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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

#201

Post by raxxorraxor »

mv4 wrote: post #72

"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits." In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data. There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2] [1] https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-sa…

You just need to vibe configure your server too so that it matches your application.

Seriously, I think for most services Hetzner is the better option. No provider lock-in, easier configuration (you cannot tell me AWS/Azure configuration is easier than system administration, these services change every 3 months and use non-standard tools).

Most services can stomach a technical fault. Recoverability is more important. There are some exceptions to this and that highly depends on the nature of the service. Nobody here described the nature of their services, so we can only speculate.

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

#202

Post by ritcgab »

walletdrainer wrote: post #193
ritcgab wrote: post #179

Looking at the root server hardware page on Hetzner [1], it is not clear if their server is using ECC memory. It would be pretty bad if not. [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ Go to the product pages (Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC)

> Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC

This is wrong - or define "normal"? In their current product line, at least the default configuration of AX52/EX44/EX63/GEX44 doesn't have ECC. It is an upgrade option only.

The blog post says their server has "8 cores Intel Xeon W-2145", which is PX92 or its variant and its base configuration can be without ECC.

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

#203

Post by kachapopopow »

0x073 wrote: post #16
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.

Using hetzner since 5 years never had issues and only 1 downtime in one data center.

I think the issue stems from their poor cloud infrastructure since that's where I've had the most issues the dedicated servers seem fine, that being said 2 years prior I had no issues either so it's definitely something recent.

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

#204

Post by immibis »

lewiscollard wrote: post #93
MaKey wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being overly dramatic. In practice I've seen complexity (which HA setups often introduce) causing downtimes far more often than a service being hosted only on a single instance.

Yes, any time someone says "I'm going to make a thing more reliable by adding more things to it" I either want to buy them a copy of Normal Accidents or hit them over the head with mine.

How bad are the effects of an interruption for you? Google has servers running every day, but you with one server can afford to gamble on it, since it probably won't fail for years - no matter the hardware though, keep a backup, because data loss is permanent. Would you lose millions of dollars a minute, or would you just have to send an email to customers saying "oops"?

Risk management is a normal part of business - every business does it. Typically the risk is not brought down all the way to zero, but to an acceptable level. The milk truck may crash and the grocery store will be out of milk that day - they don't send three trucks and use a quorum.

If you want to guarantee above-normal uptime, feel free, but it costs you. Google has servers failing every day just because they have so many, but you are not Google and you most likely won't experience a hardware failure for years. You should have a backup because data loss is permanent, but you might not need redundancy for your online systems. Depending on what your business does.

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

#205

Post by immibis »

speedgoose wrote: post #129

I wonder how many companies are running databases on non-encrypted storage on Hetzner. Their bare-metal servers don't have storage encryption by default, and I don't know for sure about the VM hosts, as I don't have access, but Hetzner never claims that it is encrypted at rest. And there is no mention of storage encryption in their data protection agreement. https://www.hetzner.com/AV/DPA_en.pdf Also, their data priv…

Indeed, this is something to be aware of.

They are not selling you a magical SaaS solution. They are renting to you a particular physical server on a particular physical shelf. In principle, you could break into the DC and steal your server and lay it on your desk at home and it would operate exactly as it did inside the DC.

Some people accustomed to cloud expect magic from their dedicated servers, which does not exist.

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

#206

Post by rmoriz »

hinkley wrote: post #90
arbol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will be adding additional db servers and running our own replica set eventually. We're just not there yet. Thanks for reading!

But then you’ll be tripling your costs. Business people are weird about numbers. You should have claimed 70% even if the replicas do nothing and made them work later on. This is highly likely to bite you on the ass.

Exactly, this is junior mistake I made too many times. There is a wisdom: Never tell anyone, when you’ve won the lottery.

In technical terms you need to plan ahead. The legacy mistakes are caused by actions in the past and will likely be made again, when you can’t change the strategy or approach to problems. You won‘t get budget for this AFTER you successfully made a change. „It‘s all solved now, we are good“. No.

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

#207

Post by walletdrainer »

ritcgab wrote: post #202
walletdrainer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ Go to the product pages (Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC)

> Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC This is wrong - or define "normal"? In their current product line, at least the default configuration of AX52/EX44/EX63/GEX44 doesn't have ECC. It is an upgrade option only. The blog post says their server has "8 cores Intel Xeon W-2145", which is PX92 or its variant and its base configuration can be without ECC.

Apparently I was wrong yeah, just looked at a lower specced server and foolishly extrapolated from there.

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

#208

Post by urbandw311er »

stopthe wrote: post #157
urbandw311er wrote: post #150

Can somebody explain to me how you would retain vector indexes in this migration to Hetzner? We recently began using Atlas Cloud and I’m concerned about these rising costs — but my understanding was that, if you self-host, you lose the ability to create vector indexes.

Available in community edition 8.2+ https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/product-release-announc...

Thank you!

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

#209

Post by tester756 »

anonymid wrote: post #177

$2700/mo is about 1/3 of an engineers' salary (cost to the business of a mid-level engineer in the UK)... But, there's the time to set all of this up (which admittedly is a one-time investment and would amortize). And there's the risk of having made a mistake in your backups or recovery system (Will you exercise it? Will you continue to regularly exercise it?). And they're a 3-person team... is it really worth your l…

You can get decent eastern eu engineer for 2700$ (after tax) salary

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

#210

Post by 0x073 »

kachapopopow wrote: post #203
0x073 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using hetzner since 5 years never had issues and only 1 downtime in one data center.

I think the issue stems from their poor cloud infrastructure since that's where I've had the most issues the dedicated servers seem fine, that being said 2 years prior I had no issues either so it's definitely something recent.

Which region?

For me: 2 dedicated, 3 vps (nbg1) 1 vps (fsn1)

Fsn is relatively new.

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