Now that everyone seems to be discovering Hetzner I guess the countdown clock for enshittification has started ticking, so we have to start looking for the next place to escape.
Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
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Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#412When you use AWS you pay for software. When you use Hetzner you pay for the hardware. Only one can go infinitely more expensive!
With decades of well engineered open source software and some help from AI virtually anyone can run their own bespoke stack on bare metal servers. You need to know a think or two but it is possible.
If you want to go crazy you can also deploy your own agent inside the machines to maintain them.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments. This account's operation was going on development subs complaining about how good Claude's latest model is and how awful it is being afraid of losing one's job to AI. I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but…
I see a lot of these posts on Reddit, too, but I don't think it's actually Anthropic or Claude doing it. It's the same old Reddit karma farmers picking up on the latest trends. They've always combined headlines with ragebait to build karma and now LLM bots make it easier than ever. It's too bad Reddit allows accounts to hide their comment history now. That was an easy way to identify bot accounts before they started…
You can still look at comment history, e.g. https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general I measured this several years back and never looked at virtual servers again. Since CPU time isn't reserved (like RAM is), the performance is abysmal compared to real hardware. https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
That’s a really good article, thank you for sharing. Has anything in the field changed since 2019, or is the situation still roughly the same?
I haven't benchmarked recently, but I believe the situation is roughly still the same. If anything, things might have gotten worse because of more overbooking going on.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#415The "Hetzner is 5-10x cheaper" framing is real but the comparison that actually matters is egress, not compute. A $5 DO droplet and a €4 Hetzner CX22 are both fine for a side project. What kills you on AWS/GCP at small scale is the per-GB egress - once I was pulling ~300GB/mo out of an eu-west-1 ELB and the egress line was 6x the EC2 line on the bill. Moving the same workload to Hetzner or even a single Fly.io region dropped it by >80% without touching the app.
One thing people skip: you also lose AWS's managed failure modes. Managed Postgres, VPC peering, IAM roles on instance metadata - you now own all of that. For a solo project or small team that's fine (rsync + pg_dump | pg_restore has worked for 20 years). For anything with on-call rotations it's a meaningful shift.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#416I migrated from Google Cloud to Hetner beginning of March. I currently have about 9 vms running and I pay a around 130 euro per month. There are very little other fees and generous freemiums for things like networking and storage. I have 3 projects, one LB, a handful of storage buckets, and a private network in one of the projects. That 130 is for everything. Their 40% price increase kicked in shortly after I signed up. It's still very affordable and good value. Their support was very helpful when a few days in I requested additional server quota.
The flip side is technical limitations and reliability. We've had a few network glitches. The vm boot disks are unencrypted (not ideal). And a few other things. Do your homework before you migrate. Most of these things you can DYI around.
I managed the whole migration via Codex orchestrating my Ansible scripts. It made fast work out of figuring out how to do NAT in Hetzner private networks and a few other hairy issues that would have otherwise derailed me for a bit. I got the whole migration completed in two days.
You get what you pay for with Hetzner and it is good value. But if you need more than they offer, you might want to look at other companies. They scale by keeping things simple. This is my second time with Hetzner. We used them around 2013 for a bit. I had six bare metal servers at the time for something like 300/month in total.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#417I use and love Hetzner as well. But you have to go into it eyes open. Concrete example - a month ago I was notified that network infra my systems ran over was going down for maintenance. Public link: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/ff8335b8-6fda-4370-8431-... So, for me that was a production DB, fairly low usage but still. In the end I judged that it was going to take so much time to work around the outage that I…
I have something on Digital Ocean and I receive emails about maintenance windows all the time. So, not an exclusivity of Hetzner for sure.
I don't remember ever having downtime on DO when I was using them.
I used to get those emails all the time, but the type of downtime they were talking about was extremely minimal (the entire point of VPS systems).
The last email I got about possible downtime was increased latency for the UI and API for ~10s last year. The email before that was ~5s of potential lost traffic to a droplet.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#418Yeah, well be careful of Hetzner, I used to love them but I just migrated away. They just shut all all of our VMs over a $36 billing dispute. (~30 VMs we were using for our CI/CD pipeline) We provided them evidence with records of the payment in totality from our bank, they refused to look at it / discuss the dispute, even when we were communicating urgently and just ultimately shut off all our access. We're on Scale…
Hm. Hetzners billing stuff is highly automated - but they usually give you about a month to pay your bill if the credit card payment failed for some reason.
We were on invoice, and yes we had about a week or so of warning, but again, we had done the wire transfer to the full amount, and provided evidence of such.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#41965gb source copied using rsync seems... odd! And more cat than cattle.
Re: Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
#420The "Hetzner is 5-10x cheaper" framing is real but the comparison that actually matters is egress, not compute. A $5 DO droplet and a €4 Hetzner CX22 are both fine for a side project. What kills you on AWS/GCP at small scale is the per-GB egress - once I was pulling ~300GB/mo out of an eu-west-1 ELB and the egress line was 6x the EC2 line on the bill. Moving the same workload to Hetzner or even a single Fly.io region…
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