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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#41

Post by jakewins »

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…

> 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.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#43

Post by master_crab »

vidarh wrote: post #8
geenat wrote: post #2

Yup. It's very good for the ecosystem for AWS to have good competition. Amazon gets far too greedy- particularly bad when you need egress. Also an "amazon core" is like 1/8th of a physical cpu core.

My favorite Jeff Bezos quote is one that applies very much to AWS: "your margin is my opportunity". Clearly when Amazon realised the enormous potential in AWS, they scrapped that principle. But the idea behind it - that an organisation used to fat margins will not be able to adapt in the face of a competitor built from the ground to live of razor thing margins - still applies. AWS is ripe for the picking. They "can't…

"your margin is my opportunity"

Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments.

To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost).

If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop their prices (or drop them by less relatively) the margins are growing.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#44

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

eahm wrote: post #39
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.

Great website, but what a blunder to display the results as "cards" rather than a good old table so you can scan the results rather than having to actually read it. Makes it really hard to quickly find what you're looking for...

Edit: Ironically, that website doesn't have Hetzner in their index.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#45

Post by Hikikomori »

croes wrote: post #23
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…

Blacklisted by whom?

AWS at least maintains IP lists of bots, active exploiters, ddos attackers, etc, that you can use to filter/rate limit traffic in WAF. Not so much AWS that blocks you but customers that decide to use these lists.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#46

Post by OutOfHere »

The part they never tell you is how Hetzner has a substantially higher unfair risk of account termination without warning. If you are okay with your account being terminated like that with zero notice or reason, then Hetzner is cheap.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#47

Post by pwmtr »

We’ve been seeing the same trend. Lots of teams moving to Hetzner for the price/performance, but then realizing they have to rebuild all the Postgres ops pieces (backups, failover, monitoring, etc.).

We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS.

If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions.

[1] https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-pos... [2] https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#48

Post by mystifyingpoi »

piokoch wrote: post #12

Well, from what see the authors exchanged AWS managed Kubernetes cluster with self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on Talos Linux. Question is if $449.50/month paid for AWS will cover additional work needed for self-hosting.

All the effort that previously wasn't required for operating EKS, but now is required to operate self-hosted Kubernetes, will be pushed to existing engineers as a bit of extra work, with no extra pay.

In the best case scenario. In the worst, some cluster f-up will eat 10x that in engineering time.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#49

Post by yomismoaqui »

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…

You can have reliability with physical servers.

When you pay 1/4 for 3X the performance you can duplicate your servers and then be paying 1/2 for 3X the performance.

I find baffling that people forget about how things were done before the cloud.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#50

Post by bakugo »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #34
bakugo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :…

> and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

To be fair, they probably would've done the same for me if I'd pushed the issue further, but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem with the hard drives (they said one of the drives was likely faulty and insisted on replacing it and having me resilver the zpool to see if it fixed the issue. spoiler: it didn't) I just gave up, disabled SIMD in ZFS and moved on.

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