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by hipadev23 569 days ago
Be careful with Hetzner, they null routed my game server on launch day due to false positives from their abuse system, and then took 3 days for their support team to re-enable traffic.

By that point I had already moved to a different provider of course.

3 comments

Digital Ocean did this to my previous company. They said we’d been the target of a DOS attack (no evidence we could see). They re-enabled the traffic, then did it again the next day, and then again. When we asked them to stop doing that they said we should use Cloudflare to prevent DOS attacks… all the box did was store backups that we transferred over SSH. Nothing that could go behind Cloudflare, no web server running, literally only one port open.
where did you move, asking to keep a list of options for my game servers, i’m using ovh game servers atm
I went back to AWS. Expensive but reliable and support I can get ahold of. I’d still like to explore OVH someday though.
Nothing beats aws tbh, the level of extra detail aws adds, like emailing and alerting a gazillion times before making any changes to underlying hardware, even if non disruptive. Robust <24 hour support from detailed, experienced and technical support staff, a very visible customer obsession laced experience all-around. Ovh has issues with randomly taking down vps/baremetal instances at random with their support staff having no clue/late non-real time data on their instance state, they lost a ton of customer data in their huge datacenter fire 2 yrs ago, didnt even replicate the backups across multiple datacentres like they were supposed to, got sued a ton too.

I use OVH because the cost reduction supremely adds up for my workloads (remote video editing/ custom rendering farm at scale with a lot more cheaper OVH s3 suitable for my temporary but too many asset workload with high egress requirements) but otherwise I miss AWS and get now, just how much superior their support and attention to detail is.

I wonder how out of norm my AWS experience is based on the comments here...

Said experience being that the very highly paid support team ghosted us when we asked questions guided by their docs (AWS Workspace stuff), probably after finding that there are no answers and that we went with service based on promise of feature that apparently didn't exist

Reading comments from the past few days makes it seem like dealing with Hetzner is a pain (and as far as I can tell, they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors).
> (and as far as I can tell, they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors)

Can you say more? Their Cloud instances, for example, are less than half the cost of OVH's, and less than a fifth of the cost of a comparable AWS EC2 instance.

even free servers are of no use if it’s not usable during a product launch. :) You get what you pay for i guess.

But i do agree, it is much cheaper.

To be fair what use is a server if you can’t afford to keep it running. This is especially true for very bootstrapped startups.
We all start somewhere. :) Hetzner can be a good fit for many small companies.

But let’s also be honest, if you’re THAT bootstrapped, you probably have no business running kubernetes to begin with. If the company has a short runway, it doesn’t make sense to work on a complex architecture from the start. Focus on shipping something and getting revenue.

Depends entirely on what is your starting skillset.

K8s is my tool of choice when I am that boostrapped, because a single server with k3s thrown on it will cost me maybe 80 EUR a month and hold all environments plus CI/CD plus various self-hosted business components (with backup sent over to separate provider, just in case), and I'll be free to build my project instead of messing with server setup or worry about cloud bills.

I don't think so. We see the outliers. Those happens at Linode, Digital Ocean, etc also. And yes even at Google Cloud and AWS you sometimes get either unlucky or unfairly treated.
> they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors

This is demonstrably false.

What competitors are similar to Hetzner in pricing? Last I checked, they seemed quite a bit cheaper than most.
Forum for cheap hosts:

https://lowendtalk.com/

Wouldn't reccomend any of these outside of personal use though.

OVH is larger provider, servers usually not significantly more expensive than hetzner.
Honestly hetzner supoort has bren outstanding from my experience. They are always there and very responsive using email
If you prefer no bullshit communications they are great. They are to the point, terse and very German. I find this both refreshing and exactly what I want/need out of support. The few times I have needed to contact them it's been HW related. One was a SSD that was clearly having issues even though SMART reported nothing wrong, I sent them blktrace output and they said yup that checks out, scheduled disk replacement right away. The other time was a network related problem with their transit, I had some ASNs that I was trying to talk to suddenly getting some pretty damn cursed paths and a big increase in latency as a result, they sorted out the path weights super fast and everything has been great since.

The only other time I have received better support was from Aussie ISPs. Back in the day when you called Internode the guy who answered the phone was a bona-fide network engineer and would go as far as getting a shell on the DSLAM to check out what is going on. To me that is peak support, live debugging of the problem!

Similarly I called into Aussie Broadband to do my first NBN setup, explained I did "BYO" modem because I was going to initiate the PPPoE session with my Linux router and they said no problem. She even offered to send me a cookie cutter pppd config along with the info to set it up myself. Easily the some of the most knowledgeable and "can do" attitude for first layer support I have encountered.

Needless to say when I encounter damn good support I stay even when it costs more.

I was an Internode customer for many years until TPG bought the company, fired the extremely smart and talented support team in Adelaide, and offshored "support" to a call centre in Philippines that hires people who barely know what a computer is.

I actually switched to Aussie Broadband to get an NBN fault fixed that TPG Philippines refused to acknowledge existed, or escalate to NBN.