Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering and very good prices. While the cloud providers invested in innovation in software, they focused on optimizing the hardware and data center techniques and engineering (something very German, btw).
Now that Cloud is a pure commodity and companies are learning about how to be truly 'multi-cloud' they come out of nowhere with a very interesting proposal at incredible pricing.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems they have built the solution on top of opensource technologies like Ceph (100% sure) and OpenStack (not so sure...). OpenStack and Ceph have been around for 7 years, so they don't have to deal with their (sexy) immaturity of the early days. I miss some key features that premium cloud providers have, like a firewall (security groups), private networks (VPC or SDN style networks), and of course Windows. But the funny thing is that it fits perfectly with my multi-cloud approach, and we are going to test it and if it works, we will move our loads from the AWS Frankfurt region to them. And saving about 80%.
Nice move, Hetzner!
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.<p>Still using AWS for Apps which rely on cloud features, e.g. SES/RDS/etc but for static servers Hetzner is now our goto.<p>Super exciting to see them entering the cloud space and offering easy snapshots + backups, should open it to hosting more stuff on there.<p>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.
I recently tried Google Compute Cloud and concluded it's got almost as awful and crufty an interface as AWS. Almost. What is it with cloud providers, they can't hire a designer? Or they don't take them seriously? This stuff is terrible.<p>So I'm still sold vs. AWS, and I have to run some nodes, and I think great, I can put the business credit card on a cloud account and run stuff. But then Google refuses to let me sign up because every time I try it says "Unable to verify with this phone number.". This could be because I can only access Google via proxies and they are not in the country of my phone number (China or HK). So perversely I am left in a situation where to get Google to allow me to give them money I have to first open a proxy compute node with another Google account in the jurisdiction my phone number is in, install a proxy, then access them through that. But you'd think they probably block their own IPs, so that probably won't work.<p>So Hetzner, maybe you got my business.
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?<p>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.
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.
I was just speaking with their customer support about this and it appears (if I understood correctly) that this offering will be replacing the current CX line, which has a lot of SSD space at a competitive price (unlike the new offering). Since I really need the SSD offered by the current/previous CX line (it was the #1 reason that made me move to Heztner) it seems that I'll have to find a new cloud provider...<p>My experience with Hetzner is/was great, but as a customer it's impossible to rely on a service provider that extinguishes a whole service line in a few months and forces me to move a whole infrastructure at a whim...
For those of you looking for competitive prices with servers in the U.S., take a look at SSD Nodes—a bootstrapped hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. I'm the founder and CEO, so I'm a <i>little</i> biased, but we're offering 16GB of RAM plus KVM for a price that's more than competitive with Hetzner, and have clients posting excellent benchmarks, like 1.1 GB/s throughput and 480K IOPS[0].<p>Check out our pricing:<p><a href="https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/</a><p>Happy to answer questions if there's any.<p>[0]: <a href="https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw" rel="nofollow">https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw</a>
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.<p>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.
That's really cheap. With really good features.<p>However, what keeps me on Linode is that they have a London datacentre with excellent peering. I've seen 9ms pings, 150 miles away. Makes for seriously fast websites (in concert with good development processes).<p>Hetzner responds in 31-35ms from here. That might be Good Enough™ for many applications but it's not as special.<p>I've never been this tempted to jump ship though. Hopefully some of these features will become industry standard.
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.<p>This way you can run for example a FreeBSD or Arch Linux VPS for under 3 Euro per month. :)
Compared to Scaleway, Scaleway gives you two vCPUs (not one) and 50GB storage (not 20GB) for their entry level cloud server, at around 3€/month.<p>URL: <a href="https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/</a><p>The problem with Scaleway is that they are working at capacity and are almost always out of stock.<p>They are expanding now (and are hiring!), <a href="https://blog.online.net/2017/11/13/scaleway-enters-a-new-growth-phase/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.online.net/2017/11/13/scaleway-enters-a-new-gro...</a><p>The big difference between Hetzner and all the rest of the cloud servers, is that they start with 2GB RAM for their entry level packages.
Congratulations! Nice step.<p>Are you also working on docker hosting and dbaas?<p>I'm a german development contractor and long-term Hetzner customer. These are the only two missing features, causing us to still operate our own systems.<p>Regarding the DSGVO: Do you support encryption of the filesystem?
"All servers that have finished their creation process will be
billed until they are deleted, regardless of their state.
This is because, internally, we allocate full resources to servers
regardless of their power state. And it enables rapid startup and boot
times for you, the customer."
(<a href="https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot" rel="nofollow">https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot</a> in FAQ)<p>I don't think they have understood, what Cloud Computing means.
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.
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.<p>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.
Uh, what? 14U colo rack space for 100 Euros per month[1], that's insane -- I must be missing something.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack" rel="nofollow">https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack</a>
Great prices.<p>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.
This looks enticing. I may wish to become a Hetzner customer again.<p>That I am presently not one is entirely Hetzner's own doing: Some years ago, testing out their offerings (which were good!), at one point I deleted my last VPS, thinking I'd come back in a few days and actually start getting serious.<p>Not to be! Virtually the very second I deleted the instance, an email pinged in: No active machine, account deleted. Which sent me over the border to the French guys (Whose interface to this day is a riddle to me, every time I haven't worked with i for a week or two. I can read the French version, it's not a language thing, just a general UI disaster).
We are very happy to see that offering. We were planning to move our German SaaS from AWS to Hetzner anyway and with Hetzner Cloud we expect things to be a lot easier for us. Congrats and thanks, Hetzner team!
Can anyone compare their service to Linode or DigitalOcean?
I'm currently using Linode but the Hetzner prices seem way lower:<p>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: <a href="https://www.linode.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.linode.com/pricing</a>)<p>Am I missing something or is Hetzner just way more competetive?<p><a href="https://www.linode.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.linode.com/pricing</a>
For someone who knows about networking can you please comment on the following:<p>1. What would be the downside of hosting my Apache server on Hezner instead of AWS? Will it affect load times, website SEO, downtime?<p>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?<p>I have a very basic understanding of networking, so appreciate any comments from someone who knows about these.
Update: When creating your Hetzner Cloud server, you can now inject cloud-init data. You can find more information at <a href="https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Can_I_use_Cloud-Init_when_creating_servers.3F" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Can_I_use_C...</a> --Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online
Does anyone know if they offer per-customer, or per-project local networking?<p>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.
Had some fun trying out these new cloud servers,<p><a href="https://blog.simos.info/a-closer-look-at-the-new-hetzner-cloud-servers-by-running-lxd/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.simos.info/a-closer-look-at-the-new-hetzner-clo...</a><p>(not affiliated with Hetzner)
Cool - renting two CX31 instances plus a BX40 storage box seems to me a good solution running a private OpenShift cluster for under 50€ a month. Id need to figure it out!
I can‘t seem to find any FreeBSD but just Linux images when trying to create a CloudServer. Is it correct that right now they just have different Linux distros available?
I just wish Hetzner would start offering cheap low-end dedicated servers like OVH's Kimsufi or Online.net's "Personal family" Dedibox offerings...
I can remember Hetzner has been around for as long as OVH. Why has OVH expanded now way beyond France to US, Asia etc while Hetzner still EU only?<p>With Google, Microsoft Facebook as well as Amazon leading the way in layering out cables across continent, having a server in US means you have a high probability most ISP in the world has tuned the networking route around those traffic. The same cant be said for EU.
Is Hetzner not known to generally be a "bad" host? I have suffered so much abuse at the hands of their clients (DOS attacks, aggressive spidering/SQL Injection probing) that I've blocked their entire IP space on the majority of my client networks. I've never received a single response from their abuse report email/tool.
One often overlooked detail, which I just could not figure out by looking at their product page is which virtualization software they use. I haven't made particularly good experiences with OpenVZ in terms of flexibility and would rather have them use something like KVM.
I'm thinking soon "enough" (as in: personal server) compute/ram/disk will be free and you can play with servers for nothing riding completely on the backs of larger paying customers. Like with wordpress.com or any service with a free tier really.
Tried it out. You can't sign in with your email address, you have to use a user name they assign to you. My assigned user name is more secure than my password and impossible to remember. I suppose it's good for security, but it's also super inconvenient.
When you create a new cloud server, there is a tab called CEPH (for the Ceph network filesystem).<p>It does not have any options and it looks like it is not active yet. It would be great if they offered network storage through Ceph.
It seems like the option for backup space (external storage) does not exist like in their vServers. I hope they will return it because they offered really cheap storage compared to Vultr and DO.
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 ?<p>Are they just lowering their prices or am I missing out on features ?
Loving the competition in the market. Object Store would be nice. Can't wait to see what happens when NAND/DRAM markets start clearing and there are multiple competitive 7nm nodes.
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.
No clue about this new product, but their previous virtual server offering had NATed IPv4 and they generally have an idiotic IPv6 policy (only small prefixes, you have to pay extra to get anything remotely sensible--like, default /64 even on dedicated servers, you can get a /56 if you pay for it, more isn't supported).
Is it me or does this look more like those "Cloud VPS" type of services other companies offer. If you use 5x more than your initial plan in a month, does it just scale up automatically or do you have to contact support to upgrade first?
Anyone know why this was upvoted?<p>I can't tell it apart from the dozens of other "good" cloud providers (Lightsail, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode)
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
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.<p>Any current clients know how fast provisioning is on these?