehow I thought it was for personal use. Too bad business use is complicated by (possible) differences in laws.

Pretty sure UK and EU is still near identical on this. Hasn't been much drift since brexit.

U forgot cloudflare, its over hyped here.

likes adblockers too. hates SF nimbyism.

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 [email protected] and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

as a customer i doubt its coordinated.

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.

That's just what a PR department coordinating a social media influence campaign would say.

/s (but not really)

Recently, somebody on hn posted this crazy video showing what the hezner data centers look like https://youtu.be/

I enjoyed it

Your link is a link to the YouTube site, not the video.

Ah shit I screwed up the copy paste on my phone. No matter, on this thread someone else one posted the same "der8auer" video again.

Also just a customer, but always happy to see Hetzner on HN, never been let down.

> 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'm just a customer and this is my first post in months.

The post is actually a negative for Hetzner. They never told me they were offering 10x the capacity for the same price. That's why the Tell HN PSA.

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.

Certainly not upgraded automatically. My complaint is that they never even told me the option's available.

Thanks, in the same situation as you and feel the same!

They have great services for the price, and their machines are reliable.

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.

Hetzner is pretty good

It's all fun and games with Hetzner until you get a denial of service attack or someone uploads content against their ToS.

They will shut you down without informing you.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only Hetzner employee actively responding to comments on HN. We don't pay for people to make comments. --Katie

GDPR creates an interesting opportunity for European-owned datacenter hosting in Europe

Suspicious?

What about suspicious amounts of mentions of AWS and GCP?