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Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#31
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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#33

We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?

> 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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#34
post #10

I saved about $1200 a year by moving from AWS to Hetzner. Can’t recommend it enough. AWS has kind of become a scam.

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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#35

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.

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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#36

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.

> 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 o…

For the price, they could buy an exact replica bare metal server and still save money.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#38
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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#39

We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?

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.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#40

> Cloud providers are expensive for steady-state workloads. Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?

We used to run some servers in a colo, we had 4u.

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.

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