Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering
In this technical retrospective (2021), @ftonobo 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 172 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 129 comments
We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.
I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.
Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.
The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.
I had actually bought a bunch of M1 Minis that I set up as a video encoding farm. The organization I set it up for moved on, so now I'm sitting with 8 M1 minis. 1 of them is my daily driver, but the other 7 are just sitting there.
I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.
Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?
My experience is only with AWS, GCP, Azure and Red Hat. This pricing for m1 mini seems quite great to me at ~80$ compared to an aws t3a.xlarge Can this kind of instance be used as a server for deploying web apps? I have never tried hetzner. I couldn't find any information about data transfer costs. As someone with predictable traffic and no need for infinite scalability would you recommend such a setup?
This could be an interesting way to run mautrix-imesssage. I wonder if they've got it hooked up to some sort of remote console solution; I've never been able to figure out how to get less-than-wretched performance out of the VNC server baked into the OS.
A Linux based M1 Max with ECC memory (and no GPU) would be a phenomenal server that could run the vast majority of hosting workloads.
Hosting providers would also love it because it's super small form factor and extremely low on power usage.