Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 125 posts

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#11

Post by rglullis »

Shakahs wrote: post #3

Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware. > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...

I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud.

Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#12

Post by throw3748859 »

weinzierl wrote: post #9
Xunjin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?

Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.

Hetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company.

US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#13

Post by voxic11 »

throw3748859 wrote: post #12
weinzierl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.

Hetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company. US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!

Software In The Public Interest Inc. (creators of free desktop) is incorporated in New York so they have to follow US sanction law anyways.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#14

Post by [deleted] »

rglullis wrote: post #11
Shakahs wrote: post #3

Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware. > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...

I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if t…

[deleted]

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#15

Post by weinzierl »

preisschild wrote: post #10
weinzierl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.

Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.

Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#16

Post by jmclnx »

RHEL (IBM) is doing well, why can't they provide free hosting and at the same time show off their cloud products ?

RHEL benefits from freedesktop and X, and as a show of good faith they could support Alpine too.

But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#17

Post by plagiarist »

systems_glitch wrote: post #5

Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.

It's surprising to me that Alpine isn't set for life from corporate donations. They're my first choice for laying down the foundation in a container.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#18

Post by mysteria »

Shakahs wrote: post #3

Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware. > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...

Hetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52.

Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#19

Post by bayindirh »

weinzierl wrote: post #15
preisschild wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.

Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?

Do you?

Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware.

On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#20

Post by FpUser »

weinzierl wrote: post #15
preisschild wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.

Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?

I do. I just rent 2 computers from Hetzner. One is main another is failover. If main dies failover kicks in while main is restored on another computer. Still way way cheaper than AWS which I would not touch with wooden pole unless required by client.
Post reply on HN