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Is the location of the cloud-server still Nürnberg/Falkenstein? The prices seem to be very low.
yes, it is. German laws for data protection apply.
Not German, but European Laws apply.

This ( http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj ) replaces all data proyection laws in the EU.

Must comply now, but sanctions won't be in effect until may 25th.

(comment deleted)
EDIT: I seem to be wrong. This is a hybrid of a EU regulation that needs to be implemented into local law, and "EU law" that has direct application everywhere. Also there are specific rules on how much stronger the member states can make their local rules. I'm leaving my error in the text below.

That is not technically correct, and the difference matters.

The EU regulation forces it's members to implement their own local laws in alignment to the EU regulation. The EU regulation can get a member state into trouble if not implemented in time or correctly. They describe a set of "baseline" data protection laws for the whole EU, but the members can still have stronger local rules. Only the local law is what can get a resident company in trouble.

Germany has (had for a long time) very strong data protection laws that are still going to be stronger than the EU regulation.

Your comment is not strictly "wrong", as you say, it's just that the law is changing. The new regulation comes in* on May 25th. Your comment correctly describes the current system, which is being replaced.

* By "comes in", I mean begins being enforced. There's been a 2 year grace period as advance notice.

Looks like it, according to the features/location:

   We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein. And we operate our data centers in accordance with ISO 27001 guidelines while also adhering to strict German data protection regulations.
They are also in process of building out in Finland (https://www.cinia.fi/en/archive/hetzner-data-center-park-hel...). There's a direct GER-FIN fiber link laid in the Baltic, owned partially by Hetzner (https://www.cinia.fi/en/services/international-connectivity-...).
Makes Finland sense if you want to connect to Asian customers? Is there a good link Finland-JP/Korea/Singapore?

Otherwise I fail to see why Finland makes sense, unless you need cheaper energy for applications that don't need low latency.

We do have cheap energy (from nuclear and mostly renewable CHP), cheap cooling, availability of educated workforce and stable state. And good network connections to Russia in addition to Nordic and Baltic states and continental Europe.
But latency to Russia and Baltic states isn't that different from where Hetzner already is. I just try to understand why people would choose Hetzner's new DC in Finland over that in Germany unless they offer cheaper prices there.
That's interesting! Thanks for pointing out.
Hetzner Cloud servers are based in Nürnberg and Falkenstein.
I wish they'd offer could service hosted in South Africa.
Whats the difference to their VPS's ? I had one until last month with pretty much the specs of the cx21 but it cost a little bit more ?

Are they just lowering their prices or am I missing out on features ?

(comment deleted)
The VPS's were never billed hourly, so you wouldn't have used them in a cloudy, disposable, dynamically scalable way.
As for all cloud providers, you are billed by an hourly rate instead of committing to pay a fixed price for the full month. This gives the customer the flexibility to scale the required power dynamically.
Hi! :)

The whole architecture has been redeveloped from scratch. We have also designed and developed an entirely new control panel called the Hetzner Cloud Console. It is and will be actively worked on to make it as easy to use as possible for our users. Feedback is highly appreciated :) Also the new cloud servers are billed hourly instead of monthly, as the old VPS were.

Full disclosure: I work for Hetzner Cloud as UX Designer.

Do you support any other PaaS-API (E.G. CF) instead of your own hcloud cli?
If you are looking for german-based CF, you should have a look at https://www.meshcloud.io . They offer CF and OpenStack from german data centers.
Hetzner used to be a rather big conventional hoster. I'm surprised to see them up and running these days when all big co seemed to have migrated to that cloud thingy
Well, they cost very little in comparison to the big cloud hosters and have great performance. Most startups nowadays can be hosted on a single big vertical machine just fine with perhaps another machine for a hot spare.

I think the much-heralded cloud elasticity for most startups only serves to please investors "we can scale if we blow up over night!".

I once allocated a dedicated machine from Hetzner faster than I get a stupid crippled VM from AWS
There is still a demand for dedicated servers, although it is becoming more and more niche, I think.
Basically resellers and enterprises
Companies with actually performance constrained software without a doubt. There are not so few of them.

There is a big pit in between own DC, and a lot of VM's in terms of economic scalability.

Own DC pays pack when you have 500+ to 1000+ machines in a single location.

Isn't 500 servers still colocation range? That's only 30-40 racks, hardly a whole DC? Or are scale effects that low that DCs of that size make sense?
Depends on colo costs. In quite few places, a budget dc (no uninterrupted power, hvac, and less flexible switching setup) makes sense
It's not a conventional hoster in the sense of hosting WAMP/LAMP/MAMP, but enterprises (mainly from Europe) used their dedicated servers a lot for their stuff.
Well, actually they made themselves a name for their quality products. And while everybody was busy minimizing their server usage in the advent of cloud computing, Hetzner worked on lowering the prices.

Therefore, they got an international reputation for delivering high quality for a cheap price.

This new offer looks very promising. I like the simple price model of 'pay per hour' + a fair 'maximum price per month'.

They're so much cheaper than the big cloud providers that I've made quite a lot of money migrating clients off AWS and Google Cloud to Hetzner when they start getting big invoices and want to cut costs.
Especially funny because so many consultants want to move us from Hetzner to AWS.
I would prefer Hetzner to concentrate on dedicated machines and expand datacenter locations (Asia, Canada).
Yeah, I'd like them to be a better dedicated server competitor to OVH as competition is normally good for the consumer. But I guess there's more demand for cloud computing these days.
Hetzner still haven't said anything to me about Spectre/Meltdown, or rebooted my VPS, so I'm not sure I trust them any more!
They have written an extensive article about it here: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Spectre_and_Meltdown/en
In the context of renting one of their VPS this is fair criticism. The information handed out by Hetzner is not adequate regarding their exposure and timeframe for patching. It's been several weeks since the public disclosure, and if they are still vulnerable for meltdown this puts all customers systems at massive risk.

"The host systems will be updated to fix the vulnerabilities as soon as possible. The necessary reboots will be announced on Hetzner Status. You may subscribe to be notified. "

Prior to this announcement, the announcement about Spectre/Meltdown migration was literally at the very top of their customer homepage. After this announcement, it is the second thing you see when you log in: https://i.imgur.com/XTSTHkR.jpg

I can't think of an approach that would be more direct to their customers than seeing it on top of their customer homepage.

That's strange. I remember getting an e-mail from them about it some time ago. Perhaps they had issues e-mailing you. Check your spam folder.
Nope, plenty of email from them. Nothing in spam.

Anyway, the proof is in the 264 day uptime!

IIRC there is something called "Live Migration" which could easily explain why you can see 264 days of uptime even with the hypervisors updating below
You can freeze a VPS, save its state and restore it later without affecting the uptime. The clock would get skewed (system time vs hardware time difference), but unless you have something that detects that you won't even notice it.
Our Cloud plattform has applied all currently released stable patches. We expect to apply more patches as they are released by our vendors over the new few days and weeks. The existing CX plattform was, has, and will be updated via live migration without any noticeable customer impact --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
2gb ram minimum, nice. Do they still require a scan of your id/passport though?
they did ask copy of passport for dedicated server this summer. Don't know about VPS though
Yes. We check IDs of our new customers. We find that this is one of the most effective ways of preventing abuse. A short time after we have verified your ID, the personal data we collected to process your order will be deleted in accordance with German data protection laws. After your first order, you don't need to provide your ID again. --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
Kudos to Germany for sane-minded laws about personal data and to Hetzner for respecting such laws!
Can you confirm that you delete the ID after verification? Your sentence seems like a lawyer's answer.
What's ambiguous about that answer? "the personal data we collected to process your order will be deleted" sounds pretty clear. Obviously a copy of an ID is personal data.
I am using their previous "VServer" offering and while it is not easily visible on their landing page it is possible to reboot their VPS into either a Linux based or a FreeBSD rescue image and install your favourite Linux distro or FreeBSD from there.

This way you can run for example a FreeBSD or Arch Linux VPS for under 3 Euro per month. :)

I am running FreeBSD on their VServer (and dedicated) too.

Anyone know if the rescue system is available on the cloud offering as well? (So alternate OS can be installed)

And do the "cloud" have the same painful setup with the gateway outside the subnet?

Yes, I created a cloud server and see the rescue system is available. Once you created a server you can also mount ISO images. I see "FreeBSD 11.1" among others listed there.
From the FAQ [1]: > Can I install Windows? > Right now we are focusing on support for Linux as an operating system. If you wish, you may install Windows on your own, and we have seen successful installations done. However, we will not provide any support for Windows.

Currently I'm running a CX20 (primarily as mail server and for smaller private projects), thinking of switching to the CX21 (more RAM, less storage, cheaper) or the CX31 (way more RAM, more storage, price per month is around 2€ higher than the CX20). If someone has benchmarked them against the old offerings, I'd be happy to see the result. :)

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=gb

Can confirm. I'm running Arch Linux on my Hetzner VPS and it's been rock-solid (except that one time when I accidentally deleted /sbin/init, but that was my own stupidity).
Great prices.

What's strange is that only RAM and disk space increase linearly with the price, not the CPU, nor the traffic. That creates an incentive to buy small instances and getting a lot more for your buck.

I don't think Hetzner makes a promise w.r.t. the CPU clock. So lower end VPS might be hosted on high-core, low-clock machines.
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Probably because that's how servers can be set up most efficiently? It's probably much cheaper to run servers with a lot of ram and storage instead of having cpu-heavy machines (infrastructure, cooling, electricity).
Keep in mind that Hetzner has a rather lax (non-existing?) policy when it comes to stopping outbound spam, so make sure to check that IPs you get from them are not on MX blacklists.

To clarify - saying this as someone who was forced to blacklist their IPs on more than one occassion, not as someone who ran into tainted IPs as their customer.

From my experience this is false. Hetzner reacts to abuse notices and I never received a server with blacklisted IP addresses.

The only organization that caused issues is Microsoft / Outlook.com, but they seem to block every IP address by default. I was able to unblock myself by filling out a form and waiting a few hours for all my servers so far.

Same here.

I've used Hetzner for two years and I never had any issue regarding blacklisted Ip addresses.

They do react to notices, but they don't do much about them.

Emailing abuse@hetzner.de yields:

    Dear Sir or Madam,
    
    Thank you for your email.
    
    In order for us to process your request, we ask that you 
    please fill out the form at the following link:
    
    https://abuse.hetzner.de/
    
    Please use this form for all future complaints.
    
    Kind regards
    Abuse team
When told that they already have all the information in the original report, a human suddenly appears and replies that apparently every report needs to include a permission to be forwarded to the customer. Again, in the context of a clearly compromised box one would expect them to first block the box and then "follow up with the customer."

Still, even with this permission and several hours in, the box is still spamming, customer is "investigating" and Hetzner has done all they could to handle this incident.

Would much rather have them investigate first, so you can't just abuse spam reports to shut down people's servers.
Was that a form by Microsoft? Would be great if you could share that, I’ve been looking for something like this forever!
FWIW: I block Hetzner.

They have an automated abuse-handling system that sends your complaint to the spammer and asks them politely to stop. This often works for small-time operation on a single IP address, and for compromised servers, but it's completely inadequate for dealing with large customers and rogue resellers spamming over large netblocks, and against darker-coloured-hat spammers engaging in reprisals.

Replying to the automated mails can get you through to a human, but their ops are stuck on a limited script so they're not really any more use than the automated systems. They have no interest in investigating wider patterns of abuse than a single spam from a single IP.

I regret having to blacklist but it's not worth the time and frustration of trying to engage with them.

Considering you said you also block Amazon, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494970, I don’t think your opinion will have much weight on this topic.
I don't aspire to weight, but I don't really know what you're getting at here - amazonses is commonly blocked as its abuse reporting is a brick wall, much worse than Hetzner who are at least trying, if ineffectively.

(Not talking about all of Amazon, just SES - AWS for example is a different animal.)

Considering how many legitimate services are on SES, if you block SES you might as well go with a whitelist for email.

That’s what I’m trying to get at here.

Beating spam by playing whack-a-mole is a dead end, that ship sailed long, long ago.
We hardly see spam from Hetzner Germany.

We have also had good experience with Hetzner South Africa's abuse department.

We do see plenty of spam from OVH however. On one occasion when we reported several IPs to them for sending Russian spam, they did not reply.

I'm using a Hetzner VPS to host my mail for nearly 8 years now. Never had a single problem with blacklisting. I once lost IPv6 connection because of a routing mistake on their side but that was it.
Can anyone compare their service to Linode or DigitalOcean? I'm currently using Linode but the Hetzner prices seem way lower:

For 35€ a month I get 32GB RAM, 8 vCPUs, 240GB SSD + 20TB Traffic. The comparable 40$ plan for Linode offers 8GB RAM 4 CPU Cores 48GB SSD and 3 TB Transfer (See: https://www.linode.com/pricing)

Am I missing something or is Hetzner just way more competetive?

https://www.linode.com/pricing

I have multiple Barebone servers with Hetzner, never had any problems. The only thing I don't like is their control panel.

Edit: Their Cloudhosting control panel is top notch.

Hi! :)

The whole architecture has been redeveloped from scratch. We have also designed and developed an entirely new control panel called the Hetzner Cloud Console. It is and will be actively worked on to make it as easy to use as possible for our users. Feedback is highly appreciated :) Also the new cloud servers are billed hourly instead of monthly, as the old VPS were.

Full disclosure: I work for Hetzner Cloud as UX Designer.

You guys did a great job, the new control panel looks clean and is super fast!
After all the positive sentiment in this thread I signed up with the cloud service for a side project.

I have to say the UX is beautiful and easy to use. Also, the setup was easier, and performance better than any other provider I was testing. I'm sticking with hetzner.

Hetzner is easily 30% off OVH and half the price of other hosting providers (VPS and bare metal). So nothing surprising here. They have a cheap cost base (data centres in rural areas and wholesale electricity prices aren't that high in Germany) which probably explains most of that.

OVH had basically the same price but their heavy investments in new DCs have made them more expensive. Since Hetzner doesn't invest a lot (at least in new buildings) they don't need to raise prices for that.

Worth mentioning SoYouStart, OVH's low-end brand. I believe the way it works is that OVH is current-gen hardware, and SoYouStart is the hand-me-downs (which I think is a great model)
hetzner has a similar 'serverbidding' for older servers which can be quite a bargain, depending on the day https://www.hetzner.com/sb . i know that SYS is good as well
What really bothers me with SYS is the lack of ECC ram. Very few servers have it (and sometimes without support by the CPU). Wouldn't set up anything processing data without ECC.
Also worth mentioning that SoYouStart servers have slower network speeds (250Mbps compared to OVH's 500Mbps-1Gbps)
That's their mid-level brand. The low-end is Kimsufi :)
→ Hetzner: CX21, 2 cores, 4GB RAM - 5.83€

→ OVH VPS Cloud 2, 2 cores 4GB RAM: 23.79€

→ OVH VPS SSD 2, 1 core, 4GB RAM: 9.51€

→ OVH VPS SSD 3, 2 cores, 8GB RAM: 17.84€

For me, OVH's unlimited traffic does not explain the price difference. I will highly consider switching to Hetzner.

EDIT: correct meaning

EDIT: Misunderstood OP's comment.
I think this is an example of a rather common mistake ESL speakers make regarding the meaning of "hardly".
Yes, I meant "highly". Thanks :)
Good catch. Another universal ESL mistake is to use "funny" when one means "fun."

Meanwhile, in Spanish I would mix up cebolla vs cepillo vs cabello vs caballo.

Approaching a woman in a bar: "I like your onion."

I’ve been maintaining the price comparison at git.io/vps for a while now, and the answer is:

No, you’re missing nothing. Yes, DO and especially AWS and GCP are about an order of magnitude more expensive than Hetzner, OVH, and similar providers. Much more for traffic.

It’s always been like this, the cloud providers simply have much larger profit margins.

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We currently use Hetzner (for 6 years with some minor troubles) in a mixed managed server (database)/VM (app, nginx, haproxy) setup.

Currently we have CX20 and CX30.

It looks this is getting cheaper + much more power.

CX20 2vCore/ 2GB/ 8,21 EUR

CX21 2vCore/ 4GB/ 5,83 EUR

CX30 2vCore/ 4GB/ 14,16 EUR

CX31 2vCore/ 8GB/ 10,59 EUR

No US and Singapore regions yet. But prices are good indeed.
Looks like they're taking on LowEndSpirit, except with a slightly better offering. Not quite beastly EC2, or piggybacking a VPS on someone's Nokia 3310.

Any current clients know how fast provisioning is on these?

From their website:

    "Our quick and clever Cloud Console lets you create server instances almost instantly, usually in under 10 seconds."
Duh, I should've read the page when I wasn't as busy... Thanks!
I just fired up an instance took 7 seconds.
I've used Hetzner and my general experience has been good.
For someone who knows about networking can you please comment on the following:

1. What would be the downside of hosting my Apache server on Hezner instead of AWS? Will it affect load times, website SEO, downtime?

2. Hosting Mysql Server on CX31 on Hezner instead of AWS? If my Apache server is on Ec2 and I make a connection to a Mysql server on Hezner will it affect performance of my sites because they're hosted on different places?

I have a very basic understanding of networking, so appreciate any comments from someone who knows about these.

1. Load time depends on the location of your visitors, see #2. Downtime is hard to evaluate, I expect the cloud to be fairly stable based on my experience with Hetzner.

2. For sure of you are using AWS in US: Traffic across the atlantic will incur at least ~65ms latency per roundtrip.

Thanks. So it would be best to host on Hezner too. That's fine with me.

Can you comment if the location of my IP will affect my website SEO wrt to USA visitors?

SEO is a black box, so there are no definite answers. It will affect load times (the 60ms) and that could have an effect on search engines.
Highly doubt Google and others would punish you for having a slightly bigger latency to your server and back.

If that was the case, all the companies that are hosted in the US would already be punished in Europe.

No it won't. US for European servers is no problem, round trip of <200ms is hardly noticeable (unless you have a lot of round trips and no CDN). It appears that Google looks at render times (at least that's what they communicate) and it's easy to lose 200ms by having 5 js resources even if the server is close. But Asian visitors will notice a deterioration if you had a server in US-West before. Latency Europe-East Asia/Australia is very high.
Keep the response form Apache as small as possible and put static content in a CDN. Your SEO shouldn't be affected by that.

That said, noone knows the rules for Googles Ranking algorithm, so I guess you will have to try.

Since I have some experience with Hetzner:

1. Pings within Europe can be a bit longer than to other providers, they lack peering with some providers. However, nothing noticeable (10-20ms max) and behind cloudflare TTFB wasn't longer than with other providers. Keep in mind that this is central Europe, ~15ms more from the US compared to Google Cloud BE or OVH in France and around ~20-25ms longer latency to the US compared to UK/Ireland. I've never experienced downtime but follow their status on twitter and they sometimes have (announced) maintenance for vhosts, think they don't live migrate customers. But I've also experienced that with AWS.

SEO is dependent on response times and the provider shouldn't make a difference.

2. That shouldn't be an issue and they peer with Amazon in Frankfurt. Expect 20ms round trip per db query (from a European DC). Can make a difference for websites with a lot of small queries. I would keep webserver and database closer together and rather keep Apache also on Hetzner.

I hope they grab enough market share to force other providers to lower their prices, Hetzner is like 10x cheaper and on better network and hardware then their competitors.
Also vpsdime is similar if not better specs and prices. Worth comparing.
scaleway seems even lower and is pretty popular.
Not if you factor in that much of the storage is not local, generally lower speed and processing power often appears relatively low per core. Never tested them myself though.
I'm Scaleway customer and it's for sure cheaper since it offers dual cores, unmetered bandwidth and more SSD storage for the same 3 EUR/m. But these are ARM or Atom x86 CPUs, both are significantly less efficient[1] than Xeons. It's worth noting that Scaleway has introduced "Workload Intensive" instances with a sweet price point starting from 25 EUR/m for 6-cores Xeon D-1531/15GB RAM/200GB SSD.

[1] https://github.com/joedicastro/vps-comparison

Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.

I'll quote a different customer's opinion (on those forums) that summarizes my experience using their service: "Whenever I've tried to use Scaleway for something serious, I regretted bitterly".

My experience was essentially this: Scaleway advertises that you can have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.

Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to start the server until it works".

To add to this, Scaleway started billing me for the (unused) volumes attached to a server that cannot be started because, according to their support, they didn't have the resources to provide it.

So, I certainly didn't feel assured that they are able to provide what is advertised on their website (virtual servers with up to 10 ssd volumes). My key takeaway from this experience was that if you have a platform on Scaleway and you need to add servers to cope with growth/features, they may not have the capacity/stock to provide it. Even if you have only 1 server, which was my case, they may be unable to say when you'll be able to start the server on a physical instance.

Aruba Cloud VPS starts from 1€/month for 1 core, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD and 2TB transfer.
Good to see Hetzner catching up to OVH. Some crude comparison of their offers:

Hetzner

    CX11
    € 2,96
    1	vCPU
    2 GB	RAM
    20 GB	NVMe SSD
    20 TB	Traffic
    
    
    CX21
    € 5,83
    2	vCPU
    4 GB	RAM
    40 GB	NVMe SSD
    20 TB	Traffic
    
    CX31
    € 10,59
    2	vCPU
    8 GB	RAM
    80 GB	NVMe SSD
    20 TB	Traffic
    
    CX41
    € 18,92
    4	vCPU
    16 GB	RAM
    160 GB	NVMe SSD
    20 TB	Traffic
    
    CX51
    € 35,58
    8	vCPU
    32 GB	RAM
    240 GB	NVMe SSD
    20 TB	Traffic
---------------------

OVH

    VPS SSD 1
    1 vCore(s)
    2 Go de RAM
    10 Go SSD
    3,99 €
    
    VPS SSD 2
    1 vCore(s)
    4 Go de RAM
    20 Go SSD
    6,99 €
    
    VPS SSD 3
    2 vCore(s)
    8 Go de RAM
    40 Go SSD
    12,99 €
You're comparing OVH's SSD where they don't guarantee speed and have 100mbit connections. Speed on those can be incredibly slow. For a fair comparison you'd have to use their public cloud instances which are 2-3x the price of Hetzner.
My understanding has been that OVH offers guaranteed bandwidth of 100mbit and Hetzners has a 10 Gbit network connection, but I would guess that this connection is shared and doesn't offer any guarantees. Hetzners free traffic is also capped at 20TB. Therefore I left this details away as it is difficult to compare. If would love to see a detailed comparison.
Hetzner has internal and incoming free. I only need that kind of bandwidth when I restore backups or load large datasets. That's either internal or infrequent and so far, I was always able to max out their bandwidth (haven't tested the cloud product yet).
Been using Hetzner for years, their hardware's has been rock solid, predictable pricing with sweet price/performance ratio resulting in large savings from consolidating existing AWS EC2 instances.

Still using AWS for Apps which rely on cloud features, e.g. SES/RDS/etc but for static servers Hetzner is now our goto.

Super exciting to see them entering the cloud space and offering easy snapshots + backups, should open it to hosting more stuff on there.

The one difference is noticeable latency from their DC in Germany vs the instant response times I was getting from AWS's N.Virgina DC. Would obviously love it if Hetzner could open a DC in the US.

If they open a DC in the US, then - by the US laws - their US company will have to provide the data even from German DCs when requested by the US government. So it is maybe better not to enter the US...
They could form a separate company to handle US operations only.
OVH tries to do that but I doubt that's waterproof. Probably easier to have an agreement with a US provider.

Having everything in the EU makes it much easier for them and is a selling point for many customers.

A US company can't force a German company to hand out data, I don't see what you mean by "waterproof".
The US government might not agree that they are two separate entities (they're not), and could take action based on that position (e.g. shut down the US company, ask the German government to compel the German company to comply with their laws etc.)
Microsoft has contracted their German Azure region to Deutsche Telekom (which is clearly a separate company) and claims to not be able to access the data. An arrangement similar to this (where basically the brand and technology is used by an actually independent company) could be possible.
Unless the US government slightly extends the law to include also the brands...
Actually, Microsofts challenge is still pending at the Supreme Court, no?
Good point. Maybe if they opened a DC in Greenland or Iceland.
Iceland would theoretically be great, ideal location for US and Europe. But they'd need to lay a cable first, traffic Iceland-US is currently routed through Denmark/UK.
Iceland also has cheap renewable energy. There is the Greenland connect cable¹ built in 2009 that goes from Iceland to Canada. Sounds like it currently has 60GBit/s.

-- ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect

At least when I was in Iceland traffic to the US was never routed through that cable (from traceroutes).

Quebec appears to be the better choice for cheap renewable energy.

That is an Interesting questions, so Canada is currently the best for US citizen if you dont want a DC inside US?
Perhaps Canada could be a location that's beyond US jurisdiction but mostly solves the SoL problem.
I don’t mind the latency. I rent a a large GPU server from them for my own machine learning experiments. Their prices are so reasonably inexpensive that this is affordable. I think it would be more expensive for them to provide the same service in the USA - I base this in pricing. OVH is the only local provider I have used that is somewhat price competitive.
A fair warning to you: IMMEDIATELY TURN OFF UPDATES FOR THE NVIDIA DRIVER

Since a few weeks ago, Nvidia changes their driver ToS, and any new versions of the driver are not permitted to be used in datacenters (except for crypto mining).

See more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587

The terms of service would (potentially) only apply to Hetzner, not to users of Hetzner's services.
The driver ToS apply to whoever installs the driver. That is you, not Hetzner.
You're right. My thinking on that wasn't quite straight.
Nvidia is going to have a difficult time enforcing that in the EU (where Hetzner operates).
That is a good point, but if a US citizen rents a server from Hetzner, they might still be affected. Better safe than sorry.
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How do you see Nvidia enforcing it on individuals?
Not necessarily now, but if you decide to turn that little ML project into a startup, staying on the same infrastructure at first, Nvidia might just come after you.

Considering this is HN, it's a pretty safe assumption that people are running these side projects to turn them into startups.

How would they know your startup is doing ML violating their EULAs? I really don't see how this can be a concern for anyone, but very few companies.
Thanks for the heads up. I don;t plan on updating the drivers - everything works fine and hopefully nvidia drivers don’t need security updates.
in my previous gig we used hetzner server to have several VMs and storage of that server failed , resulting that all our production servers went down. luckily we had backups, and restored partially our production, but after that incident we moved everything to DigitalOcean, just to not risk anymore. so our experience was bitter with Hetzner.
So you had a local attached SSD and that crashed and your production site went down. And you moved to a different provider.
Why not go with Hetzner VPSes if you didn't want to deal with dedicated HW anymore? Or are you blaming Hetzner for a hardware failure?
I was just saying that our experience with Hetzner was not as rock solid as others were saying, that's it. Don't understand why some people are downvoting my comment. Also it happened ~6 years ago, so I'm not sure if they offered VPS at all.
I guess the downvotes are because it sounds like you frame a characteristic of the product type as something the vendor did wrong.

Hardware fails, and part of having a dedicated server is that you are directly on top of said hardware and have to be prepared for it to fail.

Yeah, but I didn't write "Hetzner sucks because their disks are failing constantly".

One commenter wrote "Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering" and as a counterpoint I wanted to tell my anecdote which opposes that "rock-solidness". So for that I get downvotes :)

In retrospect yes, I agree that we had to be prepared for such event, to have failovers and so on.

I would really like to try Hetzner since it's a respectable company and offers much lower prices than DO or Linode, however, they need an ID verification. Since I am egyptian and have no passport, I cannot register. I hope they find a more resilient way for registration.
Why don't you get a passport, government ID, or driver's license? I'm honestly interested, if that's not too personal to ask.
I showed them my government ID but they refused, understandably because it's in Arabic language. They asked for an English passport. But since I didn't have one, I couldn't continue the registration. It's really frustrating. Why isn't my credit card enough to verify my identity? Almost all top cloud/vps providers don't ask such questions.
They afaik had some of problems with botnets using their cheap infrastructure in the early to mid 2000s. Might have something to do with it.
Because of stolen credit cards? They are minimising potential damages like this. Malicious actors are less likely to give their ID to send spam and ID cards are harder to steal than Credit cards :)
Be assured malicious actors got plenty of stolen ids.
Probably German laws.
Maybe you could get them to accept a notarized translation (Beglaubigte Übersetzung) of your ID. It's gonna add about 50€ up-front cost, so I don't know if that's worth the price or the hassle at your project scope.
No, thanks :D. 50 euros are about 1000 EGP. I could issue 10 passports with that amount of money :D
not in germany. you would only get one which is only usable for 5 years.
That got me curious, are you saying you don't have a passport because you're Egyptian, or was that just an additional piece of information separate from the passport? (Don't know if I'm missing some international news/info here.)

Also, maybe it would be worth contacting their support about your situation, maybe some other form of identification can be used.

I just never needed a passport, so I don't have one so far.
AFAIK Hetzner and other major German hosting companies require scan of EU/EEA ID or international passport. Possibly this is required by German law. Just acquire a passport or find local reseller on some "webhostingtalk"-like forum.
My US Driver's License was enough for them as well, but that was almost 4 years ago, so things might have changed.
I just signed up and needed no verification. Does this differ from country to country?
I have signed up too and send in my ID and CC for verification and yet no reply.
Quite impressed so far, the interface clean and straight forward. We've been using Hetzner for years, mostly because the PX121 machines offer excellent performance for cheap. We'll be doing some in depth testing of this new cloud offering in the coming days/weeks.

Provisioning is already impressively fast, especially if you're coming from EC2 where it feels like an intern has to press a button or something to get an instance online.

Maybe we just have more interns than amazon ;)

full disclosure: am working for hetzner cloud

Uh, what? 14U colo rack space for 100 Euros per month[1], that's insane -- I must be missing something.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack

That’s about common for colocation in larger German datacenters, so I don’t think you’re missing anything.
They had me at:

> Above-average raised floor system

Does anyone know if they offer per-customer, or per-project local networking?

It is something I can get from Packet.net, but not from Linode or DI (Although Linode promised that it was in their pipeline, I have yet to see it), OVH does offer this but I only experienced pain with their interface and service.

Not from what I can see in the control panel. I personally use zero-tier to connect my servers on a virtual Ethernet adapter. But you probably want to avoid getting an ipv4 if I'm guessing correctly, so I don't think that would work for you.
Since Hetzner appears to be reading here: I have a question that support couldn't answer last time. How are your DCs connected with each other and with external peering points? I notice that some traceroutes to FSN servers go via NBG. If one data centre region goes down (as OVH just experienced), will all peering still work on the other or would that kill some peering points?

Having some kind of network topology (like OVH's weathermap) would help with that, esp where to position servers that rely on certain peering points.

https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindun...

"How are the Data Centers connected to each other?

The two Data Center Parks are both connected to Frankfurt (FFM) and each other with dark fiber. Thus, a redundant loop is formed, which ensures the availability of a Data Center should one of the connections fail. The n10 Gbit/s connections provide ample bandwidth between the Data Centers.

The bandwidth of the connections between Nuremberg-Frankfurt, Nuremberg-Falkenstein and Falkenstein-Frankfurt are at least 120 Gbit/s. Through the Frankfurt location data is transported to the peering partners at DE-CIX and also to the uplinks Noris, GLBX, Aixit, AMS-IX, Init7 and Level3. At the Nuremberg location there are connections to Noris, KPN, Init7, Level3 and N-IX.

In each Data Center several Juniper EX Core switches, each with 64x 10 Gbit/s ports, are operated and bundle the streams of the Data Center to the n10 Gbit/s backbone and then over the various uplinks. "

And here is a list of their peerings: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/

Ok thanks. So it appears that most peering is done in Frankfurt and available directly. Didn't see that wiki entry before.

Let's just hope that they get more peering partners over the medium term. Peering with Telekom would be very helpful, pings from within Germany can be close to what you get from the US East Coast (from my not representative tests).

See this on why they won't peer with Deutsche Telekom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10645577
I know that Telekom has a horrible attitude towards peering. But they're the only provider of high speed internet in many regions of Germany. Other cloud providers (e.g. OVH) also pay so I doubt Telekom will change soon.
Peering gets so incredibly stupid with consumer ISP's that it's infuriating. It reminds me of the whole Comcast-Cogent fiasco, it's incredibly unfair to try and charge other providers when the customers that are PAYING YOU are requesting the traffic.

I think any real effort at enshrining net neutrality as law instead of a gentleman's agreement needs to include provisions that prevent residential / small business ISP's from throwing their weight around with peering agreements at the detriment of their customers.

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Wonder if using Hetzner makes you subject to unusual German laws requiring (nearly) every site to have an "Impressum" page with contact phone number, mailing address and other data that would be uncomfortable for an individual (not a company) to disclose.
couldn't you in reality just use the data from WHOIS protection on a domain?
People need to actually be able to contact you with that, by letter, fax, phone, email, etc.

All WHOIS protection services I’ve seen until now either ignore fax, phone and letter, or just respond with "this method of contact is ignored, please use the email"

But you can put your real data as an administrator contact on the whois entry. It doesn't always show the domain provider's information.
Odd thing to note here. I've never heard of a case in Germany where the hoster would enforce this law on behalf of the state.
There are plenty of lawyers who love to make money out of unlawful use of the German "Impressum" and send you an "Abmahnung" which requires you to pay fees even if you comply and change your website afterwards.
True, but that is solely your own responsibility. And lawyers can't do it just because they stumble over your website. Usually it's a competitor who comes after you. And even then its a civil law case - there is no threat to the hoster.
Your server provider or server location has nothing to do with the "Impressumspflicht". For example, if you're an US citizen with an English website on a US server, but you offer any products or services for German citizens, you need an "Impressum" [0][1].

> Companies and online media outlets, such as newspapers, magazines and journals, wishing to operate within any of these countries are obliged to make this information easily available to users. This requirement also applies to legal entities registered outside of the German-speaking realm that compete on the respective German, Austrian, or Swiss markets.

[0] - http://www.it-recht-kanzlei.de/nicht-eu-ausland-impressumspf...

[1] - https://www.1and1.com/digitalguide/websites/digital-law/a-ca...

You misread your source. Service providers outside the EU are not required to provide an imprint, even if their website is targeting German customers.
I'm quite sure I read it correctly. "Fazit" point 1: You do not need an imprint if you're outside the EU and you're not targetting EU citizens. Point 2: It's the opposite, if you're outside the EU but you're targetting EU citizens.

EDIT: added a source in English

Looks like we're both kind of right. Your original source is solely based on LG Siegen 09.07.2013 - 2 O 36/13, which said service providers from non-member countries don't require an imprint and the court's decision doesn't really align with what you said. However, the ruling was overthrown by OLG Hamm 17.12.2013 - I-4 U 100/13, which actually follows your interpretation of the law.