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Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#131

Post by acdha »

Yeroc wrote: post #52
perbu wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

Yes, having done this for decades, it happens often enough that you need to plan for it. You need to have redundancy, spare parts, and staffing or you are basically gambling. All of this has to be tested, too, or you might find that your failover mechanism has dependencies you didn’t plan for or unexpected failure modes (I’ve twice experienced data center hard outages due to the power distribution system failing oddly when switching between mains and UPS power, or UPS and generator).

Using something like AWS can make it easy to assume that servers don’t fail often but that’s because the major players have all of that behind the scenes, heavily tested, and will migrate VMs when prefail indicators trigger but before stuff is done.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#132

Post by joefourier »

electroly wrote: post #39
nixpulvis wrote: post #2

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 ha…

Hetzner also offers a VPS with superior specs to their old DO server for €374.99/month, or €0.6009/hour. They could just switch to a VPS temporarily while waiting for the hardware fix.

Although since they were running a LEMP server stack manually and did their migration by copying all files in /var/www/html via rsync and ad-hoc python scripts, even a DO droplet doesn't have the best guarantee. Their lowest-hanging fruit is probably switching to infrastructure as code, and dividing their stack across multiple cheaper servers instead of having a central point of failure for 34 applications.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#133

Post by timwis »

mariopt wrote: post #128

Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down? You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.

I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#134

Post by grey-area »

mariopt wrote: post #128

Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down? You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.

It depends on the service and how critical that website is.

Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:

Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.

Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.

Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.

There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.

Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#135

Post by cyanydeez »

antirez wrote: post #9

I 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…

Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#136

Post by OneMorePerson »

pmdr wrote: post #94
therealmarv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays. I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption. - OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD - Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service - Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too - Soon age restriction in OS o…

It used to be "innocent until proven/suspected guilty." Now it's more like "let's see that ID, you know, just in case..."

I'm not a legal expert/lawyer but I do think a lot of this is not the company just randomly wanting to do it, but lawyer driven development. No company wants to introduce more friction for no reason, unless somehow there's precedent or risk involved in not doing it. Curious to know what legal precedents or laws have changed recently.

The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#137

Post by daneel_w »

mariopt wrote: post #128

Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down? You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.

They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#138

Post by rolymath »

richwater wrote: post #109
faangguyindia wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not scam, it's like Casino House. Everything is designed to pull your money and make you believe that you are benefiting from it.

Your thesis is that everyone who uses AWS is being duped...?

Probably most are overpaying.

Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".

Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#139

Post by brianwawok »

antirez wrote: post #66
rustyhancock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You forgot that this entire forum is a VC/incubator ad. Its ads all the way down.

Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

#140

Post by OneMorePerson »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #3

It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.

Yeah just how it is even outside of the cloud. At some point nearly all companies eventually try to take advantage of inertia and vendor lock in, if you are willing to undertake the pain of switching it's almost always a savings.
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