[taminka]

how are ovh and hetzner like an order of magnitude cheaper than everyone else? maybe w/ a lot of sharing for VPSs it's understandable, but they also sell dedicated for super cheap...

is it a honeypot? also did ovh change prices recently? I remember checking a couple years ago and it was more expensive vs hetzner

[usrusr]

Don't know about OVH (it might be a very similar story?) but Hetzner is from my region and I've known the brand since back in the 1990ies. The difference to most (all?) large American hosting services is that they never went through some big investment scale-up of the type "spend now to earn later" where costs just don't matter as long as there is some growth to handwave it away, but have come to where they are now through continuous bootstrapping. The same applies to hundreds of much smaller hosters, but few (none?) reach anywhere close to Hetzner's economy of scale.

[wiether]

I can't talk about Hetzner, but re OVH, they are absolutely not a honeypot.

Most of the SMEs in France are customers.

They are cheap because they do most things in-house, with a lot a recycling, because their DCs are mostly located in low-cost places (real estate, rents, salaries...) and because they go for low margins.

[vachina]

Talk about bloat. American SaaS providers are paid too much.

[throwtgrer56]

If I remember OVH acquires a copy of your passport to apply, and I think Hetzner requires a copy of your passport to cancel.

They may not be a honeypot but those requirements seem like a honeypot.

[ozgrakkurt]

Hetzner is very annoying to start. Asks for ID, might reject the id without reason, might reject your order saying they don’t trust you even if you offer to pay in advance.

Support is super cold and dismissive too.

Didn’t try ovh but can’t imagine it is much worse than hetzner.

[zelphirkalt]

My experience with Hetzner Support was different. I ask technical questions and they respond with correct technical info and guidance on processes like domain transfer etc. Idk how they respond to non-technical questions.

[esskay]

Hetzner has a very bespoke setup. Their DC's mostly run on their own renewable power sources and have been refined to the limit, combined with recycling hardware for longer periods, not using server chassis or off the shelf components, and a highly bespoke racking setup and it makes for mass scale at a very low cost.

OVH has a similar setup but is way more diversified into other product lines. I'd personally never touch them after the fire that they never bothered to explain to those of us affected by it. With the amount of downtime they had there it made it very clear that their ability to recover a situation - any situation is crap.

[dan15]

There's many providers that have similar pricing, sometimes as their normal day-to-day pricing, and sometimes as sale pricing just for events like Black Friday. I've been happy with HostHatch, GreenCloudVPS ("Budget KVM" like), and RackNerd. RackNerd always have a sale running. GreenCloudVPS often have stock for their cheap ones (starting at $15/year). HostHatch has decent regular pricing (they're trying to compete with Hetzner), but their sale pricing is especially good.

[ksec]

Not using Server Grade Hardware. Although one could argue Server Grade Hardware are not worth the premium, that is up to its customer to decide i.e Ryzen vs EPYC. ECC Memory, Server Grade SSD, Power Supply, etc. If you look at their dedicated they aren't really super cheap, there are plenty of other dedicated server out there that goes for similar pricing. The difference is that those companies only offer dedicated options and dont provide the range of VPS OVH and Hetzner offers.

Custom Hardware, down to the DC design, rack, water cooling and economy of scale. There are reasons why some Datacenter are more expensive than others. And the fire at previous OVH DC shows why. Although I remember OVH did explain they dont use that design anywhere else. Doing Custom hardware part like water cooling with Racks isn't the rocket science part, doing it great while doing it at cost efficiency is the most difficult part.

Network quality. OVH owns its own Network. Layering Cables across its own DC along with other exchanges. It used to be slower but this has become less of an issue in 2025. But in the old days the difference between premium network connected and other commodity partners from DC makes a lot of difference. ( It still does but less of an concern )

Minimal Support - Although that is not a concern anymore in 2025 because everyone got used to Cloud computing that has zero support most of the time.

Expectation of Low Margin. I think both Hetzer and OVH have accepted the fact they are in computing commodity business with low margin and aim for volume. While most US business will always try to improve their margin and venture into SaaS or other managed services. Which means both Hetzer and OVH are also the expert in squeezing penny out of everything. As someone who used to work in commodity business I have a lot of respect for these people as they are harder than most people think.

Again, these are things on top of my head when I was keeping an eye on VPS. I just checked LowEndBox ( https://lowendbox.com ) is still alive and well after almost 20 years! Before cloud computing was a thing or went mainstream there were plenty of low cost low end VPS options like OVH and Hetzner. So this isn't exactly new, they just happened to have grown into current size.

[esskay]

On the hardware side of things not using server grade stuff really isn't as big of a deal these days. I'd happily take a decent Ryzen 5 or 7 series over a "new" Xeon that has twice the power consumption and mysteriously the same specs as an older Xeon made a decade ago.

Even ECC - for 99% of applications (and especially on low-end VPS servers) its less likely to be a problem.

The only thing I have found to be an issue with Hetzner is on dedicated servers, and specifically the hard drives. I've had new servers provisioned and they've given me decade old drives that are on the verge of failure - it's less of an issue now as most of their servers are shipping with new nvme drives but I dare say in 3-4 years time it'll be a problem when they reuse those and have instant non-recoverable failures for some of the hardware range.

[ksec]

Agree it is definitely less of an issue. It also used be Xeon and EPYC ( or Opteron ) exclusive for higher core count. But Desktop CPU has caught up and now offer up to 32 vCPU for $600.

Although in 2025 AMD decided instead of people using Ryzen for server they launched EPYC Grado instead. Which is similar if not slightly cheaper than Ryzen at 32 vCPU and offer official ECC Memory support.

[zerd]

I had similar issues, raid 1 on two hdd and the server would randomly reboot and be slow because it was resyncing the raid. Have to pay extra to get new refurbished drives.

It’s great for throwaway machines, e.g. CI. But don’t rely on them

[esskay]

In Hetzner's defence, it happened twice on RAID 1 setups on one of our servers, and after dropping a ticket basically saying "look, this is the second time, can you give us a drive that isn't a dinosaur please" they did put a brand new one in.

These days I'd take their ampere VPS servers over the dedicated ones though, the performance and reliability is way better (mostly just due to it being brand new hardware).

[FooBarWidget]

It's kinda ironic. Back in the days people would advocate for server grade hardware because it's more reliable. Then cloud and Kubernetes came and you were supposed be able to handle failures, and treat servers/pods as cattle, not pets. But major cloud providers are still using server grade hardware, and passing on the costs to customers?

And in my experience EC2 is not that reliable. I have Hetzner dedicated servers with more uptime than EC2 nodes.

[toast0]

> Ryzen vs EPYC.

If you're just looking for the name, AMD sells EPYC branded AM4/AM5 cpus that have remarkably similar specs to the Ryzen AM4/AM5 chips.

Depending on what you're doing, consumer hardware is often more than enough. And it's managed hosting... if the (whatever) dies, you just yell at the host and get new hardware, no big deal if you're doing reasonable backups.

[pil0u]

Yes, OVH changed their VPS offer and pricing around this summer. They just became very competitive, on top of leading the way in making their data centers (really) carbon-neutral.

[nvlled]

I just found out that ovh has their own ".ovh" TLD, that sounds pretty legit.

[zelphirkalt]

I know for example IONOS, one of the shittiest providers ever, is simply 10x as expensive as Hetzner. My guess is, that they think their marketing makes up for their bad support and that their certifications are worth anything.