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We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

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Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#51

Post by poszlem »

mkesper wrote: post #50
poszlem wrote: post #38

As in so many of these stories, what gets glossed over is just how much complexity there is in setting up your own server securely. You set up your server. Harden it. Follow all the best practices for your firewall with ufw. Then you run a Docker container. Accidentally, or simply because you don’t know any better, you bind it to 0.0.0.0 by doing 5432:5432. Oops. Docker just walked right past your firewall rules, ign…

I don't see the point of using ufw at all as Hetzner provides an external firewall.

If you use a dedicated hetzner machine you only get a stateless firewall. That would be one reason.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#52

Post by izacus »

kachapopopow wrote: post #6

Always consider if 12 hours of lost revenue is worth the savings. Recently hetzner has been flakey with minimum or no response for support or even status updates that anything was wrong. My favorite was them blaming an issue on my side just to have a maintenance status update the day after about congestion.

My Hetzner instances all have higher reliability and uptime than AWS deployments. For years now.

That was an interesting surprise.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#55

Post by MobileVet »

goastler wrote: post #43
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

> Here's how we managed to cut our costs by 90% You could cut your MongoDB costs by 100% by not using it ;) > without sacrificing performance or reliability. You're using a single server in a single datacenter. MongoDB Atlas is deployed to VMs on 2-3 AZs. You don't have close to the same reliability. (I'm also curious why their M40 instance costs $1000, when the Pricing Calculator ( https://www.mongodb.com/pricing )…

> you're going to have multiple outages us: 0, aws: 1. Looking good so far ;) > AND incur more cross-internet costs hetzner have no bandwidth traffic limit (only speed) on the machine, we can go nuts. I understand you point wrt the cloud, but I spend as much time debugging/building a cloud deployment (atlas :eyes: ) as I do a self-hosted solution. Aws gives you all the tools to build a super reliable data store, but…

Thanks for sharing the story and committing to a 6-month and 1 year follow up. We will definitely be interested to hear further how it went over time.

In the mean time, I am curious where the time was spent debugging and building Atlas deployments? It certainly isn't the cheapest option, but it has been quite a '1 click' solution for us.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#56

Post by zzzeek »

it's getting hard to ignore Hetzner (as a Linode user).

Thing is, Linode was great 10-15 years ago, then enshittification ensued (starting with Akamai buying them).

So what does enshittification for Hetzner look like? I've already got migration scripts pointed at their servers but can't wait for the eventual letdown.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#57

Post by mads_quist »

OK guys, running on a single instance is REALLY a BAD IDEA for non-pet-projects. Really bad! Change it as fast as you can.

I love Hetzner for what they offer but you will run into huge outages pretty soon. At least you need two different network zones on Hetzner and three servers.

It's not hard to setup, but you need to do it.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#58

Post by zzzeek »

righthand wrote: post #33
ianberdin wrote: post #27

I’m starting to worry about this Hetzner trend. It can end up to get the price skyrocketing.

We’re just going to end up with everyone moving from Amazon to Hetzner and the same issue will remain. High prices, lockin, etc will appear. We need an American “get off American big tech” movement. Differentiate people! Reading “we moved from X to Y” does not mean everyone move from X to Y, it means start considering the Y values and research other Y’s around you.

Hetzner is German?

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#59

Post by runako »

goastler wrote: post #43
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

> Here's how we managed to cut our costs by 90% You could cut your MongoDB costs by 100% by not using it ;) > without sacrificing performance or reliability. You're using a single server in a single datacenter. MongoDB Atlas is deployed to VMs on 2-3 AZs. You don't have close to the same reliability. (I'm also curious why their M40 instance costs $1000, when the Pricing Calculator ( https://www.mongodb.com/pricing )…

> you're going to have multiple outages us: 0, aws: 1. Looking good so far ;) > AND incur more cross-internet costs hetzner have no bandwidth traffic limit (only speed) on the machine, we can go nuts. I understand you point wrt the cloud, but I spend as much time debugging/building a cloud deployment (atlas :eyes: ) as I do a self-hosted solution. Aws gives you all the tools to build a super reliable data store, but…

> many people just chuck something on us-east-1 and go

Even dropping something on a single EC2 node in us-east-1 (or at Google Cloud) is going to be more reliable over time than a single dedicated machine elsewhere. This is because they run with a layer that will e.g. live migrate your running apps in case of hardware failures.

The failure modes of dedicated are quite different than those of the modern hyperscaler clouds.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#60

Post by tgv »

cpursley wrote: post #42

Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres? I'm legit curious. Is it inexperience? Javascript developers who don't know backend or proper data modeling (or about jsonb)? Is this type of decision coming down from non-technical management? Are VCs telling their portfolio companies what to use so they have something to burn their funding on? It's just really confounding, especially when there's even mongo-api…

I'll repeat it again: you don't always want a relational database. Sometimes you need a document-oriented one. It matches quite a lot of use cases, e.g. when there aren't really interesting relations, or when the structures are very deep. That can be really annoying in SQL.

> when there's even mongo-api compatible Postgres solutions

With their own drawbacks.

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