German discount host Hetzner launches new servers
In this technical retrospective (2013), @oellegaard shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 90 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 83 comments
Currently, I rent a managed server from Hetzner for my SaaS business. However, it has some limitations and I'm thinking about switching to a root server. Thing is, I don't want to deal with security and updates and administration and that stuff.
Can anyone recommend a solution? Is there a good software that works as good as their managed version, e. g. keeps itself updated and has a more or less tight security package out of the box? Or do I need to hire a system administrator?
I do have some Linux/command line skills, but I don't want to put a lot of time in it.
That is some impressive pricing. 32 GB ram, 20 TB Traffic at 49€ / month is cheap.
Is there any way of getting VMware or Xen on thus? I have a project ( http://www.opentestsearch.com/ ↗ ) that currently uses 9 small virtual machines, running some different operating systems and software that can't easily run on the same server. Currently colo has been the only viable option. Cloud servers would be too expensive and no cheap dedicated host I know about support virtualizations systems like VMware or Xen.
As today seems to be advertising day, I'll plug HostEurope, http://www.hosteurope.de/ ↗, another large german datacenter operator from Cologne.
I've got a virtual server running there flawlessly for the last five years. Customer service is amazing (all communication is english and german), and I can only remeber one single downtime for a few hours in all the years.
Be prepared to incredibly unreliable disks. Or better, ask for new disks for your box, even if this will require some additional cost.
Clarification: I had bad experiences with disk reliability, I told different friends, that in turn had very bad experiences including multiple disks in RAID breaking in the same time range.
Be careful and ask support to confirm all the software in your stack will be runnable. We tried to launch an SQL Server (MSSQL) -backed system on one of their root servers and their support said "the Windows licenses we use do not allow installing MSSQL - you will have to buy your own licenses for Windows and SQL Server".