Migrating from AWS to Hetzner • Hacker News Board

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#271

Post by chatmasta » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

kitd wrote: post #253

radu_floricica wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is old is new again. Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost, for very low performance and a promise of "scalability". You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server - and at baremetal costs, you're usually about a year ahead of the curve anyways.

People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.

I can’t believe this cloud propaganda remains so pervasive. You’re just paying DevOps and “cloud architects” instead.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#272

Post by rightbyte » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

realitysballs wrote: post #222

adamcharnock wrote: post #150

I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance. This is down to several things: - Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency - Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying har…

Ya but then you need to pay for a team to maintain network and continually secure and monitor the server and update/patch. The salaries of those professionals , really only make sense for a certain sized organization. I still think small-midsized orgs may be better off in cloud for security / operations cost optimization.

Isn't most vulnerabilities in your own server software or configs anyways?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#273

Post by esskay » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #9

AmazingTurtle wrote: post #4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038591

Less biased view of "Hetzner on HN": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (skipping all comments from this submission) In the end, Hetzner is a provider of "cheap but not 100% uptime" infrastructure, probably why it's so cheap in the first place. As every other provider, if you want 100% uptime (or getting close to it), you really need at least N+1 instances of everything , as every hosting…

You make it sound like they are in some way less reliable or you've got more downtime - neither of which is true. You've got just as much chance of having downtime there as you have with any other provider.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#274

Post by ripped_britches » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

objektif wrote: post #249

Startup founders and employees are you really paying insane bills to AWS? How? We are really paying peanuts compared to other expenses.

Probably depends on what your business is and the LTV of your customers

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#275

Post by whalesalad » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

The struggle is real. A lot of people think cloud lock-in is due to using cloud-specific services like SQS... but its the data. Try and exfil 300TB out of S3 without paying an enormous transfer cost =(

I want to move our infra out of AWS but at the end of the day we have too much data there and it is a non starter.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#276

Post by Macha » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #235

jakewins wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues. I'm not sure if this is a difference between other clouds, at least a few years ago this was a weekly or even daily problem in GCP; my experience is if you request hundreds of VMs rapidly during peak hours, all the clouds struggle.

We launch 30k+ VMs a day on GCP, regularly launching hundreds at a time when scheduled jobs are running. That’s one of the most stable aspects of our operation - in the last 5 years I’ve never seen GCP “struggle” with that except during major outages. At the scale of providers like AWS and even the smaller GCP, “hundreds of VMs” is not a large amount.

If you’re deploying something like 100 m5.4xlarge in us-east-1, sure, AWS’s capacity seems infinite. Once you get into high memory instances, GPU instances, less popular regions etc, it drops off.

Now maybe after the AI demand and waves of purchases of systems appropriate for that things have improved, but it definitely wasn’t the case at the large scale employer I worked at in 2023 (my current employer is much smaller, so doesn’t have those needs, so I can’t comment)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#277

Post by mentalgear » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

No mention of SST.dev running on Hetzner ?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#278

Post by wltr » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #225

AWS and DigitalOcean*: $559.36, Hetzner: $132.96 Perspective: this difference is one hour of US fintech engineer time a month. If you have to self-build a single thing on Hetzner you get as "built-in" on AWS, are you ahead? If this is your price range, and you're spending time thinking about how to save that $400/month (three Starbucks a day) instead of drive revenue or deliver client joy, you likely shouldn't be on…

I’d like to point that exaggerations like $430 an hr (isn’t some average salary) or three Starbucks a day being something everyone casually does, they weaken your point.

As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS, rather than some conversion whether everyone really needs that enterprise tier. Me, I’d prefer to control as much of my infra as possible, rather than offloading it to others for an insane price tag.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#279

Post by tinyspacewizard » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

> Why two cloud providers? Initially we used only DigitalOcean, but a data intensive SaaS like tap needs a lot of cloud resources and AWS have a generous $1,000 credit package for self-funded startups.

So some Kubernetes experts migrated to AWS for $1k in credits. This is madness. That's weeks of migration work to save the equivalent of a day of contracting.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#280

Post by PeterStuer » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #194

lisperforlife wrote: post #11

I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It…

As mentioned multiple times in other comments and places people think that doing what Google or FB is doing should be what everyone else is doing. We are running modest operations on European VPS provider where I work and whenever we get a new hire (business or technical does not matter) it is like a Groundhog day - I have to explain — WE ALREADY ARE IN THE CLOUD, NO YOU WILL NOT START "MIGRATING TO CLOUD PROJECT" ON…

The number of times I have seen fresh "architects" come in with an architectural proposal for a 10 user internal LoB app that they got from a Meta or Microsoft worldscale B2C service blueprint ...