We have a lot of experience with Hetzner servers and I used and recommend this hoster since at least 10 years intensively with tens and hundreds of servers.<p>The most important thing with Hetzner Servers is to monitor everything very closely:<p>- CPU Temperature<p>- RAM<p>- Disks (SMART)<p>- Software- and Hardware raids<p>- Network (interface) errors<p>The servers are usually consumer-grade hardware components which have more often issues under heavy load so you have to expect down-times and broken components. However, if you are aware of that and you can easily shift around that with your software Hetzner will save you serious money (10 to 15 times cheaper than GCP and AWS). Also to mention is that their customer support is first class if you tell them all required details and exactly what to do. Usually they respond in minutes and do hardware replacements within an hour and small downtimes.
I've also stumbled upon that.
However the question remains, how to add more compute nodes? Is there a easy process to do that?
How about updating it? Isn't it carless to actually say:<p><pre><code> You will have sole and unrestricted administration
rights to the dedicated hardware with root access.
Hetzner Online will not have access to the servers, and
will therefore not be able to provide server
administration support.
</code></pre>
?<p>I mean if I can't provision it, it's probably problematic to update it.
This isn't quite hitting the spot to me (non-server hardware, you still administer the OS, single location), but it does seem indicative of a potential new wave of low-cost cloud providers.<p>Someone like Vultr, Linode, or DO is positioned well to deliver an "AWS lite" offering. They all have decent hardware, lots of locations, and a good delivery history. A bit of work to put together ELB/EC2/Lambda/S3 equivalents and a control panel would open up a new market. Especially if they offered low egress pricing.
I have been happy with using Hetzner services in the past and I wish I had a business use for this. I used openstack for a while on IBM bluemix and found it convenient enough. I would like a good backup recovery setup. I hope that they configure the systems for some redundancy between the two servers, but it is not clear from the ordering page.
It's totally unsupported. If you were not able to just rent the tin and configure this yourself then you're probably not going to be able to maintain it long term. This product is dangerous and some people will learn that too late.
I used Hetzner like 10 years ago and didn't had good experience. I doubt anything changed over time. They offer home grade hardware and low priority support in return of cheap prices. They only deal with hardware and network issues (which is quite normal for Dedi service with normal support option)<p>- Hardware they offer is more prone to fail because of using home grade hardware for long time (especially HDD).<p>- It's almost impossible to convince them HDD is failing even with showing SMART logs. Hardware needs to fail so they will replace it.<p>- Hardware replacement times are quite fast (thanks to SLA). They replace it with another used HDD, if you want something newer, than they ask some money for replacing with less used HDD.<p>- They scan their network regularly for hosted malware, trojan etc. so if one of your sites get hijacked and has iframe viruses etc. Hetzner will null route your server.<p>- If your IP gets DDOS, null route.<p>- If you get DMCA warning, null route without waiting 24 hours.<p>- If your NAT leaks your internal traffic to WLAN, null route.<p>- It takes almost few day to lift null route ban on your server when you get in contact with support. It's okay for support tickets to wait in queue for long time because of service level but I believe null route tickets needs priority no matter what.<p>We decided to move over to another provider after having problems.<p>Hetzner also owns few other brands like Serverloft.
The company I'm working for moved away from hetzner coz it has a single location and far too many noisy neighbourhood. Hetzner was often target of DDoS and our connectivity was also affected.
Here I was enthusiastic, but it's not-quite-there. If they took up administration of the Openstack setup this would be a very interesting product.
I used Hetzner services until I received an email from there about some of their servers being infected in the RAM.<p>Here is the email that I received in 2013:<p>Dear Client<p>At the end of last week, Hetzner technicians discovered a "backdoor" in one
of our internal monitoring systems (Nagios).<p>An investigation was launched immediately and showed that the administration
interface for dedicated root servers (Robot) had also been affected. Current
findings would suggest that fragments of our client database had been copied
externally.<p>As a result, we currently have to consider the client data stored in our Robot
as compromised.<p>To our knowledge, the malicious program that we have discovered is as yet
unknown and has never appeared before.<p>The malicious code used in the "backdoor" exclusively infects the RAM. First
analysis suggests that the malicious code directly infiltrates running Apache
and sshd processes. Here, the infection neither modifies the binaries of the
service which has been compromised, nor does it restart the service which has
been affected.<p>The standard techniques used for analysis such as the examination of checksum
or tools such as "rkhunter" are therefore not able to track down the malicious
code.<p>We have commissioned an external security company with a detailed analysis of
the incident to support our in-house administrators. At this stage, analysis
of the incident has not yet been completed.<p>The access passwords for your Robot client account are stored in our database
as Hash (SHA256) with salt. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your
client passwords in the Robot.<p>With credit cards, only the last three digits of the card number, the card type
and the expiry date are saved in our systems. All other card data is saved
solely by our payment service provider and referenced via a pseudo card number.
Therefore, as far as we are aware, credit card data has not been compromised.<p>Hetzner technicians are permanently working on localising and preventing possible
security vulnerabilities as well as ensuring that our systems and infrastructure
are kept as safe as possible. Data security is a very high priority for us. To
expedite clarification further, we have reported this incident to the data
security authority concerned.<p>Furthermore, we are in contact with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in
regard to this incident.<p>Naturally, we shall inform you of new developments immediately.<p>We very much regret this incident and thank you for your understanding and
trust in us.<p>A special FAQs page has been set up at
<a href="http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en</a> to assist you with further
enquiries.<p>Kind regards<p>Martin Hetzner