Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

digitalsociety.coop

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 643 posts

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#31

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

eyk19 wrote: post #26

We've experienced something similar: for compute-heavy rendering tasks, AWS just wasn't good enough. EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines

> EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines

Yeah, even when you move to "EC2 Dedicated Instances" you end up sharing the hardware with other instances, unless you go for "EC2 Dedicated Hosts", and even then the performance seems worse than other providers.

Not sure how they managed to do so for even the dedicated stuff, would require some dedicated effort.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#32

Post by croes »

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…

Can you name a provider with 100% uptime? Or is it 100%¹?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#33

Post by cisophrene »

Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.

A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.

The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.

So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.

[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#34

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

bakugo wrote: post #30
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…

Be warned though that, when renting dedicated servers, there are certain issues you might have to deal with that usually aren't a factor when renting a VPS. For example, I got a dedicated server from Hetzner earlier this year with a consumer Ryzen CPU that had unstable SIMD (ZFS checksums would randomly fail, and mprime also reported errors). Opened a ticket about it and they basically told me it wasn't an issue beca…

Yeah, their support, for better or worse, is really technical and you need to send all the evidence of any faults to convince them. But when I've had random issues happening, I've sent them all the troubleshooting and evidence I came across, and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

And based on our different experiences, the quality of care you receive could differ too :)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#36

Post by endymion-light »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #10

You got me with the title and I was curious at first but then I got to the part where it shows the bill and realized this is just toy project.

It's really dismissive and frankly quite ignorant to have an attitude that just because a product doesn't have a massive AWS bill it's a toy project.

It's a rotten attitude, and judging a projects worth by an AWS bill is a very poor comparator. I could spin up a massive aws bill doing some pointless machine learning workloads, is that suddenly a valid project in your eyes?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#37

Post by drcongo »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #27
breadislove wrote: post #19

Hetzner is really great until you try to scale with them. We started building our service on top of Hetzner and had couple 100s of VMs running and during peak time we had to scale them to over 1000 VMs. And here couple of problems started, you get pretty often IPs which are black listed, so if you try to connect to services hosted by Google, AWS like S3 etc. you can't reach them. Also at one point there were no VMs a…

Worth noting that this seems to be about Hetzners cloud product, not the dedicated servers. The cloud product is relatively new, and most of the people who move to Hetzner do so because of the dedicated instances, not to use their cloud.

Hetzner's cloud offering is probably a decade old by now - I've been a very happy customer for 8 years.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#38

Post by eric_khun »

AWS won't raise the limits on our new account (we're stuck at 1GB RAM in Lightsail after 2 months, even though we need to launch this month).

Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise.

Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#39

Post by eahm »

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…

I recently rediscovered this website that might help: https://vpspricetracker.com

Too cool to not share, most of the providers listed there have dedicated servers too.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#40

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

cisophrene wrote: post #33

Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime. A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given the…

> It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.

Even hosting double of everything when you're doing dedicated servers will let you have cheaper monthly bills, compared to the same performance/$ you could get with AWS or whatever.

But Hetzner does seem a bit worse than other providers in that they have random failures in their own infrastructure, so you do need to take care if you wanna avoid downtime. I'm guessing that's how they can keep the prices so low.

> is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated

I think that's a problem in your design/architecture, if you don't have backups that live outside the actual servers you wanna migrate away from, or at least replicate the data to some network drive you can easily attach to a new instance in an instant.

Post reply on HN