Live data from Hacker News

Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

twitter.com

111–117 of 117 posts

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not publish the specific reasons why we reject orders. If we did this for every customer, it would be really easy to create a fake account. Potential abusers would quickly learn what to avoid. So we don't publish this information to anyone. We understand that that seems harsh. That's not what we intend. We just want to prevent abuse. --Katie

It's not ethical to withhold this information. I'm sorry it makes it harder for your fraud departments but it's not ok to reject someone and not tell them why. That's all there is to it. I've had this happen to me by banks before and it's shit because the customer has no recourse. They can't advocate for themselves. This practice needs to change, industry-wide.

We know it feels terrible to be rejected. We do. But every online store and service has customers who they reject. The internet can really test your trust in people, and for good reason. Our products are not flowers, or delivered food, or books or music, which are all pretty non-controversial. Even companies that sell these things online reject new customers. Our products, like a car and many other things, are mostly for good, but in the wrong hands, they can be destructive. There unfortunately aren't international licenses for trustworthy sysadmins or an international police agency that can enforce that. So we have to try to do our best using our own systems. People who abuse servers are not always easy to spot. There are, of course, customers who accidentally resemble a fake customer. In the past, we used to tell customers why we rejected their orders because of this. And we had much higher rates of abuse. So we changed our process, and we no longer publish this information. And this has been working better. It's harder for people to create fake accounts with us now. We don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings or cause frustration. --Katie

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#112

Naive question: what’s the difference between this and ec2? (I am already running my personal mail and website on an ec2 instance; is there any good reason to switch?)

Hetzner is a fraction of the cost of AWS. A 8vcpu, 16GB RAM instance is 22€ on Hetzner cloud or $148 on AWS. If you have substantial egress traffic the difference becomes even more pronounced. AWS has a bigger ecosystem of services, and due to AWS's traffic cost you can't cheaply mix-and-match things inside and outside their ecosystem. That's probably the biggest reason to go with EC2.

That 22€ instance is shared cpu, and they do get oversubscribed. The dedicated vcpu ones are more comparable to AWS and at 70€ they are still a lot less expensive than AWS. Then there is the free egress bandwidth (up to 20TB per instance) and unlimited free internal bandwidth.

The main shortcoming of the US deployment so far is no HDD storage available. I hope they can offer that soon, even if no dedicated servers. Their biggest StorageBox plan (basically scp/rsync storage though sshfs works) is 40€/month for 10TB or so. The cloud servers have SSD block storage available but it is .04€/m for 1GB i.e. 10x more expensive (though a lot more flexible) than StorageBox.

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#113

More Cloud providers is a good thing. But I hope more providers start following the method of an implementation of OpenStack that a customer can control. OpenStack has an API and tools which makes it much easier for a customer to start using cloud services in a standard way. Might not be good for "vendor lock-in", but it does let me ramp up on technology quicker. I've used OpenStack in a couple cloud providers so far…

Hetzner has an API that is a lot less complicated than Openstack. It's not that big a deal to use it.

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#115
post #78
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d put myself in the camp of zealous Tailscale customers. I’ve used wireguard for years and Tailscale solved every single complaint I had about Wireguard. Their ACL management could use a lot of polish but moving to them and paying for the service was the easiest decision to make after how well it worked. And the product has worked flawlessly for us. Not a paid advertisement. Just someone who never ever thinks about…

>I’ve used wireguard for years Really for years?

Yes. For years. 2018 I think?

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#116

Anyone know how I can invest/get exposure to hetzner as a business? Doesn't seem to be a public company. I can honestly see these guys becoming a HUGE cloud provider.

Hetzner is a privately owned company, so it's not possible to invest in it. The owner and founder Martin Hetzner is one of the CEOs and is heavily involved in the company. Like with anything, there's some pros and cons to being privately owned. It means our fans can't help us grow by investing in us. And it means we tend to open new locations very carefully, and perhaps more slowly than our competitors. But it also means that we are not beholden to any investors. So if the CEOs decide to re-invest lots of the profits back into the company, they don't have to worry about a board complaining about lower returns. --Katie

Re: Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)

#117

More Cloud providers is a good thing. But I hope more providers start following the method of an implementation of OpenStack that a customer can control. OpenStack has an API and tools which makes it much easier for a customer to start using cloud services in a standard way. Might not be good for "vendor lock-in", but it does let me ramp up on technology quicker. I've used OpenStack in a couple cloud providers so far…

Hetzner has an API that is a lot less complicated than Openstack. It's not that big a deal to use it.

Thanks for the feedback about our API. :) For anyone who's interested, here some more info on it: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/api/faq --Katie
Post reply on HN