[eitland]

They are in the early stages.

I think the website said they recently raised 16 million euros (or dollars).

Making investments into data centers and hardware could burn through that really quick in addition to needing more engineers.

By using rented servers (and only renting them when a customer signs up) they avoid this problem.

[vednig]

understood, would love to know about it from founders tho, and what went through in their decision

[fdr]

GP is more or less correct.

Building and owning an institution that finances, racks, services, networks, and disposes of servers, both takes time and increases the commitment level. Hetzner is month to month, with a fixed overhead for fresh leasing of servers: the set-up fee.

This is a lot to administer when also building a software institution, and a business. It was not certain at the outset, for example, that the GitHub Actions Runner product would be as popular as it became. In its earliest form, it was partially an engineering test for our virtual machines, and we went around asking friendly contacts that we knew would report abnormalities to use it. There's another universe where it only went as far as an engineering test, and our utilization and revenue pattern (that is, utility to other people) is different.