[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.