I've had a the smallest cloud instance for a few years now, it is in fact really good and fast. 1vcpu with 2GB ram is plenty for a full stack web application + a database. IO is also very good with stable ~8000 iops write performance for 4k sync.
Compared to Azure VM instances, Hetzner offers like 100x more performance for each $ spent.
It appears ColoCrossing created dozens of VPS "companies" that they pumped through LEB, sold plans, and then shut down without refunds. LEB may be/have been owned by or share common ownership with ColoCrossing.
> Compared to Azure VM instances, Hetzner offers like 100x more performance for each $ spent.
So much this. I can't stress enough how awesome of a deal are Hetzner Cloud's offerings. I've also been running a personal Docker Swarm cluster on Hetzner for the past two years and I couldn't be happier with the way it performs. And how refreshing it is to actually be able to predict and control costs, and have absolutely no worry in the world regarding what might pop up in the invoice. If only this was true for any other cloud provider.
I don't know how to feel about this. One the one hand this is good for sites that needs to be more global. But I mainly build stuff for Europe and I don't want anything to do with USA when storing personal data. I hope they keep the seperation between Europe and US clear.
> Hetzner's own team of technicians in Germany provides customer support for the Hetzner Cloud servers in both Europe and Ashburn, VA. See below "How do I contact support?" We hope to soon expand the hours for the support team, and we will make an announcement when this happens.
One can hope, otherwise I can see European customers move off Hetzner. We have a number of customers who do not want US staff to be able to access their servers and VMs.
This is such a far departure from where I was hoping the Internet would look like growing up. Makes me sad political borders are now viewed as a feature.
This is nothing to do with freedom of speech; the issue is differing laws on data privacy between the EU and US (and repeated failure of Safe Harbour and other regulatory attempts to paper over the cracks).
So one concern (and it's not just a theoretical concern; it has happened) is that a US court forces the US branch to use access it has to data held by the EU branch to exfiltrate data. Companies with the highest standards on this stuff will want either a pure-EU host or a host structured such that this can't happen.
Not Complying with US law is also illegal, now imagine who has more to say in that regard.
Hetzner should split up in two Company's.
BTW:
The CLOUD Act applies to all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate in the U.S, whether those providers are established in the United States or another country.
The Schrems II judgement might be applicable. I know that in the EU-based company I work for we have strict requirement for all cloud providers to comply with Schrems II, and not send/store any personal data to outside EU.
i was asking specifically about "US based employees should not have access to manage", which isn't necessarily the same thing as "not send/store any personal data outside the EU". You could have data stored inside the EU, but then saying no US-based employees can have access to it seems like another further requirement? Although it may be one under GDPR? But that's what I meant asking for more info about, sorry!
Any info on what DC they use? So far they've run everything themselves which made them slower to expand but was much cheaper to run. If they now use other DC providers it would explain why they only offer the higher margin cloud servers there. But would be curious if anyone knows where the data center is physically located. With their other ones they're also quite open about it so I was surprised they didn't mention it here.
EDIT: They do mention somewhere on their side that it's a third party DC. So probably no option to offer dedicated servers there (at least not at the same price as in their other locations). Would still be curious which one it is.
Oh wow, that's really amazing. Thanks for the info!
So they shipped a 40ft container full of servers via ship to the US? That really surprises me, I always thought this kind of equipment was done via air cargo only.
It is, but these components also probably cost upwards of a million dollars and are very fragile. Esp with current shipping delays (not sure how the situation is on the route EU-US), I'm surprised they waited the extra few weeks to save a few thousand $.
so if i didn't misunderstood that page they've had one 40 foot container delivered with nineteen "server hardware" pieces, likely racks?
thats less than i would've expected, but it makes sense considering that they probably don't have any big customers lined up.
it will be interesting to see how fast they'll grow.
Maybe they only shipped some components they don't want to have assembled there or that are more expensive in the US. So theoretically they could've just shipped network equipment or storage servers (for block volumes) while other servers were assembled in the US. I can't really imagine that it's cheaper for them to assemble complete racks in Germany and ship them over, assembly cost by a third party in the US is likely cheaper and definitely much faster.
Right now we're not offering any dedicated servers (as I wrote on another comment). That might change some time in the future depending on how well things go here. But I can't give a clear answer about whether or not we will introduce dedicated root servers, or an ETA. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
I've been working on bringing the managed services (which is still somewhat lacking though Hetzner has LoadBalancers) now to places like Hetzner and OVH. Right now I'm planning on starting with Redis/Memcached and S3.
If this seems like something you'd be interested in I'd love to hear from you (email in bio). If you don't have the time to write an email but maybe take a most-questions optional survey:
Not sure about their cloud services, but their dedicated servers offering is unmatched anywhere. Unfortunately they only have DCs in Finland and Germany, would love to see it expanded. Anyone here sitting on any information if they are planning to extend their locations?
Hi there - We are currently just focusing on the new location for cloud servers. Depending on how successfully things go there, we may consider adding other products in the future. But we will discuss that internally first before making any announcements. Sorry that I can't give you a firm yes or no answer. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
Same, have been a happy Hetzner customer for 8+ years because they've consistently offered the best dedicated server pricing with essentially free (20TB) bandwidth.
Unfortunately they're only offering their "Cloud" hosting packages for the time being, so it'll be a while before they start offering dedicated servers.
Once they offer dedicated servers in US and a managed RDS service I can finally look at moving off AWS for most services. But it looks like Cloudflare will beat them to it as their CEO has mentioned they're already working on a managed DB service, hopefully it will be as cost-effective as their R2 pricing.
I had a terrible experience with DHL, we used them for US domestic small parcel shipments before the business unit was shut down for losing money, around 2008 I think. Towards the end they started systematic over charging. They would rate an 8oz package as 20lbs. The bills were 5-10x what they should have been. The service was never very good, they just had a good sales team. I hesitate to generalize from specifics though, it doesn't represent how all German companies do business. Maybe we should care less about national identity and more about the company's reputation.
Was quite surprised that they use custom built server racks with their own custom-made mainboards delivered by OEMs. They even have their own long-term Fan testing rigs and custom HDD failure check setups.
This. Cloud is everywhere nowadays, but most dedicated servers are outrageously expensive or have bandwidth limitations (I'm looking at you OVH). Servers on Hetzner's auction might be pushing 10 years, but who cares as long as they work just fine.
What kind of bandwidth limitations have you seen with OVH? Their burstable bandwidth works great for us during peak times, I've never noticed any throttling. Though if you're running a seedbox and maxing the interface 24/7 things might be different.
Last time I checked, their midrange brand Soyoustart had 250 mbps and OVH 500 mbps. Hetzner is 1 gbps. Other than that OVH prices are much higher for more or less the same specs.
Hetzner has a seriously flawed fraud detection system. There are multiple documented review complaints. Seriously, try opening an account from a third world / low income country (non EU/US/UK/CA/AU/NZ), your order will be flagged immediately. If they don't want orders from those countries, they should explicitly say so.
Country of origin is not the sole reason we reject some orders. Most orders are rejected because of more than one red flag. We do have customers from "high-risk" countries. We also reject many European orders that appear to be fake, or that are far enough along the "possibly risky" scale. It is not a perfect art, but our team is constantly tinkering to improve our methods. We find that being overly cautious helps us to prevent abuse down the road. --Katie, Marketing Hetzner Online
When we thought to rent a dedicated server for our hackerspace we initially put "Bernd Liefert" (a german in-joke) as the responsible admin down and they basically told us "lol no we know our jokes, too". We had to tell them a real, existing person as contact or they wouldn't have rented us the box.
Hetzner's definition of "high risk" orders is certainly geographically biased. If you're worried about invoice payments, consider a prepaid credits model.
On the other hand it probably allows them to offer these prices. For AWS, unpaid bills from fraudulent accounts will make up a significant line item, Hetzner can't afford that at their margins.
Had the same issue trying to open an IBM cloud account recently. After submitting my CC info the system told me to get in touch via email, and after contacting them they wanted two official documents (Driver’s License and Passport) to be submitted via email. Big nope from me.
Hetzner will actually refuse your order after you submit your documents with no valid reasons whatsoever. At a point, you just give up and ask your EU co-workers to spin up dedicated servers for you.
We do not publish the specific reasons why we reject orders. If we did this for every customer, it would be really easy to create a fake account. Potential abusers would quickly learn what to avoid. So we don't publish this information to anyone. We understand that that seems harsh. That's not what we intend. We just want to prevent abuse. --Katie
It's not ethical to withhold this information. I'm sorry it makes it harder for your fraud departments but it's not ok to reject someone and not tell them why.
That's all there is to it. I've had this happen to me by banks before and it's shit because the customer has no recourse. They can't advocate for themselves.
We know it feels terrible to be rejected. We do. But every online store and service has customers who they reject. The internet can really test your trust in people, and for good reason. Our products are not flowers, or delivered food, or books or music, which are all pretty non-controversial. Even companies that sell these things online reject new customers. Our products, like a car and many other things, are mostly for good, but in the wrong hands, they can be destructive. There unfortunately aren't international licenses for trustworthy sysadmins or an international police agency that can enforce that. So we have to try to do our best using our own systems. People who abuse servers are not always easy to spot. There are, of course, customers who accidentally resemble a fake customer. In the past, we used to tell customers why we rejected their orders because of this. And we had much higher rates of abuse. So we changed our process, and we no longer publish this information. And this has been working better. It's harder for people to create fake accounts with us now. We don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings or cause frustration. --Katie
For me, Hetzner, Starlink, and Tailscale are 2014-era startups: stellar products that turn you into a zealous militant for the companies. This is a very exciting development. I am very much looking forward to their dedicated offering extending to the US.
Huh? I'm pretty sure the first time I heard of Hetzner was almost a decade before that. Wikipedia says they were founded in 1997.
EDIT: Ok, I take it you mean they are like 2014-era startups? A quick Google search tells me, Starlink is the only one of them that could be dated to 2014. But IMO still a strange comparison. With their business model and history I wouldn't exactly call Hetzner a startup.
I’d put myself in the camp of zealous Tailscale customers.
I’ve used wireguard for years and Tailscale solved every single complaint I had about Wireguard.
Their ACL management could use a lot of polish but moving to them and paying for the service was the easiest decision to make after how well it worked. And the product has worked flawlessly for us.
Not a paid advertisement. Just someone who never ever thinks about wireguard provisioning anymore.
"The host systems for our Cloud instances all have a redundant 10 Gbits connection. This connection is shared by all instances on the host. We do not offer bandwidth guarantees for our Cloud servers, but you can expect about 300-500 Mbits."
This sounds pretty underwhelming and probably what's preventing me from migrating infra to Ashburn. Other than that, looks pretty great bang for buck.
>The CLOUD Act applies to all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate in the U.S, whether those providers are established in the United States or another country.
Bravo Hetzner, no chance for servers with private data (for example European customers) on it anymore, Exoscale it will be then in the future.
As an American who'd only be using VPSes like this for personal projects, the only thing holding me back from trying Hetzner before this was that they had no US servers.
I changed my country on that page to US but all the prices still seem to be in euros?
It would be great if they let me see more detail about the instance types without having to sign up for an account. I'm not sure if I want to try it out, and I'm lazy, so I probably just won't now.
I just mean prices. It's difficult but not impossible for them to do a currency conversion in-browser... just one of those things that helps convert customers, funny that they don't do it.
Here is why me having to do the conversion is annoying.
Pricing at 1 euro = 1.1579126540169 usd:
- Traffic: 20TB included, over that is $1.1579126540169 TB/month
- Backups: 20% of instance price (so for first instance, $0.00162107771 ? )
- Volumes: $0.046316506160676 GB/month
- Snapshots: $0.011579126540169 GB/month
I'm willing to bet my currency conversion rate and math precision are incorrect (we all know precision is hard) and customers might get pissed if they think they're getting overcharged when they do the math incorrect on their side. A pricing calculator would help.
Currency rates are constantly changing. If they list a converted USD price when you visit the site this may be different than the rate when you are billed. If they don't want to establish fixed USD rates than providing a point in time currency conversion is likely to cause more problems than additional customers this converts.
This appears to be a product aimed mostly at European customers that want a US presence and not to US customers.
Great deal, I use OVH Starter VPS that is a fraction cheaper at $3.50 (same config)
For testing and personal use I found both offers to be top-notches and only DC location could be a decision factor here
Naive question: what’s the difference between this and ec2? (I am already running my personal mail and website on an ec2 instance; is there any good reason to switch?)
Hetzner is a fraction of the cost of AWS. A 8vcpu, 16GB RAM instance is 22€ on Hetzner cloud or $148 on AWS. If you have substantial egress traffic the difference becomes even more pronounced.
AWS has a bigger ecosystem of services, and due to AWS's traffic cost you can't cheaply mix-and-match things inside and outside their ecosystem. That's probably the biggest reason to go with EC2.
That 22€ instance is shared cpu, and they do get oversubscribed. The dedicated vcpu ones are more comparable to AWS and at 70€ they are still a lot less expensive than AWS. Then there is the free egress bandwidth (up to 20TB per instance) and unlimited free internal bandwidth.
The main shortcoming of the US deployment so far is no HDD storage available. I hope they can offer that soon, even if no dedicated servers. Their biggest StorageBox plan (basically scp/rsync storage though sshfs works) is 40€/month for 10TB or so. The cloud servers have SSD block storage available but it is .04€/m for 1GB i.e. 10x more expensive (though a lot more flexible) than StorageBox.
While not exactly apples-to-apples in all scenarios, I encourage people to use Spot Instances on AWS whenever possible. We run all our web traffic on spot instances, for example.
Spot pricing really closes that gap. A m6g.2xlarge is ~220/month on-demand, $140/month with a yearly RI, and $60/month as a spot instance.
Hetzner is still cheaper for sure if you have a stateful, 24/7 workload. But if I use auto scaling on spot instances (where a good chunk of compute is only running for a part of the day) then the math starts getting much much closer.
Aws bandwidth costs would be the primary reason to potentially switch.
If you're stuff is low bandwidth there is probably little reason to move. You might compare the cost tiers of the size of system you use. Might also be reasonable to run personal stuff on spot pricing on AWS for cost savings.
Mainly the price, Hetzner is much cheaper. But you don't get all the other features from AWS. So if you only need EC2 and EBS you should probably use Hetzner and will save a lot of money.
Hetzner is a privately owned company, so it's not possible to invest in it. The owner and founder Martin Hetzner is one of the CEOs and is heavily involved in the company.
Like with anything, there's some pros and cons to being privately owned. It means our fans can't help us grow by investing in us. And it means we tend to open new locations very carefully, and perhaps more slowly than our competitors.
But it also means that we are not beholden to any investors. So if the CEOs decide to re-invest lots of the profits back into the company, they don't have to worry about a board complaining about lower returns. --Katie
Besides, what is holding you back from setting up DNSSEC? It's not as if Hetzner doesn't support manually managing your DNSSEC-related records. Having your registrar manage your DNSSEC deployment kind of defeats the point.
Is there a way to see equivalent prices in USD? Also would my credit card be charged in Euro and then the card company will apply some arbitrary conversion rate ?
More Cloud providers is a good thing. But I hope more providers start following the method of an implementation of OpenStack that a customer can control. OpenStack has an API and tools which makes it much easier for a customer to start using cloud services in a standard way. Might not be good for "vendor lock-in", but it does let me ramp up on technology quicker. I've used OpenStack in a couple cloud providers so far and I really enjoyed it. (I've also administrated an OpenStack bare metal cluster, so I don't envy whoever is managing it at the cloud provider....)
Compared to Azure VM instances, Hetzner offers like 100x more performance for each $ spent.