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Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
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Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#62This 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.
[1] I wrote more on this 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#63What's the HA plan?
Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
They could but then that exchanges cost savings for complexity. You now need to keep them in sync and it is double the cost.
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.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the price, they could buy an exact replica bare metal server and still save money.
> they could 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.
> 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.
What do you feel was misleading?
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#66I 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…
Wow a Claude add embedded into a Hetzner add. How deep does this go?
"ad", with a single "d".
So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#67And 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?
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#69I had to ban the whole DigitalOcean AS.
Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#70I saved about $1200 a year by moving from AWS to Hetzner. Can’t recommend it enough. AWS has kind of become a scam.
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.