[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).