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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#451

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

esskay wrote: post #273
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that's not true in my experience, and I'm a very happy Hetzner customer and been using them for years, they are a step below in reliability, no matter how much I love them it's hard not to see that.

I've used Vultr for about the same amount of time, and I never got an email that some network switch had a hardware failure and it'll take a couple of hours to restore connectivity, but I've had that happen with Hetzner more than once, in the same time-span. And again, I say this as a Hetzner-lover, and someone who prefers Hetzner over Vultry any day of the week.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#452

Post by bstsb »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #411
hibikir wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers. I've been in multiple clou…

Yeah, clouds are such a huge improvement over what was basically an industry standard practice to say oh you want a server fill out this 20 page form and will get you your server in 6 to 12 months. But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be. And if it mak…

in my experience i can rescale Hetzner servers and they'll be ready in a minute or two

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#453

Post by lazystar »

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…

> In reality, there is significant latency between Hetzner locations that make running multi-location workloads challenging, and potentially harmful to performance as we discovered through our post-deployment monitoring.

the devil is in the details, as they say.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#454

Post by matt-p »

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #442
matt-p wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seems to be broadly the same sadly, but thanks it's interesting to see they're all hovering quite close to eachother.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#455

Post by ldoughty »

abenga wrote: post #291
realitysballs wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This implies cloud infrastructure experts are cheaper than bare metal Linux/networking/etc experts. Probably in most smaller organizations, you have the people writing the code manage the infra, so it's an "invisible cost", but ime, it's easy to outgrow this and need someone to keep cloud costs in check within a couple of years, assuming you are growing as fast as an average start-up.

I think it's completely different ballparks to compare the skill sets...

It is cheaper/easier for me to hire cloud infrastructure _capable_ people easier and cheaper than a server _expert_. And a capable serverless cloud person is MUCH cheaper and easier to find.

You don't need to have 15 years of a Linux experience to read a JSON/YAML blob about setting up a secure static website.. of you need to figure out how to set up an S3 bucket and upload files... And another bucket for logging... And you have to go out of your way now to not be multi-az and to expose it to public read... I find most people can do this with minimal supervision and experience as long as they understand the syntax and can read the docs.

The equivalent to set up a safe and secure server is a MUCH higher bar. What operating system will they pick? Will it be sized correctly? How are application logs offloaded? What are the firewall rules? What is the authentication / ssh setup? Why did we not do LDAP integration? What malware defense was installed? In the event of compromise, do we have backups? Did you setup an instance to gather offloaded system logs? What is the company policy going to be if this machine goes down at 3am? Do we have a backup? Did we configure fail over?

I'm not trying to bash bare metal. I came from that space. I lead a team in the middle of nowhere (by comparison to most folks here) that doesn't have a huge pool of people with the skills for bare metal.. but LOTS of people that can do competent severless with just one highly technical supervisor.

This lets us higher competent coders which are easier to find, and they can be reasonably expected to have or learn secure coding practices... When they need to interact with new serverless stuff, our technical person gets involved to do the templating necessary, and most minor changes are easy for coders to do (e.g. a line of JSON/YAML to toggle a feature)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#456

Post by naasking »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #363
naasking wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Last I checked, stack overflow and all of the stack exchange sites are hosted on a single server. The people who actually need to handle more traffic than that are in the 0.1% category, so I qu…

SO was hosted on a single rack last I checked, not a single box. At the time they had an MS SQL cluster. Also, databases can easily see a ton of internal traffic. Think internal logistics/operations/analytics. Even a medium size company can have a huge amount of data, such as tracking every item purchased and sold for a retail chain.

They use multiple servers for redundancy, but they are using only 5-10% capacity per [1], so they say they could run on a single server given these numbers. Seems like they've since moved to the cloud though [2].

[1] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/stack-overflow-st...

[2] https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/08/28/moving-the-public-stac...

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#457

Post by lazystar »

> In reality, there is significant latency between Hetzner locations that make running multi-location workloads challenging, and potentially harmful to performance as we discovered through our post-deployment monitoring.

found this little bit buried near the end. all that glitters is not gold, i guess

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#458

Post by colechristensen »

bombcar wrote: post #444
torginus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, cloud adoption was driven by teams having to wait 2 years for capex for their hardware purchase and then getting a quarter of what they asked for. You couldn't get things, people hoarded servers they pretended to be using because when they did need something they couldn't get it. Management just wouldn't approve budgets so you were stuck using too little hardware.

On the cloud it takes five seconds to get a new machine I can ssh into and I don't have to ask anyone for the budget.

You can save a lot of money with scaling, you have to actually do that though and very few places do.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#459

Post by datadrivenangel »

blibble wrote: post #282
Aissen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an infrastructure engineer (amongst other things), hard disagree here. I realize you might be joking, but a bit of context here: a big chunk of the success of Cloud in more traditional organizations is the agility that comes with it: (almost) no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc. There is no reason that baremetal shouldn't provide the same customer-oriented service, at least for th…

don't underestimate the ability of traditional organisations to build that process around cloud you keep the usual BS to get hardware, plus now it's 10x more expensive and requires 5x the engineering!

This is my experience, though the lead time for 'new hardware' on cloud is only 6-12 weeks of political knife fighting instead of 6-18 months of that plus waiting.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#460

Post by tracker1 »

hibikir wrote: post #352
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.

A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers. I've been in multiple clou…

Worst is when one of those dysfunctional orgs that does the IT systems administration tries to create their own internal cloud offerings instead of using a cloud provider. It's often worse than hosted clouds or bare metal.

But I definitely agree, it's usually a self-inflicted problem and the big gamble attempting to work around infrastructure teams. I've had similar issues with security teams when their out of the box testing scripts show a fail, and they just don't comprehend that their test itself is invalid for the architecture of your system.

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