So far, I have nothing but praise for Hetzner. I've only had to contact support once, when one of my server's hard drives was shouting out SMART errors and looking like it was going to die shortly.<p>I got in touch late on Sunday night, discussed the problem with a couple of their support staff, and by midday on Monday morning, all was fixed, a new hard drive in place. Really quite incredible service, especially considering the price.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Hetzner's:<p>1. Uses desktop grade hardware (i.e. no ECC, single socket, limited networking, etc)<p>2. Is located in Germany (i.e. high latency for your US user base).<p>Don't get me wrong, the pricing Hetzner provides is unbelievable.<p>I just wish a US based hosting provider was available that used server grade component who was even 2x Hetzner price because it'd still be a steal.<p>(For those of you unaware of their pricing, you can get a Xeon E-3 with 32GB of ram for just 79 euros/mo.)
If you have a single-rack network, now your single point of failure is the rack switch or PDU. (This is why e.g. HDFS has rack-aware mode.)<p>If you have a cage, it's the datacenter (peering, power, environment, physical security.)<p>Do you need to care about these things? Probably not. (But maybe you do, and you happen to care less about price, or database write latency/throughput/predictability, or...) Pick whatever set of tradeoffs works for you.
The article makes some good points and is a good starting guide to setting up a dependable stack but I think the author downplays the skill, cost and time that something like Heroku can save. He states "not including developer time ofcourse[sic]."<p>For those not able to afford a fulltime sys admin that can be a significant expense and bring in unnecessary risk.
One thing to note about Hetzner, in addition to high US latency times, is the initial setup cost. For the EX4 (core i7-2700, 16 GB ram, 6 TB HD, 49 euros/month), the one time setup was 149 euros. However, I just checked and the setup cost for this server has dropped to 49 euros. I'm not sure if this is promotional or permanent.
I can put in my exp. with Hetzner. We had a RAM that was failing and got replaced once they ran the check. We did have a backup server to take up the load, in the mean-time so wasn't a problem.
IMO a dependable stack requires a firewall in front of your servers. Sure you can configure software firewalls on all of your servers, but its nice to have an outer wall as well(defense in depth and all that). If hetzner started offering that and private vlan support they would have a really killer offering.
I had a VPS at Hetzner I replaced my Linode with. Really liked it. For the same price, though, you can get a really underpowered dedicated server at kimsufi.ie through OVH with more ram and HD space.
If you mostly have users in Europe like I do, then this is a no-brainer. I have been using it over 2 years and so far only two glitches: once one of HDD's simply vanished from my RAID array, and the other was when the key switch burned out in datacenter where my server was. About 30 minutes downtime and that was all.<p>I switched 5 different providers before settling with Hetzner.
I see the everything below the new EX6S has dropped by about 90 Euros in setup fee. This is great news! I think I'll buy 6!<p>People have brought up reliability and that they are using consumer grade hardware. This is an issue if you have SPOF. If you have a fully distributed system (rare these days, for sure) it isn't much of an issue.<p>My current plan is to use DNS and each box is a full stack. (web app platform on top of riak with authoritative DNS on the box.) So a web request might look up example.com and get back a list of authoritative name servers NS1-6.exampledns.com When the client then does the query to one of those auth servers the auth server is in the cluster and returns the list of other servers in the cluster ranked by load (Eg: multiple A address response for the query.) Then when the client goes to connect to the web server it will hit the least busy node.<p>I wonder, though, if there are 5 authoritative name servers listed in the root for a given domain, will the root return them in the same order every time, such that my first authoritative dns server (the one listed first at the domains registrar) will get most of the DNS load? Or is there a way to have the root name servers randomize the order of the authoritative servers they give back to the client?<p>(Yes all this will be open source, eventually. I've learned not to make promises about when-- soon as its viable outside the lab.)
So let me sum this up:<p>Hetzner is comparable to Heroku and AWS, except that you have to do your own rack buildouts, private IP subnets, load balancing, redundancy zones, and CDN.<p>Is that right?