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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#441

Post by benjiro »

odie5533 wrote: post #266
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.

Complexity? I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks and I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches. Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.

> I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks

I haven ever setup a AWS postgres and redis, and know its more then a few clicks. there is simply basic information that you need to link between services, where it does not matter if its cloud or hardware, you still need to do the same steps, be it from CLI or WebInterface.

And frankly, these days with LLMs, its no excuse anymore. You can literally ask a LLM to do the steps, explain them to you, and your off to the races.

> I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches

Single command and reboot...

> Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.

Unless your google, overrated ...

You literally rent from places like Hetzner for 10 bucks a load balancer, and if your old fascion, you can even do a DNS balancing.

Or you simply rent a server 10x the performance what Amazon gives (for the same price or less), and you do not need a load balancer. I mean, for 200 bucks, you rent a 48 core 96 thread server at Hetzner... Who needs a load balancer again... You will do millions or requests on a single machine.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#442

Post by MrPowerGamerBR »

matt-p wrote: post #257
codethief wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner FWIW, Hetzner has two data centers in the US, in case you're just looking for "Hetzner quality but in the US", not for "American/Canadian companies similar to Hetzner".

Yeah no dedicated severs in the US sadly. I'm not aware of anyone who can quite match hetzners pricing in the US (but if someone does I'd love to know!). https://www.serversearcher.com throws up clouvider and latitiude at good pricing but.. not hetzner levels by any means.

I haven't checked Hetzner's prices in a while, but OVHcloud has dedicated servers and they do have dedicated servers in the US and in Canada (I've been using their dedicated servers for years already and they are pretty dang good)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#443

Post by mikeckennedy »

spinningslate wrote: post #24

Related: Michael Kennedy moved TalkPython [0] hosting to Hetner in 2024. There's a blog about the move here [1] and a follow up after Hetzner changed some pricing policy [2]. He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too. -- [0] https://talkpython.fm/ [1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetz…

Thanks for the shoutout @spinningslate. :)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#444

Post by bombcar »

torginus wrote: post #338
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…

Yup, I hope to god we are moving past the age of 'everything's fast if you have enough machines' and 'money is not real' era of software development. I remember the point in my career when I moved from a cranky old .NET company, where we handled millions of users from a single cabinent's worth of beefy servers, to a cloud based shop where we used every cloud buzzword tech under the sun (but mainly everything was cont…

My conspiracy theory is that "cloud scaling" was entirely driven by people who grew up watching sites get slash dotted and thought it was the absolute most important thing in the world that you can quickly scale up to infinity billion requests/second.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#445

Post by cameronh90 »

codegeek wrote: post #301
odie5533 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complexity? I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks and I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches. Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.

This is how the cloud companies keep you hooked on. I am not against them of course but the notion that no one can self host in production because "it is too complex" is something that we have been fed over the last 10-15 years. Deploying a production db on a dedicated server is not that hard. It is about the fact that people now think that unless they do cloud, they are amateurs. It is sad.

Doing stuff on-prem or in a data centre _is_ hard though.

It's easy to look at a one-off deployment of a single server and remark on how much cheaper it is than RDS, and that's fine if that's all you need. But it completely skips past the reality of a real life resilient database server deployment: handling upgrades, disk failures, backups, hot standbys, encryption key management, keeping deployment scripts up to date, hardware support contracts and vendor management, the disaster recovery testing for the multi-site SAN fabric with fibre channel switches and redundant dedicated fibre, etc. Before the cloud, we actually had a staff member who was entirely dedicated to managing the database servers.

Plus as a bonus, not ever having to get up at 2AM and drive down to a data centre because there was a power failure due to a generator not kicking in, and it turns out the data centre hadn't adequately planned for the amount of remote hands techs they'd need in that scenario...

RDS is expensive on paper, but to get the same level of guarantees either yourself or through another provider always seems to end up costing about the same as RDS.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#446

Post by olavgg »

darkwater wrote: post #439
rightbyte wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is old is new again. My employer is so conservative and slow that they are forerunning this Local Cloud Edge Our Basement thing by just not doing anything.

> What is old is new again. I think there is a generational part as well. The ones of us that are now deep in our 40s or 50s grew up professionally in a self-hosted world, and some of us are now in decision-making positions, so we don't necessarily have to take the cloud pill anymore :) Half-joking, half-serious.

I'm in my 40s and run my own company. We deliver a data platform, our customers can choose between our self-hosted solution or run it on AWS/Azure for 10x higher cost.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#447

Post by [deleted] »

wredcoll wrote: post #405
Arch-TK wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more likely to fail? The hardware managed by Hetzner or your product? I'm not saying that you won't experience hardware failures, I am just saying that you also need to remember that if you want your product to keep working over the weekend then you must have someone ready to fix it over the weekend.

I mean, yes, but also I get "3 nines" uptime by running a website on a box connected to my isp in my house. (it would easily be 4 or 5 nines if I also had a stable power grid...) There's a lot, a lot of websites where downtime just... doesn't matter. Yes it adds up eventually but if you go to twitter and its down again you just come back later.

[deleted]

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#448

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#449

Post by recroad »

normie3000 wrote: post #92
pwmtr wrote: post #47

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 A…

This is one key draw to Big Cloud and especially PaaS and managed SQL for me (and dev teams I advise). Not having an ops background I am nervous about: * database backup+restore * applying security patches on time (at OS and runtime levels) * other security issues like making sure access to prod machines is restricted correctly, access is logged, ports are locked down, abnormal access patterns are detected * DoS and…

Exactly this. For a small team that's focused on feature development and customer retention, I tend to gladly outsource this stuff and sleep easy at night. It's not even a cost or performance issue for me. It's about if I start focusing on this stuff, what about my actual business am I neglecting. It's a tradeoff.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#450

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

rapind wrote: post #317
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space. When I've needed dedicated servers in the US I've used Vultr in the past, relatively nice pricing, only missing unmetered bandwidth for it to be my go-to. But all those US-specific cases been others paying for it, so hasn't bothered me, compared to personal/community stuff I host at Hetzner and pay for myself.

I've been eying Vultr for dedicated metal in Canada (Toronto Datacenter). How do they measure up to Hertzner? I'm not looking to get the best possible deal, but just better value than EC2 (which costs me a fair amount of egress).

I'd go for Hetzner any day of the week, but if a client really screams "Servers MUST be in North America" I'd use Vultr before anything else, unless the client is bandwidth-sensitive.
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