Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down?
You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.
It depends on the service and how critical that website is.
Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:
Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.
Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.
Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.
There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.
Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.
I run internal services on DO that I've considered moving to Hetzner for cost savings.
Could I take it down for the afternoon? Sure. Or could I wait and do it after hours? Also sure. But would I rather not have to deal with complaints from users that day and still go home by 5pm? Of course!
Well why have downtime if you can avoid it with a bit of work?
But I do agree the poster should think about this. I don't think it's 'off' or misleading, they just haven't encountered a hardware error before. If they had one on this single box with 30 databases and 34 Nginx sites it would probably be a bad time, and yes they should think about that a bit more perhaps.
They describe a db slave for cutover for example but could also have one for backups, plus rolling backups offsite somewhere (perhaps they do and it just didn't make it into this article). That would reduce risk a lot. Then of course they could put all the servers on several boxes behind a load-balancer.
But perhaps if the services aren't really critical it's not worth spending money on that, depends partly what these services/apps are.
to be fair a lot of ppl still run this way and just have really good backups, or have an offline / truly on-prep server where they can flip the dns switch in case of true outage.
Yes and for many services that is totally fine. As long as you have backups of data and can redeploy easily. It's not how I personally do things usually but there is definitely a place for it.
Also, in general, you can architect your application to be more friendly to migration. It used to be a normal thing to think about and plan for.
VMware has a conversion tool that converts bare metal into images.
One could image, then do regular snapshots, maybe centralize a database being accessed.
Sometimes it's possible to create a migration script that you run over and over to the new environment for each additional step.
Others can put a backup server in between to not put a load on the drive.
Digital Ocean makes it impossible to download your disk image backups which is a grave sin they can never be forgiven for. They used to have some amount of it.
Still, a few commands can back up the running server to an image, and stream it remotely to another server, which in turn can be updated to become bootable.
This is the tip of the iceberg in the number of tasks that can be done.
Someone with experience can even instruct LLMs to do it and build it, and someone skilled with LLMs could probably work to uncover the steps and strategies for their particular use case.
Respectfully, this type of "high availability" strawman is a dated take.
This is a general response to it.
I have run hosting on bare metal for millions of users a day. Tens of thousdands of concurrent connections. It can scale way up by doing the same thing you do in a cloud, provision more resources.
For "downtime" you do the same thing with metal, as you do with digital ocean, just get a second server and have them failover.
You can run hypervisors to split and manage a metal server just like Digital Ocean. Except you're not vulnerable to shared memory and cpu exploits on shared hosting like Digital Ocean. When Intel CPU or memory flaws or kernel exploits come out like they have, one VM user can read the memory and data of all the other processes belonging to other users.
Both Digital ocean, and IaaS/PaaS are still running similar linux technologies to do the failover. There are tools that even handle it automatically, like Proxmox. This level of production grade fail over and simplicity was point and click, 10 years ago. Except no one's kept up with it.
The cloud is convenient. Convenience can make anyone comfortable. Comfort always costs way more.
It's relatively trivial to put the same web app on a metal server, with a hypervisor/IaaS/Paas behind the same Cloudflare to access "scale".
Digital Ocean and Cloud providers run on metal servers just like Hetzner.
The software to manage it all is becoming more and more trivial.
I'm not arguing for cloud or against bare metal hosting, just saying there is a broad range of requirements in hosting and not everyone needs or wants load balancers etc - it clearly will cost more than this particular poster wants to pay as they want to pay the bare minimum to host quite a large setup.
I feel like 95% of the web falls into this category. Like, have you ever said "That's it, I am never gonna visit this page again!", because of temporary downtime? Unless you are Amazon and every minute costs you bazillions, you are likely gonna get the better deal not worrying about availability and scalability. That 250€/m root server is a behemoth. Complete overkill for most anything. As a bonus, you are gonna be half the internet, when someone at AWS or Cloudflare touches DNS.
Exactly. I've never not bought something because the website was temporarily down. I've even bought from b&h photo!
Even if Amazon was down, if I was planning to buy, I'd wait. heck, I got a bunch of crap in my cart right now I haven't finished out.
Intentional downtime lets everyone plan around it, reduces costs by not needing N layers of marginal utility which are all fragile and prone to weird failures at times you don't intend.
> Like, have you ever said "That's it, I am never gonna visit this page again!", because of temporary downtime?
That's a strawman version of what happens.
There have been times when I've tried to visit a webshop to buy something but the site was broken or down, so I gave up and went to Amazon and bought an alternative.
I've also experienced multiple business situations where one of our services went down at an inconvenient time, a VP or CEO got upset, and they mandated that we migrate away from that service even if alternatives cost more.
If you think of your customers or visitors as perfectly loyal with infinite patience then downtime is not a problem.
> Unless you are Amazon and every minute costs you bazillions, you are likely gonna get the better deal not worrying about availability and scalability. That 250€/m root server is a behemoth. Complete overkill for most anything.
You don't need every minute of downtime to cost "bazillions" to justify a little redundancy. If you're spending 250 euros/month on a server, spending a little more to get a load balancer and a pair of servers isn't going to change your spend materially. Having two medium size servers behind a load balancer isn't usually much more expensive than having one oversized server handling it all.
There are additional benefits to having the load balancer set up for future migrations, or to scale up if you get an unexpected traffic spike. If you get a big traffic spike on a single server and it goes over capacity you're stuck. If you have a load balancer and a pair of servers you can easily start a 3rd or 4th to take the extra traffic.
To be fair, modern dedicated servers at hetzner have two power units, and come with a redundand ssd/hdd raid-1 config. AFAIK both ssd and power unit having hotplug capability, so in case either fails they can be replaced with zero downtime.
Given the downtimes we saw in the past year(s) (AWS, Cloudflare, Azure - the later even down several times, I would argue moving to any of the big cloud providers give you not much of a better guarantee.
I myself am a Hetzner customer with a dedicated vServer, meaning it is a shared virtual server but with dedicated CPUs (read: still oversubscribed, but some performance guarantee) and had zero hardware-based downtime for years. I would guess their vservers are on similar redundant hardware where the failing components can be hotswapped.
= They once within the last 3 years sent me an email that they had to update a router that would affect network connectivity for the vServer, but the notification came weeks in advance and lasted about 15 minutes. No reboot/hardware failure on my vServer though.
These articles are popular where there's a mismatch between application requirements and the solution chosen. When someone over-engineers their architecture to be enterprise-grade (substitute your own definition of enterprise-grade) when really they were running a hobby project or a small business where a day of downtime every once in a while just means your customers will come back the next day, going all-out on cloud architecture is maybe not necessary. That's why you see so many comments from people arguing that downtime isn't always a big deal or that risking an outage is fine: There are a lot of applications where this is kind of true.
The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing
Clever architecture will always beat cleverly trying to pick only one cloud.
Being cloud agnostic is best.
This means setting up a private cloud.
Hosted servers, and managed servers are perfectly capable of near zero downtime. this is because it's the same equipment (or often more consumer grade) that the "cloud" works on and plans for even more failure.
Digital Ocean definitely does not guarantee zero downtime. That's a lot of 9's.
It's simple to run well established tools like Proxmox on bare metal that will do everything Digital Ocean promises, and it's not susceptible to attacks, or exploits where the shared memory and CPU usage will leak what customers believe is their private VPS.
Nothing ever failing in the case of a tool like Proxmox is, install it on two servers, one VPS exists on both nodes (you connect both servers as nodes), click high availability, and it's generally up and running. Put cloudflare in front of it like the best preference practices of today.
If you're curious about this, there's some pretty eye opening and short videos on Proxmox available on Youtube that are hard to unsee.
Also, don't underestimate the reliability of simplicity.
I was a Linux sysadmin for many years, and I have never seen as much downtime from simpler systems as I routinely see from the more complicated setups. Somewhere between theory and reality, simpler systems just comes out ahead most of the time.
To be fair they were using a single VM on DigitalOcean, so they didn't had the perks of a cloud provider, except maybe the fact that a VM is probably more fault-tolerant than a bare metal server.
Usually those articles describe two situations:
- they were "on the cloud" for the wrong reasons and migrating to something more physical is the right approach
- they were "on the cloud" for the right reasons and migrating to something more physical is going to be a disaster
Here they appear to be in the first situation.
If their setup was running fine on DO and they put the right DR policies in place at Hetzner, they should be fine.
They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".
To be fair, I migrated a VPS from Linode to Hetzner a few years ago. Minor downtime is a non-issue: personal website and email server. I approximately halved the monthly cost, and I haven't had any downtime except what I caused myself when rebooting to upgrade the kernel every now and then.
DO doesn't do high availability droplets, and their migration policy is will try, if we detect poor health of server before it fails.
If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.
Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.
What are you running on it is the only question which matters, obviously you dont want air traffic control to go down but some app… So what if it goes down? Backup is somewhere else if you even need it anyway. Github has uptime less than 90% according to this: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ . And the world keeps turning. Obviously we should strive for better, but also lets please not continue making this uptime fetish out of it, for vast majority of the apps it absolutely doesnt fucking matter.
If you have the setup within server fully scripted and automated (bash, pyinfra or ansible etc) and backups are in place then recovery isn't that hard. Downtime for sure maybe couple of hours for which you can point your DNS entries to a static page while you're restoring everything.
The vast majority of services are actually alright with a little downtime here and there. In exchange, maintenance is a lot simpler with less moving parts.
People underestimate how far you can go with one or two servers. In fact, what I have seen in ky career is many examples of services that should have been running on one or two servers and instead went for a hugely complex microserviced approach, all in on Cloud providers and crazy requirements of reliability for a scale that never would come.
I was thinking the same. A managed database is just set and forget pretty much. I do NOT miss the old times where I had to monitor my email from routine security checkups hoping my database didn't get hacked by some script kiddie accompanied by blackmail over email.
I agree with you, even for the servers I am responsible for I always make decisions like putting db on supabase instead of local, hosting files on s3 with versioning/multi region etc. then of course come up with a backup and snapshot system.
I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.
I moved two servers, one from Linode and the other from DO to Hetzner a few months ago, with similar savings. The best part was that the two servers had tens of different sites running, implemented in different languages, with obsolete libraries, MySQL and Redis instances. A total mess. Well: Claude Code migrated it all, sometimes rewriting parts when the libraries where no longer available. Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.
I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments. This account's operation was going on development subs complaining about how good Claude's latest model is and how awful it is being afraid of losing one's job to AI.
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but this kind of astroturfing is a new low and it's everywhere on forums such as these.
I see a lot of these posts on Reddit, too, but I don't think it's actually Anthropic or Claude doing it. It's the same old Reddit karma farmers picking up on the latest trends. They've always combined headlines with ragebait to build karma and now LLM bots make it easier than ever.
It's too bad Reddit allows accounts to hide their comment history now. That was an easy way to identify bot accounts before they started allowing accounts to hide their post history
The whole internet is like this now, and it's only just getting started. Makes me sick tbh, and I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in.
For those who remember Digg, the recently relaunched a new version and shut it down almost immediately. They were getting hammered with AI bots when it was realized the Digg apparently still has good SEO. The explain it right on homepage.
I've been warning people of Anthropic's astroturfing for a while now. The amount of "Insert latest model/Claude Code is scary. I'm worried about my job" posts, followed by a doom ridden writing about how their job was automated and 30 dudes got fired and the person is pivoting into plumbing or something or working at Mcdonalds, is just too suspicious not to note. Sometimes it's more covert. They don't mention any provider/model. Sometimes there's a subtle insert somewhere in the body, Opus, Claude, etc.
I was really confused then realized the person you’re replying to misspelled “ad” and you’re moving forward with the premises GP is an ad and this HN submission is an ad and explaining a similar thing where you saw an account on a gamedev Reddit complaining AI is too good so the account is worried they won’t have a job
I mean if it were anyone else, yeah I might agree, but I think Salvatore is being genuine here (and have seen Claude do a similarly surprising job fixing ops issues).
Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!
If I remember correctly (it has been a while since I looked), Hetzner although is a lot cheaper on the price sheet, they're European region by default and then if you look to get US region servers at Hetzner, the pricing is a lot higher and similar to Digital Ocean. Is that still the case?
For OP though who is a Turkey-based company and want European region servers anyway, it might make sense.
If you’re migrating a large MySQL database and you’re not
using mydumper/myloader, you’re doing it the hard way.
If you aren't using xtrabackup you are doing it wrong. I recently migrated a database with 2TB of data from 5.7 to 8.4 with about 15 seconds of down time. It wouldn't have been possible without xtrabackup. Mysqldumper requires a global write block, I wouldn't call blocking writes for hours a "zero downtime migration".
This is something we've[0] done a number of times for customers coming from various cloud providers. In our case we move customers onto a multi-server (sometimes multi-AZ) deployment in Hetzner, using Kubernetes to distribute workloads across servers and provide HA. Kubernetes is likely a lot for a single node deployment such as the OP, but it makes a lot more sense as soon as multiple nodes are involved.
For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.
We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:
- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)
- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)
- Less cache contention, etc [1]
Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.
Moving around k8s deployments is really nice. Very little vendor lockin compared to many of the cloud things you can buy.
My entire stack is.. k8s, hosted Postgres, s3 type storage. I can always host my own Postgres. So really down to k8s and s3. I think hetzner has some kind of s3 storage but haven’t looked into, and I assume moving in 100 TB is a process….
The migration sharing is admirable and useful teaching, thank you!
I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).
I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.
The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.
If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.
Cute; I'd somehow missed ever seeing that one. The omitted con of electric engines (costs way more to build batteries than a gas tank so you're likely to have more expensive storage AND less of it) makes the XKCD joke miss. BUT... since there's probably something that Digital Ocean offers that Hetzner doesn't, that might actually be a very appropriate XKCD for the situation, precisely because there's a tradeoff the XKCD didn't mention. (I haven't used Hetzner so I don't know firsthand what the tradeoff is, but a quick search suggests Hetzner doesn't do Kubernetes so that might be the tradeoff for some people. Or it might be something else, everybody has their own situation).
> Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.
Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.
What are you doing for DB backups? Do you have a replica/standby? Or is it just hourly or something like that?
Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
Hetzner normally advertises their hardware servers as 2x 1 TB SSD, because it's strongly recommended to run them in SWraid1 for net 1TB. (Their image installer will default to that)
Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.
Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.
And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.
For over a decade I ran a small scale dedicated and virtual hosting business (hundreds of machines) and the sort of setup you describe works very well. Software RAID across 2 devices, redundant power supplies, backups. We never had a significant data loss event that I recall (significant = beyond user accidentally removing files).
For quite a while we ran single power supplies because they were pretty high quality, but then Supermicro went through a ~6 month period where basically every power supply in machines we got during that time failed within a year, and replacements were hard to come by (because of high demand, because of failures), and we switched to redundant. This was all cost savings trade-offs. When running single power supplies, we had in-rack Auto Transfer Switches, so that the single power supplies could survive A or B side power failure.
But, and this is important, we were monitoring the systems for drive failures and replacing them within 24 hours. Ditto for power supplies. If you don't monitor your hardware for failure, redundancy doesn't mean anything.
> Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware ...
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
I'm not going to re-write it, the TL;DR is they are making an Apples and Oranges comparison.
Yes they "saved money" but in no way, shape or form are the two comparable.
The polite way to put is is .... they saved as much money as they did because they made very heavy handed "architectural decisions". "Decisions" that they appear to be unaware of having made.
Surely you must've noticed that pretty much all of their bare metal offerings ("dedicated" and the stuff on "auction") have multiple disks, allowing for various RAID configurations?
Can you elaborate? I'm coming up with similar designs recently (static site plus redundant servers) but my designs so far assume no database and ephemeral interactions. (Realtime multiplayer arcade games.)
Curious what the delta to pain-in-ass would be if I want to deal with storing data. (And not just backups / migrations, but also GDPR, age verification etc.)
database isn't hard to have HA with, it's actually very easy to do any of this.
i already design with Auto Scale Group in mind, we run it in spot instance which tend to be much cheaper. Spot instances can be reclaimed anytime, so you need to keep this is kind.
I also have data blobs which are memory maped files, which are swapped with no downtime by pulling manifest from GCS bucket each hour, and swapping out the mmaped data.
i use replicas, with automatic voting based failover.
I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost.
Recently, got into postgres, so far so good. Before that i always used RDS or other managed solution like Datastore, but they cost soo much compared to running your own stuff.
Healthchecks start new server in no time, even if my Hertzner server goes out or if whole Hertzer goes out, my system will launch digital ocean nodes which will start soaking up all requests.
It's possible no one will care much if it's down even for that long. I couldn't care less if my HOA mobile app was down even for a week for example. We don't need constant uptime for everything.
Don’t forget that integrity matters as much as availability in many applications. You might not mind if your HOA takes time to bring a server back up but you’d care a lot more if they lost the financial records or weren’t able to recover from a ransomware attack.
If that's the tradeoff they're willing to make, who are you to say that they're doing it wrong?
Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.
A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.
That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays.
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
I'm not a legal expert/lawyer but I do think a lot of this is not the company just randomly wanting to do it, but lawyer driven development. No company wants to introduce more friction for no reason, unless somehow there's precedent or risk involved in not doing it. Curious to know what legal precedents or laws have changed recently.
The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.
I dont. I'm happy the grift economy has some controls on it. As much as I love open source and all the efforts in collective without government interference; some security is required, otherwise we'll just invite more grift based economics.
It's bad enough living in America without the rest of the world adopting the grift economy.
They have to operate within the laws of the countries they’re physically located in. Those countries want to know that they’re not hosting illegal content, providing services to crime rings, Russia or North Korea, etc.
If Hetzner allows you to host something and you use it for illegal acts, they aren’t going to jail to shield you for €10/month.
Hetzner is like 1/10th the cost of ripoffs like AWS now, the passport data is deleted after verification and I can actually trust this claim coming from an EU company under GDPR that doesn't have any use for my personal data. You can also just bypass the passport requirement entirely by making a €20 Paypal deposit to the account.
You just hear to many horror stories of data being leaked. Even if Hetzner uses a 3rd party system to do the verification - that 3rd party probably has to store you pics for some time.
But at least if there is an alternative then great.
They do not. I've never had to present any documentation whatsoever to Hetzner and have been a happy customer for many years.
As I understand it, they ask only from accounts that check several boxes for common cases of abuse. So basically, personal accounts (as opposed to business accounts) from poor countries (by per capita, so e.g. India qualifies as poor).
That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.
AWS ain't no Mercedes. Mercedes feels premium and isn't full of bugs.
AWS and Azure a charging an arm and a leg, but the offered quality is mostly perceived. Most of the bits and bobs they charge for are not providing much value for a vast majority of businesses. I won't even go over the complete lack of ergonomics with their portals.
I see you've never actually owned or worked on a German car, especially in relation to even modest Japanese models. Maybe they were a little nicer inside in the 80s and maybe 90s, but "German car" and frankly "European make" is basically synonymous with "big expensive pile of shit that's an expensive pain in the ass when things start falling apart (which they seem to with increasing rapidity)." It's like the disease that plagued British cars for the longest time got contaminated with the German propensity to build overly complex monstrosities.
No, they just don't know what value AWS provides. And honestly you'll never know until you roll out your own Dedicated servers and later you'll wonder why you never did it sooner.
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
> Old server nginx converted to reverse proxy We wrote a Python script that parsed every server {} block across all 34 Nginx site configs, backed up the originals, and replaced them with proxy configurations pointing to the new server. This meant that during DNS propagation, any request still hitting the old IP was silently forwarded. No user would see a disruption.
What was the config on the receiving side to support this? Did you whitelist the old server IP to trust the forwarding headers? Otherwise you’d get the old server IP in your app logs. Not a huge deal for an hour but if something went wrong it can get confusing.
> 30 MySQL databases (248 GB of data)
> 34 Nginx virtual hosts across multiple domains
> GitLab EE (42 GB backup)
> Neo4J Graph DB (30 GB graph database)
> Supervisor managing dozens of background workers
> Gearman job queue
> Several live mobile apps serving hundreds of thousands of users
He's doing all of that on a single server?!
I'm not against vertical scaling and stuff, but 30 db instances in one server is just crazy.
It's an average of 8GB per database, I guess he serves multiple clients and decided to "segregate" each client on its instance. If it's acceptable for the business it's nothing wrong with his setup.
does anyone else start to wonder about these companys issuing vps/online space with no hardening and no warning
you can basically go on hetzner and spin up a vps with linux that is exposed to the open internet with open ports and user security and within a few hours its been hacked, there is no like warning pop up that says "if you do this your server will be pwnd"
i especialy wonder with all the ai provisioned vps and postgres dbs what will happen here
I've had excellent experiences with Percona xtrabackup for MySQL migration and backups in general. It runs live with almost no performance penalty on the source. It works so well that I always wait for them to release a new matching version before upgrade to a new MySQL version.
I started with DO in 2013 when they offered 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM for $5/mo. For some reason I paid no VAT then, but I do now. Their $4/mo option now is still 512MB, still 1 vCPU, but 10GB SSD. So it's like the last decade of technological progress with regards to RAM, CPU and storage that should either lead to price cuts/spec bumps didn't happen. And yeah, DO got expensive before AI bought up all the memory.
I had my fair share of Hyperscaler -> $something_else migrations during the past year. I agree, especially with rented hardware the price-difference is kind of ridiculous.
The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.
For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
I wish we had something like Hetzner dedicated near us-east-1.
They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
Given the premise that zero day exploits are going to be frequent going forward, I feel like there is a new standard for secure deployment.
Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).
That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
I did the same this year. I really liked Digital Ocean though, compared to more complex cloud offerings like AWS. AWS feels like spending more for the same complexity. At least DO feels like it does save time and mental band width. Still though, the performance of cloud VPS is abysmal for the price. I'm now on Hetzner + K3's plus Flux CD (with Cloudflare for file storage (R2) and caching. I run postgres on the same machine with frequent dump backups. If I ever need realtime read replicas, I'll likely just migrate the DB to Neon or something and keep Hetzner with snapshots for running app containers.
Am I missing something? I'm genuinely surprised it was not deployed from the start on a dedicated server. Don't you make a cost analysis before deploy? And if the cost analysis was ok at initial deploy, why wait to have such a difference in cost before migrating? How much money goes wasted in such situations?
Managed services have value. It's less to set up, less to maintain, and less worrying about waking up at 3am when something breaks.
I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.
When some component in OP's dedicated server fails, they will find out what that extra DO money was going toward. The DO droplet will live migrate to a healthy server. OP gets to take an extended outage while they file a Hetzner service ticket and wait for a human to perform the hardware replacement. Do some online research and see how long this often takes. I don't believe this Hetzner dedicated server model even has redundant PSUs.
Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.
Hetzner also offers a VPS with superior specs to their old DO server for €374.99/month, or €0.6009/hour. They could just switch to a VPS temporarily while waiting for the hardware fix.
Although since they were running a LEMP server stack manually and did their migration by copying all files in /var/www/html via rsync and ad-hoc python scripts, even a DO droplet doesn't have the best guarantee. Their lowest-hanging fruit is probably switching to infrastructure as code, and dividing their stack across multiple cheaper servers instead of having a central point of failure for 34 applications.
The comparison is somewhat skewed, since they went from an (expensive) virtual server to a cheaper dedicated server (hardware).
One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.
With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.
And hopefully they also got some backup setup.
It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.
I moved from Heztner to DO because my Hetzner IPs kept getting spoofed and then Hetzner would shut down my servers for "abuse". This hasn't happened once on DO, and I'm happy to pay a little more.
> We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.
> Old server: CentOS 7 — long past its end-of-life, but still running in production. New server: AlmaLinux 9.7 — a RHEL 9 compatible distribution and the natural successor to CentOS.
So they did same mistake all over again. Debian or Ubuntu would just be upgrade-in-place and migrate
The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.
Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.
“Your own server in a colo” means going to the colo to swap RAM or an SSD when something goes wrong. You rent a server and the benefit is the rentor has spare parts on hand and staff to swap parts out.
You have to deal with a lot more stuff. You have to order/pay for a server (capex), mount it somewhere, wire up lights-out-mgmt and recovery and do a few more tasks that the provider has already done.
Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.
For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.
Have you done this yourself? If you haven't I think you'd discover server hardware is actually shockingly reliable. You could go years without needing to physically touch anything on a single machine. I find that people who are used to cloud assume stuff is breaking all the time. That's true at scale, but when you have a handful of machines you can go a very long time between failures.
Yes, having done this for decades, it happens often enough that you need to plan for it. You need to have redundancy, spare parts, and staffing or you are basically gambling. All of this has to be tested, too, or you might find that your failover mechanism has dependencies you didn’t plan for or unexpected failure modes (I’ve twice experienced data center hard outages due to the power distribution system failing oddly when switching between mains and UPS power, or UPS and generator).
Using something like AWS can make it easy to assume that servers don’t fail often but that’s because the major players have all of that behind the scenes, heavily tested, and will migrate VMs when prefail indicators trigger but before stuff is done.
If you have failover redundancy of services across your systems of some kind to mitigate then great. With proper setup no worries. I guess it depends how much you want to take on vs hand off.
Congrats on doing this successfully, but your setup is amateur. This would have been infinitely easier if you were using IaC (Terraform/Ansible), containerized applications (that you're not already doing that is madness), and had a high-availability cluster setup in place already. It sounds like avoiding downtime is important to you, yet there's no redundancy in the existing stack at all, and everything is done by hand.
This isn't something others should use as an example.
Ah yes, create db replica, promote replica to primary. Seems so simple!
When I’ve seen this work well, it’s either built into the product as an established feature, or it’s a devops procedure that has a runbook and is done weekly.
Doing it with low level commands and without a lot of experience is pretty likely to have issues. And that’s what happened here.
Just watch out Hetzner don’t fail to take a payment from you from their end then proceed to flag your account for non-payment all while communicating absolutely nothing about this to you arriving at the conclusion they will delete all your servers and ban your account and identity from ever using them again.
Happened to me.
I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.
It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.
Yeah just how it is even outside of the cloud. At some point nearly all companies eventually try to take advantage of inertia and vendor lock in, if you are willing to undertake the pain of switching it's almost always a savings.
And DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me in any other way. But worse, when they do that, they immediately destroy your data without any possibility to restore. Or at least that's what they told me with their bog standard, garbage support replies. I was a customer for nearly a decade. After it happened, I realized that never would have happened on GCP, AWS, etc. Because they take billing seriously with multiple contact info, a recovery period, etc. All the things a company would be expected to do to maintain good relationships with customers during a billing issue that lasts a few weeks. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they fixed some stuff. But the complete lack of support and unprofessional B2B practices was an eye opener.
DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.
Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.
The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.
You could have loaded the Hetzner pricing page and checked - the server in the article is currently listed around $30/month higher. Not enough to materially change the equation
I think Digital Ocean is not something where I would worry about costs. I would prefer server like Hetzner but I don't think DO is service where the costs are such that we need to do movement.
Plus, this is not what DHH was doing, he was not saving few bucks, but unlocking potential for his company to thrive.
It's a nice chunk of change, which you could use for other purposes. It might not make or break the company, but it could pay for something that actually generates business.
If you only have Rs. 100 in your pocket, you will think hard before spending Rs. 10. If you have Rs. 1000 in your pocket, you will not mind spending Rs. 10. That said, even if you are financially sound, why in the world would you want to pay $14k extra for a similar service that is available cheaper? That money could be better utilised elsewhere.
when i save money on something without losing performance or reliability, i feel like a real hacker and money saved is just cherry on top of self accomplishment i feel.
I suspect with that money you could get a full time customer support person for your business. Now think about it, what's creating more value to your customers: having your infra on Digital Ocean or having a better customer support?
You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.
Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:
Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.
Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.
Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.
There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.
Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.
Could I take it down for the afternoon? Sure. Or could I wait and do it after hours? Also sure. But would I rather not have to deal with complaints from users that day and still go home by 5pm? Of course!
But I do agree the poster should think about this. I don't think it's 'off' or misleading, they just haven't encountered a hardware error before. If they had one on this single box with 30 databases and 34 Nginx sites it would probably be a bad time, and yes they should think about that a bit more perhaps.
They describe a db slave for cutover for example but could also have one for backups, plus rolling backups offsite somewhere (perhaps they do and it just didn't make it into this article). That would reduce risk a lot. Then of course they could put all the servers on several boxes behind a load-balancer.
But perhaps if the services aren't really critical it's not worth spending money on that, depends partly what these services/apps are.
Also, in general, you can architect your application to be more friendly to migration. It used to be a normal thing to think about and plan for.
VMware has a conversion tool that converts bare metal into images.
One could image, then do regular snapshots, maybe centralize a database being accessed.
Sometimes it's possible to create a migration script that you run over and over to the new environment for each additional step.
Others can put a backup server in between to not put a load on the drive.
Digital Ocean makes it impossible to download your disk image backups which is a grave sin they can never be forgiven for. They used to have some amount of it.
Still, a few commands can back up the running server to an image, and stream it remotely to another server, which in turn can be updated to become bootable.
This is the tip of the iceberg in the number of tasks that can be done.
Someone with experience can even instruct LLMs to do it and build it, and someone skilled with LLMs could probably work to uncover the steps and strategies for their particular use case.
This is a general response to it.
I have run hosting on bare metal for millions of users a day. Tens of thousdands of concurrent connections. It can scale way up by doing the same thing you do in a cloud, provision more resources.
For "downtime" you do the same thing with metal, as you do with digital ocean, just get a second server and have them failover.
You can run hypervisors to split and manage a metal server just like Digital Ocean. Except you're not vulnerable to shared memory and cpu exploits on shared hosting like Digital Ocean. When Intel CPU or memory flaws or kernel exploits come out like they have, one VM user can read the memory and data of all the other processes belonging to other users.
Both Digital ocean, and IaaS/PaaS are still running similar linux technologies to do the failover. There are tools that even handle it automatically, like Proxmox. This level of production grade fail over and simplicity was point and click, 10 years ago. Except no one's kept up with it.
The cloud is convenient. Convenience can make anyone comfortable. Comfort always costs way more.
It's relatively trivial to put the same web app on a metal server, with a hypervisor/IaaS/Paas behind the same Cloudflare to access "scale".
Digital Ocean and Cloud providers run on metal servers just like Hetzner.
The software to manage it all is becoming more and more trivial.
Even if Amazon was down, if I was planning to buy, I'd wait. heck, I got a bunch of crap in my cart right now I haven't finished out.
Intentional downtime lets everyone plan around it, reduces costs by not needing N layers of marginal utility which are all fragile and prone to weird failures at times you don't intend.
That's a strawman version of what happens.
There have been times when I've tried to visit a webshop to buy something but the site was broken or down, so I gave up and went to Amazon and bought an alternative.
I've also experienced multiple business situations where one of our services went down at an inconvenient time, a VP or CEO got upset, and they mandated that we migrate away from that service even if alternatives cost more.
If you think of your customers or visitors as perfectly loyal with infinite patience then downtime is not a problem.
> Unless you are Amazon and every minute costs you bazillions, you are likely gonna get the better deal not worrying about availability and scalability. That 250€/m root server is a behemoth. Complete overkill for most anything.
You don't need every minute of downtime to cost "bazillions" to justify a little redundancy. If you're spending 250 euros/month on a server, spending a little more to get a load balancer and a pair of servers isn't going to change your spend materially. Having two medium size servers behind a load balancer isn't usually much more expensive than having one oversized server handling it all.
There are additional benefits to having the load balancer set up for future migrations, or to scale up if you get an unexpected traffic spike. If you get a big traffic spike on a single server and it goes over capacity you're stuck. If you have a load balancer and a pair of servers you can easily start a 3rd or 4th to take the extra traffic.
Dealing with over engineered bullshit, that behaved in strange ways that disrupted the service was far more often a problem.
So, yes, redundancy is something that can be left away, if you're comfortable to be responsible for fixing things at a Saturday morning.
Given the downtimes we saw in the past year(s) (AWS, Cloudflare, Azure - the later even down several times, I would argue moving to any of the big cloud providers give you not much of a better guarantee.
I myself am a Hetzner customer with a dedicated vServer, meaning it is a shared virtual server but with dedicated CPUs (read: still oversubscribed, but some performance guarantee) and had zero hardware-based downtime for years. I would guess their vservers are on similar redundant hardware where the failing components can be hotswapped.
= They once within the last 3 years sent me an email that they had to update a router that would affect network connectivity for the vServer, but the notification came weeks in advance and lasted about 15 minutes. No reboot/hardware failure on my vServer though.
The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing
Clever architecture will always beat cleverly trying to pick only one cloud.
Being cloud agnostic is best.
This means setting up a private cloud.
Hosted servers, and managed servers are perfectly capable of near zero downtime. this is because it's the same equipment (or often more consumer grade) that the "cloud" works on and plans for even more failure.
Digital Ocean definitely does not guarantee zero downtime. That's a lot of 9's.
It's simple to run well established tools like Proxmox on bare metal that will do everything Digital Ocean promises, and it's not susceptible to attacks, or exploits where the shared memory and CPU usage will leak what customers believe is their private VPS.
Nothing ever failing in the case of a tool like Proxmox is, install it on two servers, one VPS exists on both nodes (you connect both servers as nodes), click high availability, and it's generally up and running. Put cloudflare in front of it like the best preference practices of today.
If you're curious about this, there's some pretty eye opening and short videos on Proxmox available on Youtube that are hard to unsee.
Also, don't underestimate the reliability of simplicity.
I was a Linux sysadmin for many years, and I have never seen as much downtime from simpler systems as I routinely see from the more complicated setups. Somewhere between theory and reality, simpler systems just comes out ahead most of the time.
They saved money and lost nothing.
Now, if they so wish, they could use a portion of that to increase redundancy.
Usually those articles describe two situations:
Here they appear to be in the first situation. If their setup was running fine on DO and they put the right DR policies in place at Hetzner, they should be fine.As a bonus, Hetzner is European.
If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.
Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.
I know people like FAANG LARPing. Not everyone has budget or need to run four nines with 24/7 and FAANG level traffic.
Not a bad tradeoff for 99.8% of shops out there.
People underestimate how far you can go with one or two servers. In fact, what I have seen in ky career is many examples of services that should have been running on one or two servers and instead went for a hugely complex microserviced approach, all in on Cloud providers and crazy requirements of reliability for a scale that never would come.
If your scaling need is not that high, you can get very far with a single server
If you can tolerate few hours of downtime and some data rollback/loss, single server + robust backups can be viable strategy
Deploying a new docker instance or just restoring the app from a snapshot and restoring the latest db in most cases is enough.
How deep does this go?
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but this kind of astroturfing is a new low and it's everywhere on forums such as these.
It's too bad Reddit allows accounts to hide their comment history now. That was an easy way to identify bot accounts before they started allowing accounts to hide their post history
I'm not. I stick around for the popcorn, and I'm not gonna miss the schadenfreude in a few years.
https://digg.com/
Just noting for fellow just-waking-up people
So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.
Btw this type of grammar error can be found by proofreading your posts with ChatGPT powered OpenClaw assistant.
What’s exciting is how simple cli tools can be so impactful to dev workflows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Sanfilippo
This whole thread is hilarious.
For OP though who is a Turkey-based company and want European region servers anyway, it might make sense.
For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.
We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:
- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)
- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)
- Less cache contention, etc [1]
Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.
[0] https://lithus.eu
[1] I wrote more on this 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867
High availability, in case anyone else was wondering.
My entire stack is.. k8s, hosted Postgres, s3 type storage. I can always host my own Postgres. So really down to k8s and s3. I think hetzner has some kind of s3 storage but haven’t looked into, and I assume moving in 100 TB is a process….
Your post was reasonable until the spam tagline.
Not cool.
I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).
I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.
The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.
If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.
i hardly ever visit their website, everything from terminal.
You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.
Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.
https://docs.hetzner.cloud/
Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.
Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.
And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.
For quite a while we ran single power supplies because they were pretty high quality, but then Supermicro went through a ~6 month period where basically every power supply in machines we got during that time failed within a year, and replacements were hard to come by (because of high demand, because of failures), and we switched to redundant. This was all cost savings trade-offs. When running single power supplies, we had in-rack Auto Transfer Switches, so that the single power supplies could survive A or B side power failure.
But, and this is important, we were monitoring the systems for drive failures and replacing them within 24 hours. Ditto for power supplies. If you don't monitor your hardware for failure, redundancy doesn't mean anything.
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.
I would not have written the post I did if they had presented a multi-node bare-metal cluster or whatever more realistic config.
What do you feel was misleading?
They don't.
And reading the article, they don't seem to understand that.
Erm. I already spelt it out in my original post ?
I'm not going to re-write it, the TL;DR is they are making an Apples and Oranges comparison.
Yes they "saved money" but in no way, shape or form are the two comparable.
The polite way to put is is .... they saved as much money as they did because they made very heavy handed "architectural decisions". "Decisions" that they appear to be unaware of having made.
I agree with the other poster, this is fine for a toy site or sites but low quality manual DR isn't good for production.
Curious what the delta to pain-in-ass would be if I want to deal with storing data. (And not just backups / migrations, but also GDPR, age verification etc.)
i already design with Auto Scale Group in mind, we run it in spot instance which tend to be much cheaper. Spot instances can be reclaimed anytime, so you need to keep this is kind.
I also have data blobs which are memory maped files, which are swapped with no downtime by pulling manifest from GCS bucket each hour, and swapping out the mmaped data.
i use replicas, with automatic voting based failover.
I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost.
Recently, got into postgres, so far so good. Before that i always used RDS or other managed solution like Datastore, but they cost soo much compared to running your own stuff.
Healthchecks start new server in no time, even if my Hertzner server goes out or if whole Hertzer goes out, my system will launch digital ocean nodes which will start soaking up all requests.
Recently, I did it in PostgreSQL using pg_auto_failover. I have 1 monitor node, 1 primary, and 1 replica.
Surprisingly, once you get the hang of PostgreSQL configuration and its gotchas, it’s also very easy to replicate.
I’m guessing MySQL is even easier than PostgreSQL for this.
I also achieved zero downtime migration.
Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.
A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.
It's bad enough living in America without the rest of the world adopting the grift economy.
Absolutely no to this - reason enough to go with AWS or alternatives. And why are ppl willingly giving it to hosting providers?
Unnecessarily exposing yourself to identity theft if they get compromised.
If Hetzner allows you to host something and you use it for illegal acts, they aren’t going to jail to shield you for €10/month.
And if someone want to do illegal things, what's stopping them from submitting a fake ID?
But at least if there is an alternative then great.
As I understand it, they ask only from accounts that check several boxes for common cases of abuse. So basically, personal accounts (as opposed to business accounts) from poor countries (by per capita, so e.g. India qualifies as poor).
Not sure what differs in our cases, I'm based in EU.
AWS and Azure a charging an arm and a leg, but the offered quality is mostly perceived. Most of the bits and bobs they charge for are not providing much value for a vast majority of businesses. I won't even go over the complete lack of ergonomics with their portals.
and mercedes is just like aws in dumb charges. new tires, EUR1000+ for set. replace car keys? EUR1000+
I see you've never actually owned or worked on a German car, especially in relation to even modest Japanese models. Maybe they were a little nicer inside in the 80s and maybe 90s, but "German car" and frankly "European make" is basically synonymous with "big expensive pile of shit that's an expensive pain in the ass when things start falling apart (which they seem to with increasing rapidity)." It's like the disease that plagued British cars for the longest time got contaminated with the German propensity to build overly complex monstrosities.
Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month). Sure it was awesome and "proper". But crazy expensive.
I host it now (and 5 similar things) for free on Cloudflare.
But if you need what AWS provides, you'll get that. And that means sometimes it's not the most cost-effective place.
On the other hand, we have dozens production workloads on Lambda handling thousands of requests daily and we spend like $50/mo on Lambda.
I'm really intrigued by what you did to get to those figures!
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
It's worse than Oracle and they don't even use lawyery contracts.
The technology itself is the tendrils.
What was the config on the receiving side to support this? Did you whitelist the old server IP to trust the forwarding headers? Otherwise you’d get the old server IP in your app logs. Not a huge deal for an hour but if something went wrong it can get confusing.
I'm not against vertical scaling and stuff, but 30 db instances in one server is just crazy.
They didn't say that and the article didn't allude to that. 1 instance with 30 databases.
you can basically go on hetzner and spin up a vps with linux that is exposed to the open internet with open ports and user security and within a few hours its been hacked, there is no like warning pop up that says "if you do this your server will be pwnd"
i especialy wonder with all the ai provisioned vps and postgres dbs what will happen here
So a near 44% price reduction for a 50% reduction in only one of the components. Looks like progression to me.
The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.
For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).
That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
Anyone else doing something similar?
How much latency does this add?
I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.
Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.
Although since they were running a LEMP server stack manually and did their migration by copying all files in /var/www/html via rsync and ad-hoc python scripts, even a DO droplet doesn't have the best guarantee. Their lowest-hanging fruit is probably switching to infrastructure as code, and dividing their stack across multiple cheaper servers instead of having a central point of failure for 34 applications.
One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.
With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.
And hopefully they also got some backup setup.
It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
https://slitherworld.com
My foray into multiplayer games.
And i say it every time they came up: Their cloud UX is brilliant and simple! Compared to the big ones out there.
So they did same mistake all over again. Debian or Ubuntu would just be upgrade-in-place and migrate
Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?
The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.
Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.
At one point in the early 2000's, my brother was soldering new capacitors onto dell raid cards. (I like to call that full-stack ops.)
Most expense is initial setup and automation, but once you get thru that hump and have non-spiky loads it can be massively cheaper
Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.
For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.
Using something like AWS can make it easy to assume that servers don’t fail often but that’s because the major players have all of that behind the scenes, heavily tested, and will migrate VMs when prefail indicators trigger but before stuff is done.
Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?
But it's indeed cheaper with high, sustained workloads.
Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?
This isn't something others should use as an example.
When I’ve seen this work well, it’s either built into the product as an established feature, or it’s a devops procedure that has a runbook and is done weekly.
Doing it with low level commands and without a lot of experience is pretty likely to have issues. And that’s what happened here.
Moving away from the US also felt great.
Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.
Happened to me.
I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.
DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.
Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.
The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.
> $1,432 to $233
a difference of 5/6 in price does not materially change the decision to move between providers, even with a 40% price increase
Cloud is ludicrously marked up.
Plus, this is not what DHH was doing, he was not saving few bucks, but unlocking potential for his company to thrive.
Not everyone likes wasting money.