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Hetzner GPU Server

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Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#101

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #44
aborsy wrote: post #23

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc). Consider also the cost of components failur…

It's definitely weird that cloud costs which is supposed to be commoditized is differing by 2 orders of magnitude. Hetzner/OVH seemed to have solved the hard part of making the service cheaper but just can't solve the easier task of making the platform usable. Why do I need to upload documents for verification. Why can't I try server for 2 hours right after signing up for the service.

Sure you can. I rented a server and after two weeks decided I don't like it, and got refunded all the money, including the setup fee.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#102

Post by rsynnott »

ramesh31 wrote: post #69

Does every European tech company have some kind of committe that ensures their customer facing website looks like a decrepit ASP page from 2004? I mean what explains this? It's a billion dollar corporation and I am having serious reservations about whether I would even enter my credit card info on this site.

I mean, see also AWS; for a very long time their console looked like something from the dark ages. I think they have largely spruced it up now, though I'm not sure it helped _usability_ too much, and may have actually made it worse.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#103

Post by callalex »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #98
lakomen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is pretty hostile towards foreigners. And don't you dare suggest in their forum that foreign tech is better than German, instaban. Fuck Hetzner

What German tech - AMD, Intel or Nvidia?

Please don’t feed the trolls.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#104

Post by lukan »

lakomen wrote: post #84
happylion0801 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signed up from an Asian country and during signup they asked me to upload a passport copy page. I thought that was weird (I mean no other cloud provider asked for it but okay). I uploaded anyway because I thought it’s in EU so they at least have better privacy laws so they may end up deleting it later from their systems but I immediately got rejected. Not sure why no reason specified. So now they have my passport cop…

Hetzner is pretty hostile towards foreigners. And don't you dare suggest in their forum that foreign tech is better than German, instaban. Fuck Hetzner

I can see a possible scenario, in where rather your general attitude might have been the problem.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#105

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

Propelloni wrote: post #73
formerly_proven wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of residential rates (about 40 ct/kWh) are taxes and levies, not the actual price of the electricity. That's why industrial rates can be less than half of residential rates.

You need to compare prices again. Residential electricity costs are significantly below your quoted rate for quite some time now. I've just checked and the lowest rate I saw was 21 ct/kWh. Most vendors are somewhere in the 25 to 30 ct/kWh bracket.

Large part of their operation is in Helsinki, where electricity prices are a fraction of Germany prices.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#106

Post by fragmede »

tiffanyh wrote: post #62
aborsy wrote: post #23

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc). Consider also the cost of components failur…

Yes. This is what you expect prices to be when a vendor is buying in bulk. Cloud vendors should be like "Costco" (buy servers in bulk and can pass along those savings & this is what Hetzner does) The trick AWS (and other cloud vendors have done), is charge "Uber Eats" pricing for Costco items.

That's a really clever analogy, but is it really a trick? UberEats delivers the food to my door but if I go to Costco I have to make my dinner myself. Sometimes life happens and UberEats isn't just a convenience thing, it's the only way I'll manage to feed me and my crew. I could run a pubsub queuing system and a database myself, but if I don't have to do that, it frees me up to focus on the tasks I'm really trying to accomplish instead.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#107

Post by petercooper »

petercooper wrote: post #30

I've just ordered one to ditz around with. We're early in the process of deploying our own internal server for Mixtral work, but it'll be interesting to see how this performs (in raw terms, almost certainly worse, since we can roll out a 4090 without getting into trouble – but Hetzner has a better connection and handles the maintenance, so..) Order has been accepted but not deployed yet. I'll update when I have some…

I got it after a few hours. You need to install drivers/CUDA yourself, but all very straightforward. Unfortunately due to having 20GB of VRAM, I'm limited to mixtral:8x7b-instruct-v0.1-q2_K but it runs fine, generating at about 40 tokens/s (65 tok/s for eval). As per official specs, it's running maxed out at 70W (being an SFF card).

(I've now tried running the Q4 mixtral which is 26GB. 18GB is on GPU, 8GB through CPU. Gets about 11 tok/s.)

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#108

Post by cduzz »

Dalewyn wrote: post #60
brudgers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy? TANSTAAFL 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction. 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). 3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency. 4. You are your own most important customer.…

>2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means you have something for your money spent.

A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others.

I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates.

I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing.

Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#109

Post by chrisweekly »

brudgers wrote: post #50
aborsy wrote: post #23

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc). Consider also the cost of components failur…

Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy? TANSTAAFL 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction. 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). 3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency. 4. You are your own most important customer.…

> TANSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"

(I had to look it up, figure I'll save someone else yhe trouble)

Re: Hetzner GPU Server

#110

Post by whizzter »

aborsy wrote: post #23

The price of a brand new Dell precision PC with a core i9 13900 CPU (24 cores), 64 GB RAM and 2X2TB NVMe is probably around 2.5k$. It costs tens of Euros per month in electricity to run this PC. The hardware is good to go for some 3 years, before running into various issues (newer CPUs becoming much more power efficient, firmware updates getting less and less frequent etc). Consider also the cost of components failur…

It seems a bit like car leasing, providers gets a bit of discounts for their volume purchases and customers pays a premium (that is still affordable) compared to just taking the entire deprecation cost themselves. The provider then still has something worth a fair bit of cash that can still generate income (through resale).

So if you look at a 2 year horizon and want to keep cutting edge (or prefer operating expenditures to capital expenditures) then it's cheaper whereas looking at a 5 year horizon the capital expenditure will pay off.

Hetzner is very bare-bones compared to regular clouds (a friend who was after performance but wasn't prepared for this ran into some issues when a disk died), so you need some procedures for backup/replication in place but if your procedures are in place then you can save big compared to the regular clouds.

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