[vladd]

The price for Hetzner's EX 4S is 49.58 EUR for non-EU customers and 59 EUR per month VAT-included for most EU customers (EU corporations registered for VAT purposes need to apply the VAT specific to their own country).

An Amazon m2.4xlarge instance (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Reserved Instance) with Heavy Utilization on a 3-year commitment costs $9'660 for the 3y term and 3 * 365 * 24 * $0.454 = $11'931 in usage fees, which means a $21'591 total, $7'197 per year or $600 per month (EUR 458 per month at the current exchange rate).

458 EUR versus 49-60 EUR is 9x more expensive at full-time usage. (instance type and price data extracted from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ).

If you were to consider just the Amazon Heavy Utilization term commitment for 3 years, that's still $9'660 / 3 / 12 = $268 (EUR 205) each month.

[julian37]

That's hardly a fair comparison. Last time I checked Hetzner doesn't offer auto scaling, "elastic" load balancing, or any of the countless other features that EC2 offers. Actually, forget auto-scaling: what if you want to bring up another bunch of instances manually to deal with a spike in demand?

The EX 4S looks like a very compelling alternative for many use cases but saying that its 9x cheaper is comparing apples to oranges.

[growt]

Maybe not 9x, but how about 3x?

You can rent 3 Hetzner servers to deal with 300% load spikes or improve reliability. And you're still 3 times cheaper then EC2.

[dasrecht]

Of course Elastic Scaling is not possible. Because Hosting a server in a datacenter and having cloud instances are two different stories. If you have need for flexibility you can simply run a loadbalancer having your base hardware hosted for a good price at hetzner (or another datacenter you like) and then spin up some AWS Instances behind the loadbalancer for dealing with spikes.

Or as others have written you can buy 3 boxes at hetzner and scale 300% ;)

Solution?

[prateekdayal]

The problem is that you need to have all the three boxes on the same rack wired up to a gigabit switch. Hetzner can do that for you but you can't add or remove servers easily.

I have found that OVH has a virtual rack that can accomplish this. After years with Hetzner I think it is time to move on

[nirvana]

Do you have data for the difference in latency &/or bandwidth between servers on the same rack at Hetzner vs. on different racks?

I was assuming that having the servers in different racks would be an advantage, mainly because the reason I have multiple servers is for data redundancy (I'm using Riak and data is replicated across the cluster.) However, in Riak the servers do talk to each other a fair bit.

The latency and bandwidth between a given server and a web browser out in the world shouldn't vary much from rack to rack, I'm assuming.

[mike_esspe]

Sometimes i had a 5-10% ping loss between servers in the same Hetzner datacenter, so not being on the same rack can be a problem. Especially if you are using nginx -> backend. Then every request is a TCP connect to the backend server, and when SYN packet is lost, you will have a 3 seconds timeout (at least on FreeBSD TCP stack).

[fleitz]

Actually it's a really fair comparison, for the price of the AWS service you can buy 9 hetzner instances. So you don't need to spin anything up, just buy it.

A long term contract is the perfect comparison because it's a similar service, you know you'll be using the capacity so you pay up front to have it 'reserved' and in exchange receive reduced prices. Normally with EC2 you'd buy 1 instance and then spin up 8 more on demand, with hetzner you just buy 9 machines and pay the same price you'd pay for 1 AWS machine. When your load spikes you've got 8 extra machines to handle the load. Voila, "auto scaling".

I don't know very many businesses that need to scale beyond 8X capacity for an afternoon. If you really think you need the EC2 API to add and remove machines on demand just install UEC.

It may be comparing apples to oranges but I can tell you that when I need fruit if apples are a $1/lb and oranges are $9/lb I buy apples.

Personally, I think the XS29 @ $299 per month would have been a much better comparison, with 15 drives you could push through some serious IO which would make it suitable for running a database on.

[julian37]

You and your sibling posters are all focusing on my point about scaling. Fair enough, maybe the fact that it's so much cheaper means that point is moot.

That still doesn't mean that it's a fair comparison. EC2 has plenty of other features out-of-the-box like the ability to manage security groups, VPNs, elastic IPs, easy access to other AWS offerings like SQS and S3, the ability to treat images and the machines they're running on as independent, multiple locations, etc.etc.

Yes you can have all these things outside of the cloud, and yes you might not need any or all of them. (EDIT: and yes using their services means you're locked-in to some degree.) Still, I maintain my original point which is that you can't really say that Hetzner is X times cheaper based purely on the hardware specs, disregarding the fact that EC2 is much more than just a bunch of virtual machines.

[fleitz]

I'd agree with that, if you need those services it may make fiscal sense if you have few enough servers.

[nirvana]

The only problem with your comparison is that you forgot to include the 149 Euro setup fee for the Hetzner server. I don't think this makes a material difference however over three years.

Some would say this isn't fair because you're not including elastic scaling which AWS supports, however you can't elastically scale with a 3 year commitment. Further its hard to estimate how much scaling you'll need because that's a highly variable figure.

But you can say that you will need to keep some number of servers up and running 24/7 for your service.

I think it would be a more perfect comparison to compare AWS's on-demand price to Hetzner with the built in higher performance of the 4S considered as a hot standby for scaling. (I don't know how long it takes Hetzner to provision extras, though I hear its relatively fast.) Since servers are cheap (at Hetzner, at least) it seems reasonable to have 1 or 2 extra spun up if you really have spiky traffic.

Since I'm planning to get a cluster of Hetzner boxes to support a Riak distributed cluster, and each Hetzner box is over provisioned for my needs (if I get a 4S I think they will be way over-provisioned, leaving a lot of headroom for this "elastic scaling" issue)... I think I'll compare the price of the same number of each boxes. (The AWS box has less performance, but I can elastically scale if I need to, and I'll just give the cost of those short term scale-ups to Amazon for free in this example.) The results may not be a perfect example for whatever others are considering, but it is a reasonable comparison for my purposes. (my service is a big data service, involving a lot of map reduce, requiring a cluster for operational simplicity and reliability as well as the ability to scale to millions of customers. I don't know if we'll get millions of customers, but one of our closest competitors had millions of customers within a few weeks.)

Amortizing the 4@ m2.4xlarge = 4* $600/month = $2,400 (using the $600 for the reserved instance costs from vladd's example.)

4@ Hetzner 4S = $149 Euro setup fee, amortized over 3 years = 4.14 Euro/month Add the 49.58 Euros in hosting = 53.71 euros x 4 servers = 214.87 euros or $282.50 a month.

So, for my cluster, AWS is 8.5 times as expensive.

I think that $282 per month is a lot easier for a scrappy startup to handle than $2,400 as well. This brings "big data" within the realm of undefended mortals.

Many people use AWS for all the extra services that AWS offers. The value of these services is, of course, subjective, as some startups will need them and others won't. But they all are based on a custom Amazon API which means if you build your architecture across many servers at Amazon you've got a fair amount of lock-in.

For me, I'll take the 8.5X reduction in costs, over lock in anyway. If Hetzner starts performing poorly, I can migrate without too much difficulty, and without having to re-architect my service.