Best feature of (some) the dedicated servers Hetzner offers is the unmetered bandwidth. I'm hosting a couple of image-heavy websites (mostly modding related) and since moving to Hetzner I sleep much better knowing I'll pay the same price every single month, and have been for the ~3 years I've been a happy Hetzner customer.
I use Hetzner for this reason, but there are caveats. They're great but their uptime isn't as good as AWS and they don't have great region coverage. I strongly advise people to pair them with Cloudflare. Use Hetzner for your core with K8s, and use R2/D1/KV with Container Durable Objects to add edge coprocessing. I also like to shard customer data to individual DOs, this takes a ton of scaling pressure off your data layer, while being more secure/private.
We kept most smaller-scale, stateless services in AWS but migrated databases and high-scale / high-performance services to bare metal servers.
Backups are stored in S3 so we still benefit from their availability.
Performance is much higher thanks to physically attached SSDs and DDR5 on-die RAM.
Costs are drastically lower and for much larger server sizes which means we are no getting stressed about eventually needing to scale up our RDS / EC2 costs.
I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It is overprovisioned by all cloud providers. Even the I/O part of the disk is crazy. It uses all sorts of shenanigans to get a drive that sitting on a NAS and emulating a local disk. Most startups do not need the hyper virtualized, NAS based drive. You can go much farther and much more cost-effectively with dedicated server rentals from Hetzner. I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner. I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space.
Well, from what see the authors exchanged AWS managed Kubernetes cluster with self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on Talos Linux. Question is if $449.50/month paid for AWS will cover additional work needed for self-hosting.
Having deployed servers well before AWS was a thing, AWS alwyas felt incredibly overpriced.
The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing.
On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews.
Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable.
Hetzner is really great until you try to scale with them. We started building our service on top of Hetzner and had couple 100s of VMs running and during peak time we had to scale them to over 1000 VMs. And here couple of problems started, you get pretty often IPs which are black listed, so if you try to connect to services hosted by Google, AWS like S3 etc. you can't reach them. Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues.
But in general if you don't need to scale crazy Hetzner is amazing, we still have a lot of stuff running on Hetzner but fan out to other services when we need to scale.
Related: Michael Kennedy moved TalkPython [0] hosting to Hetner in 2024. There's a blog about the move here [1] and a follow up after Hetzner changed some pricing policy [2].
He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too.
We've experienced something similar: for compute-heavy rendering tasks, AWS just wasn't good enough. EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines
Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.
A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.
The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.
So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.
AWS won't raise the limits on our new account (we're stuck at 1GB RAM in Lightsail after 2 months, even though we need to launch this month).
Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise.
Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?
The part they never tell you is how Hetzner has a substantially higher unfair risk of account termination without warning. If you are okay with your account being terminated like that with zero notice or reason, then Hetzner is cheap.
We’ve been seeing the same trend. Lots of teams moving to Hetzner for the price/performance, but then realizing they have to rebuild all the Postgres ops pieces (backups, failover, monitoring, etc.).
We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS.
If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions.
Makes sense. If you don't need the redundancy, certification/legals or the big cloud 100s of integrated other lego blocks then big cloud vps prices just are a rip off.
Saving $426/mo for a business seems like a waste of time and resources. The excessive frugal developer complex. How many hours did it take to do the migration?
I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw).
My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers.
When I need to scale, I can always add servers. The only difference is that with physical servers you don't scale up/down on demand within minutes, you have to plan for hours/days. But that's perfectly fine.
I use a distributed database (RethinkDB, switching to FoundationDB) for fault tolerance.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAmazon gets far too greedy- particularly bad when you need egress.
Also an "amazon core" is like 1/8th of a physical cpu core.
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10...
I legit cannot buy anything on Amazon. Reddit and Epic Games are also broken.
We kept most smaller-scale, stateless services in AWS but migrated databases and high-scale / high-performance services to bare metal servers.
Backups are stored in S3 so we still benefit from their availability.
Performance is much higher thanks to physically attached SSDs and DDR5 on-die RAM.
Costs are drastically lower and for much larger server sizes which means we are no getting stressed about eventually needing to scale up our RDS / EC2 costs.
The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing.
On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews.
Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable.
I'm looking forward to try Hetzner out!
But in general if you don't need to scale crazy Hetzner is amazing, we still have a lot of stuff running on Hetzner but fan out to other services when we need to scale.
He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too.
--
[0] https://talkpython.fm/
[1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/
[2] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-p...
[3] https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production
A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.
The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.
So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.
[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...
Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise.
Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?
Big fan of Vultr, I like them a lot, but got bare metal stuff Hetzner is going to be cheaper
We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS.
If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions.
[1] https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-pos... [2] https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers.
When I need to scale, I can always add servers. The only difference is that with physical servers you don't scale up/down on demand within minutes, you have to plan for hours/days. But that's perfectly fine.
I use a distributed database (RethinkDB, switching to FoundationDB) for fault tolerance.