Nice, I just bought Hetzner's 'EX101' and I'm extremely happy with it. Already hosting my own STUN, TURN, and echo servers. They give you plenty of IPv6s and adding additional IPv4s is very cheap. I'm happy with it.
I want to say that if any of you decide to try Hetzner and use their auction process instead of their regular packages - make sure you check out the details for the CPU. I made the mistake of buying an old server on there because it had plenty of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth. Then I saw the CPU was ancient and had only 4 cores.
You know there is something quite unique and strange about Hetzner. They charge you no money until your first invoice date rolls around. So you essentially have access to their servers for free until whenever the next invoice date is. It seems to me... how to say it? Kind of crazy and insanely trusting. But it works, I guess?
The reverse is always surprising to me: as if blocking a credit card constitutes the ending of a contract.
In Europe, a contract isn't entered or broken by making or blocking payment. Companies will very succesfully have their contracts enforced, with any extra costs billed to you. Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.
That's technically the case in most countries, just that enforcing those contracts has a cost.
Blocking the credit card is banking on the company not bothering to follow up, or (in case of company misbehavior), forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge.
Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills. I once heard it said about the Netherlands as being attractive to do business.
> Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills.
That's the first time I ever heard of such thing, and I've lived in a few European countries. Some European countries even standardized service payments on direct debit, which worst case scenario leaves a bank holding the bag for the debt.
> forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge
And showing up in court has costs, which are not guaranteed to be covered in any award/payment order, and even if you win there is still the matter of actually collecting. If it's all a matter of a few hundred dollars, most businesses will just write it off.
> Companies will very successfully have their contracts enforced
Hetzner turned off all access to my paid server due to a false-positive on their netscan/DDOS (literally it was tailscaled doing a netcheck) protection and equally incompetent technical support staff.
Can I sue them for breach of contract and subsequent damages? I moved all my hosting off Hetzner as a result, but I'm still very disappointed in their actions.
Ah, that's shitty. I guess in theory you could demand a refund or file a chargeback for an amount based on the services they didn't contractually provide. As you ceased doing business with them I don't think there would have been any drawback to this. IANAL
Same here, I initially got an Epyc 1st generation server with 256gb and was happy for a while, until I figured out single core performance was important for my workflows (web development). Then I got a a 7950x3d and i'm now super happy.
On most servers there's a setup fee so people are not very likely to run without paying. (I know it doesn't exist in auction and they do have no-fee specials sometimes)
The setup fee is refunded too. Source: just had $258 returned to me after Ampere Altra server did not behave as I expected after running it for 13 days.
I didn't know that. That really cool. I didn't get to experience it because I am quite a happy customer. (Knock on wood and don't publicly cross them huh)
What was up with the Altra? I have a free instance (4 cores) on oracle cloud. Seems really capable.
It was behaving strangely under load - worked for a few hours all right, then at some point all 80 cores invariably fell into 1GHz mode with no way to return them to work at normal 3GHz. Probably some software issue, because reboot (and only reboot) fixed it. But after reinstalling multiple kernels and much twiddling, I bailed. Otherwise, a wonderful processor.
It's the same with AWS and GCP and Digital Ocean isn't it? An active card check is performed but that's about it, you PAYG and get billed at the end of the month.
It was like this for me for years until a month I got double invoice and now it's seemingly paid in advance. It might depend on the pricing bracket (I jumped from a 40EUR dedicated to 180EUR with extra hardware around that time, too).
It's about comparable. Hetzner's packages in general are a little bit cheaper than other major hosts though. I'm mostly talking about OVH. A factor here that HN readers might want to consider is server latency. Hetzner offers cheaper servers in Germany and Finland but the round-trip will be much higher. I get about 250ms from Australia to my dedi in Finland. If you want lower than look for a US data center. The MS is apparently quite significant if you're wanting this for e-commerence because studies show that faster page loads correspond highly with more sales. So it's worth considering!
> They used to require sending a copy of an ID card as proof that you are who you say you are. I guess gdpr put an end to that.
That was the case for me when I registered with Hetzner, though that was a few years ago. Then again, I registered for Contabo this month and still had to send my ID and something to prove my address. Their justification was that they're required by law to verify that data (KYC or something), so I guess they have to process that data even with GDPR being a thing.
In my experience, some of the DigitalOcean lower end tiers have older Xeon chips that just feel slower. One of the first things I do is run `yabs` on a new droplet to see exactly where I'm at:
I might do this. The more direct approach is to benchmark your actual app, since that will check the attributes that matter (it might be more useful to have good IO to the database than a fast CPU). Probably good to do both.
Yes, good tip! I once searched for a super cheap VPS and found one, but found out the hard way that the single core performance was terrible; 3 times as slow as Hetzner.
yes. especially their storage servers are great - https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx - i'm at a small startup and we don't need 100% uptime or georeplication and other cloud features but we have ton's of 3d data to store - price per TB is pretty good with these machines and you can upgrade to a 10Gbit port for additional 50€/month - or order multiple of these in the same rack with internal 10GbE with a switch to have a ceph cluster there. Their enterprise phone sales support is also top-notch in my experience.
Sure, but mostly they won't accept you if you are from a developing country trying to break in to the tech world. Its a catch 22 situation - they offer cheaper prices only to those who can afford expensive servers.
I know it's because of spam - but it is what it is.
Unfortunately, hetzner really seems to have trouble with piracy and spam. Given Plex is going as far as blocking hetzner servers completely, it seems like abuse is pretty widespread.
It’s really annoying that this kind of behavior is ruining the reputation of an otherwise great Hoster and making their products inaccessible for large parts of the worlds population.
Really wish the could implement measure to make their products accessible to users from these countries that are heavily restricted
Is there an arb opportunity? Something as simple as someone in the US runs Kubernetes on Hetzner, then rents out the pods for anyone in the world to run their workloads on. They could restrict the workloads, e.g. firewall the outbound requests to a pre agreed list.
Yes I used to do this for US customers when Hetzner and OVH would only take EU customers.
The problem is that the customers interested in that price point are trash customers that only wan't to do all the dodgey stuff hetzner doesn't want them to do. Hetzner will detected it and will firewall the whole server all sites will go down the bad and the good and all of your customers will want refunds even if they where the cause of the problems.
There are hosting providers offering webhosting and virtual servers that just run their operations on Hetzner dedicated servers. The virtual servers are just KVM to split the dedicated server into multiple, with a bit of management interface and some firewall rules.
I think there is room for a clunky but cheaper VPS. There is room for competitors. For side projects I used Digital Ocean over AWS because of the DX, abstraction level (close enough to the metal but not too close) and not going to worry about getting a $1m bill. This arb would probably make something cheaper that digital ocean, maybe with the UX of vast.ai (very basic web interface and SSH for the rest of what you need)
When I signed up for Hetzner they asked for a national ID/passport OR pay a non-refundable €20 fee which gets you accepted immediately. I’m not sure what their risk assessment process looks like now.
I've been using the same x86 server for 3 or 4 years at this point, plus another arm64 one since they introduced them (so two years?). Never had them deleting anything, haven't paid a dime.
Paid tenancy is just a matter of providing a working debit/credit card. You don't need to actually spend anything to keep using the free tiers with resource protection.
You got a source / proof of that? Because that's a pretty big statement. Nationality makes no sense either, but I assume you mean country of residence. Yes, companies like Hetzner may not let you rent servers if you're in a country they don't like or have bad experience with - I feel like, while that sucks, that could be understandable.
Banning based on ethnicity or nationality would mean that, if you're in Germany on a work visa and try to become a customer, they'd boot you based on your ethnicity. I don't think that's accurate at all.
Not at all. It's far easier for criminals to use stolen credit card information to spin up servers for a month at a time than to compromise other servers.
I'm sorry you seem to be from a country that Hetzner has identified as being responsible for too much fraud, but Hetzner refusing to provide services to people in certain countries isn't criminal.
> I'm sorry you seem to be from a country that Hetzner has identified as being responsible for too much fraud
Funny how y'all assume one has to be the victim because is standing up for that victim. Must be a cultural thing. Well, shocking news, I am not from a country that this dodgy company has decided to discriminate against.
Some little known fact because they don't advertise the feature: You can re-scale your cloud vps servers up and down (and even switch from shared-core to dedicated cores) and pay by the hour, as long as you don't tick the "rescale storage space" option. I.e. you can start with a shared-cpu VPS for as little as 5€ that has 20 GB storage, and flexible scale it to an 48-core EPYC for just a couple of hours, and after you are done scale it down. If you are okay with slower storage, you can get separate storage from them and and mount via network. You do need to reboot between scaling, though.
I use that for development - I use VSCode with remote extension so the building, running and code indexing happens on the cloud server. Most of the time a small instance is enough, if I need more power I scale it up within seconds, and at the end of the work day (or week) back to a small instance (or shut off).
Have you looked at Scaleway Elastic Metal? It's a little but more expensive (~ x1,5) but part of their "cloud environment", so "scriptable" via API, CLI, etc.
Hetzner's hardware is custom built by the manufacturers, for example motherboards by asrock, they even get their own mainboard microcode from asrock. SSDs come from Micron, they have their own chassis etc.
They have a _huge_ testing lab with insane amounts of testing equipment. I never had any problems with their hardware at all. Networking was not that good years ago but is stellar now.
Some is custom built, some (in their server auction) are just bare consumer-grade ATX motherboards in compact shelves.
We ran two dedicated servers at Hetzner for about three years and had two disk failures. These, too, were consumer-grade Seagate disks, and both of them had been in use by prior customers. All in all it was not a bother and we definitely got our money's worth.
I've worked/played around with BSD back in the 90s and actually never looked back. Tried it here and there within the last 20 years but never found it as versatile as Linux.
Working on macOS (how much BSD is still in that system?) since 6 month now and finally getting used to it. Still feels a bit crippled compared to the tools I used under Windows/Linux.
For OpenBSD on a server in particular, many useful tools (web server, mail server, pf...) are developed by the same team and better integrated in the base system. This means consistent documentation, behavior and syntax (e.g. for configuration).
In contrast, Linux distributions are a collection of software taken from different sources, with all the quirks that may derive from this.
(I don't want to imply that the BSDs have only advantages over Linux and not the other way round, but the OP asked specifically why _BSD over Linux_).
Linux user for 25+ years here. (When did kernel 0.9 come out?)
I learned how to perform basic admin tasks for Linux and OpenBSD in the 1990s.
I relearned how to do all those things under Linux at least five times since then, and am facing yet another round of "why the fuck is everything broken (regressed back to worse than 1998 levels of stability) and different again this year?" with my Linux machines.
I recently installed OpenBSD and FreeBSD in VirtualBox VMs and am doing a bake off for my next desktop OS.
FreeBSD is slightly ahead from the "annoyingly terrible stuff works in a pinch" perspective, since I have some windows game getting to a splash screen via LLVMPipe under Steam. (It runs out of DRAM, and needs a GPU that doesn't exist, so I'm counting this as working.)
OpenBSD is ahead from the "if its available at all, then it is solid" perspective.
Both of them are more familiar to me than the Linux desktop that's hosting the Virtual Box VMs.
Also, I'm increasingly concerned about the ethics of the upstream Linux development community. Red Hat's new business model is based on violating the GPL (maybe they are not technically breaking it, though I think they are), and they have enough weight to force the ecosystem to do whatever they want.
They've rammed all sorts of user-hostile crap (most of those regressions, for example) on to my (ubuntu, arch, etc) machines, so it's not just a theoretical concern.
Go ahead and find a guide showing you how to do a thing that Just Works regardless of the flavor of Linux distro. You can't, because they're gratuitously different for the sake of differentiating themselves. You can't even use one guide to cover multiple versions of Ubuntu.
Now find a guide showing you how to do a thing for any of the BSDs. That guide is more usable on one of the other BSDs than any Linux guide is usable on a different distro.
That's one reason. Others include the ability to keep track of what's on a system, since the BSDs don't include the kitchen sink and have good package management, the fact that they're lighter weight than most Linux distros (in some cases significantly), that they're more consistent and more deterministic, the fact that you can literally rebuild the whole kernel and OS trivially, and so on.
There are many reasons, but for me, the one thing that really stands out is cleanliness.
> Now find a guide showing you how to do a thing for any of the BSDs. That guide is more usable on one of the other BSDs than any Linux guide is usable on a different distro.
That's simply not true in my experience. Sure, man pages for base utilities are usually interchangeable between BSDs, but the same is true on Linux.
When it comes to the system (init, networking, firewalling, package management, configuration, etc), BSDs are different enough that you'll need your own variant's documentation to make things work properly.
And again, Linux isn't that different there. More often than not a page on the Arch wiki will put you on the right track regardless of your distro of choice.
If I might make some counter-arguments to some of these
A lot of the points of differentiation in terms of plumbing layers are slowly eroding away, systemd helped a lot by standardizing things around service files as opposed to the patchwork of init scripts (and OpenRC and everyone else scripts)
I don't know about BSD's being lighter weight than a Linux system, but I don't really know what your baesline of light weight is (Ubuntu? Debian? Arch? Gentoo?)
For more consistent and deterministic systems there's offerings such as Nix and others
As for rebuilding the whole OS and kernel trivially? Gentoo stands out as probably the easiest one in that regard, your entire system can be rebuilt with "emerge -e world"
> If I might make some counter-arguments to some of these
Of course :)
> A lot of the points of differentiation in terms of plumbing layers are slowly eroding away, systemd helped a lot by standardizing things around service files as opposed to the patchwork of init scripts (and OpenRC and everyone else scripts)
It has been my experience that systemd has been inconsistent from one version of systemd to the next. I've given systemd a fair shake, and even those people who swear that it's the bees' knees haven't been able to help me figure out how to work around somewhat silly issues (in other words, they shouldn't have been telling me how easy it is if they can't even illustrate its ease themselves).
> I don't know about BSD's being lighter weight than a Linux system, but I don't really know what your baesline of light weight is (Ubuntu? Debian? Arch? Gentoo?)
You can't really compare a BSD, or all of the three major direct BSDs, with the best of each Linux distro. Sure, Nix is better at being deterministic, and Debian is much better than the others about not changing gratuitously, and Gentoo can easily rebuild everything, but what happens when you need all of those things in once place?
By lightweight, I mean that I can literally run NetBSD on a VAXstation with 24 megs of RAM, or a Mac LC III+ with 36 megs (http://elsie.zia.io/), where I literally compile everything besides the OS from source, on those machines. Sure, perl takes more than a week, but they work.
This has other benefits: I can easily, without much fuss, run everything I need for a tinc tunnel in 128 megs with tmpfs for logs and no swap on an appliance-like device. It's surprisingly easy to do this starting with the default OS, whereas small Linux systems are often unrecognizable compared with their "normal" distro counterparts.
> Gentoo stands out as probably the easiest one in that regard, your entire system can be rebuilt with "emerge -e world"
Exactly. I love that. It's great, and it'd be wonderful if that were more widespread in other Linux distros.
OTOH, NetBSD takes it further: you can build NetBSD for any architecture on any other so long as you're running a reasonably Unix-like OS with a reasonably relevant compiler.
So, again, Linux in general has so many nice things, but if you want them all in the same place, in the same distro, you're kinda out of luck.
> Go ahead and find a guide showing you how to do a thing that Just Works regardless of the flavor of Linux distro. You can't...
You can, but it's not so much a guide - Ansible roles.
Wise usage of the modules and deconstruction of the personalities (ie: package names, file paths) means a playbook that works for one distribution can work for any.
You can even aim for the stars and support entirely different operating systems!
Not to detract from the cleanliness of BSD - it truly is delightful.
I think you're right in saying that it's not as versatile than Linux, but if your needs are focused, then it's actually a feature. For example, for small web servers: an OpenBSD base install comes with httpd(8), relayd(8), sshd(8), pf(4), etc.: tweak a few configuration files and drop a cross-compiled single-binary Go and you're all set.
OTOH, if you want to toy around with "edgy" open-source software, I would expect Linux to provide a better experience.
Small and comes with a lot of packages that are only an "apt install" away.
I only install packages that I need an check that nothing else is running and/or has open ports.
As far as I know, the OpenBSD team ensures that the base installation is useful already, so that their "secure by default" claim has some intrinsic value. As a result, even without installing extra packages, you get an usable system, unified (written by the same group of people), well-documented (reading the man pages and knowing what to expect from the software often is enough), easy access to OpenBSD-specific software, etc.
I personally enjoy having not to ask myself questions like, which http server I should be using, and just be rolling with whatever's in the box.
I wouldn't be surprised for Debian, and others, to provide a similar experience, perhaps not as tightly packaged though. I'm not sure the difference is that remarkable either, unless perhaps you have some specific needs that you know are well-managed by *BSD-centered software.
Others point out Homebrew, but I still prefer MacPorts for command line tools. It feels more “BSD” to me, while Homebrew reminds me of some tools a Node developer would write (cheeky terminology, overuse of emoji, cleverness over correctness, etc.).
At home I just use macOS and FreeBSD and many of my personal projects typically build on both. The base userland tools are mostly the same, but the non-POSIX stuff diverges heavily (file system control, process isolation, configuration, etc.)
When I need to install some random program, I can't just create a container and build it. Instead, I need to install a pile of random dependencies, and then homebrew, macports and xcode all fight with each other.
Also, the MacOS window manager is objectively terrible. "Move window to right of screen" involves a keypress, trackpad hover, and menu selection. "Maximize window" doesn't exist. "Minimize window" makes the window inaccessible with command-tab and option-tab. Neither of those keyboard shortcuts function properly if there is more than one monitor plugged in.
Fractional scaling breakages still exist.
The font renderer is de-featured (vs the open source ones) because it is working around some expired patents involving true type hints.
It can no longer open postscript files.
I could go on for a long time.
MacOS makes a passible dumb terminal for accessing remote development environments though. It also integrates in well with iOS, etc.
For me, they've been easier to administer and more reliable. I've had some running for years with minimal maintenance and they just keep chugging along with no security issues and all of the utilities I need out of the box.
For servers I'm exclusively using Debian for 20 years and there was literally never a problem while upgrading from one release to another. Of course there were hickups with packages but not with the core system.
I expect something similar for BSDs...
Because not everything needs to be linux. In fact, this modern trend of running linux everywhere from critical infrastructure to IoT devices is worrying as it feels like a monoculture is starting to rise its ugly head once again.
If you're missing some CLI tooling on MacOS, it's worth checking out the Homebrew repositories to see if you can find what you're looking for. I use several up-to-date GNU versions of utilities instead of the older BSD-flavoured versions that shipped with MacOS.
I started with Linux back in the 90s then changed to OpenBSD in 1997, then FreeBSD in 1998. Ran it for many years. Eagerly awaited MacOS X as it was called back then, and I was not disappointed.
In my opinion, macOS is the supreme UNIX™ workstation still, although there are things you need to work around or disable like SIP in rare cases. It definitely has BSD heritage, and Homebrew is pretty mature at this point, which wasn't always the case.
For servers though I tend to just stick to Linux these days, mostly out of practicality. I miss the days of easily recompiling the BSD kernel by just editing a single file.
During the last KubeCon in Amsterdam, Hetzner employees hinted at the possibility of a Kubernetes-as-a-Service entirely managed by them… that’s one of my hidden dreams :)
We've been running Scaleway for years (Both VMs and managed k8s).
There are quirks from time to time, their disk system has been nightmarish for a while, but they've recently had a major overhaul there and we didn't really have any major complaints since. It is very decent for the price, I would say.
After paying Vultr way too much for my personal toy OpenBSD hosting, let me share my host TinyKVM [1] as a happy customer. Obviously look at the terms, they clearly recommend not using it for any critical purposes. It's a service offered by RAM Host [2], based in Dallas.
A bit out of the blue, I'll say that I'm also a happy customer of MXroute [3], which are also in Texas. I like these folk's no-nonsense approach. I can only think of SpongeBob's friend Sandy, and the experience have reinforced this stereotype :) No affiliation, I'm sorry for this regional digression, have never been to Texas unfortunately, but good job, guys!
I'm a big fan of the CAX* series on Hetzner. The price vs performance is really good.
I'm patiently waiting for Percona to add Debian `bookworm` packages for their database servers on arm64/aarch64 and then I can migrate from amd64 on other cloud providers.
So, somebody succeeded running OpenBSD/ARM64 in someone else's stock pre-configured VM. Great!
But what about some bigger targets - e.g. running OpenBSD ARM64 on a stock bare-metal server provided by some dedicated hosting company, not necessarily Hetzner?
But if your server or website gets targeted by DDOS or anything similar, they will just shut down the network/server and you have very little recourse as their customer service is very unfriendly.
There are none unfortunately. I've found Vultr to be good value if you really need dedicated servers, OVH probably as well. However, a Hetzner VPS with dedicated CPUs in the US is still less expensive than the equivalent dedicated server at those providers.
Hetzner does now have US based locations. However, as far I can tell, they are restricted to their cloud products and not their line of dedicated servers
If you don't want to get super techie you will get less headaches with Intel or AMD today. Deciding between those two is not a big deal compared to other things, like the code you're running and the server setup, unless you have decent scale.
They have ARM servers for as low as 3.79/mo with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM. And as of September 19 they are available in Nuremberg and Finland as well, not just Falkenstein.
I want to say that if any of you decide to try Hetzner and use their auction process instead of their regular packages - make sure you check out the details for the CPU. I made the mistake of buying an old server on there because it had plenty of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth. Then I saw the CPU was ancient and had only 4 cores.
You know there is something quite unique and strange about Hetzner. They charge you no money until your first invoice date rolls around. So you essentially have access to their servers for free until whenever the next invoice date is. It seems to me... how to say it? Kind of crazy and insanely trusting. But it works, I guess?