Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cardine 2812 days ago
>How does Hetzner compare here? In terms of both, general experience and costs.

We use Hetzner for this purpose. It's hard to compare it with the other providers since with Hetzner you are renting unmanaged servers, not turning up cloud instances.

But it is absolutely the best value you can get. Our bill would be at least 10x higher if we were using Google/Amazon/Microsoft.

Considering we spent a lot on servers as is, that makes it well worth it for us. It might not be if your product is very computationally light.
2 comments
krn 2811 days ago
> It's hard to compare it with the other providers since with Hetzner you are renting unmanaged servers, not turning up cloud instances.

Hetzner Cloud is already a thing[1] and is a direct alternative to Amazon EC2, if you choose dedicated vCUP.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

link
segmondy 2812 days ago
I don't know your location, but if you are in the US and running your own k8s on baremetals, I would reckon you should have at least 1 full time person on staff to handle all of it. Let's say that person costs only $50k/yr. Will your workload on Google cost more than $50k? Google pretty much really does all of the management for GKE. Just deploy your app and run.
link
cardine 2812 days ago
>I would reckon you should have at least 1 full time person on staff to handle all of it.

What exactly would that person be handling? We probably spend no more than a couple hours per week handling everything involved. That's the point of something like Kubernetes in the first place.

>Will your workload on Google cost more than $50k?

Our sever bill with GKE would far exceed $50k/yr (it would exceed $50k/mo!)

As a result, Hetzner is a no-brainer for us. As mentioned before, that might be different for you if you are doing something that is computationally light.

link
Drdrdrq 2812 days ago
Well if you are running k8s you already have that person. The real question is, is it worth putting additional load on that person in exchange for savings?
link
mijamo 2812 days ago
That is not my experience with GKE. And 50k/y is super low with Google Cloud. It's really easy to get at least 5 times higher even with a small application.

Funnily I spend more time administrating GKE than I do with applications on VPS.

link