Hetzner Cloud
In this technical retrospective (2018), @CSDude 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 Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 579 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 335 comments
Interesting speeds:
``` ------------------------------------------------- nench.sh v2017.06.01 -- https://git.io/nench.sh ↗ benchmark timestamp: 2018-01-23 20:03:56 UTC -------------------------------------------------
Processor: Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS) CPU cores: 1 Frequency: 2099.998 MHz RAM: 1.9G Swap: - Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-112-generic x86_64
Disks: sda 19.1G HDD
CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB 3.249 seconds CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB 5.604 seconds CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB 2.970 seconds
ioping: seek rate min/avg/max/mdev = 32.9 us / 63.2 us / 4.71 ms / 22.5 us ioping: sequential read speed generated 22.2 k requests in 5.00 s, 5.42 GiB, 4.44 k iops, 1.08 GiB/s
dd: sequential write speed 1st run: 391.96 MiB/s 2nd run: 311.85 MiB/s 3rd run: 315.67 MiB/s average: 339.83 MiB/s
IPv4 speedtests your IPv4: 94.130.181.xxxx
Cachefly CDN: 81.40 MiB/s Leaseweb (NL): 134.69 MiB/s Softlayer DAL (US): 6.10 MiB/s Online.net (FR): 88.06 MiB/s OVH BHS (CA): 7.12 MiB/s
IPv6 speedtests your IPv6: 2a01:4f8:1c0c:xxxx
Leaseweb (NL): 92.31 MiB/s Softlayer DAL (US): 4.22 MiB/s Online.net (FR): 79.54 MiB/s OVH BHS (CA): 6.79 MiB/s ------------------------------------------------- ```
Hetzner has an excellent reputation for rock-solid engineering and very good prices. While the cloud providers invested in innovation in software, they focused on optimizing the hardware and data center techniques and engineering (something very German, btw). Now that Cloud is a pure commodity and companies are learning about how to be truly 'multi-cloud' they come out of nowhere with a very interesting proposal at incredible pricing. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems they have built the solution on top of opensource technologies like Ceph (100% sure) and OpenStack (not so sure...). OpenStack and Ceph have been around for 7 years, so they don't have to deal with their (sexy) immaturity of the early days. I miss some key features that premium cloud providers have, like a firewall (security groups), private networks (VPC or SDN style networks), and of course Windows. But the funny thing is that it fits perfectly with my multi-cloud approach, and we are going to test it and if it works, we will move our loads from the AWS Frankfurt region to them. And saving about 80%. Nice move, Hetzner!
I recently tried Google Compute Cloud and concluded it's got almost as awful and crufty an interface as AWS. Almost. What is it with cloud providers, they can't hire a designer? Or they don't take them seriously? This stuff is terrible.
So I'm still sold vs. AWS, and I have to run some nodes, and I think great, I can put the business credit card on a cloud account and run stuff. But then Google refuses to let me sign up because every time I try it says "Unable to verify with this phone number.". This could be because I can only access Google via proxies and they are not in the country of my phone number (China or HK). So perversely I am left in a situation where to get Google to allow me to give them money I have to first open a proxy compute node with another Google account in the jurisdiction my phone number is in, install a proxy, then access them through that. But you'd think they probably block their own IPs, so that probably won't work.
So Hetzner, maybe you got my business.
Good to see Hetzner catching up to OVH. Some crude comparison of their offers:
Hetzner
``` CX11 € 2,96 1 vCPU 2 GB RAM 20 GB NVMe SSD 20 TB Traffic CX21 € 5,83 2 vCPU 4 GB RAM 40 GB NVMe SSD 20 TB Traffic CX31 € 10,59 2 vCPU 8 GB RAM 80 GB NVMe SSD 20 TB Traffic CX41 € 18,92 4 vCPU 16 GB RAM 160 GB NVMe SSD 20 TB Traffic CX51 € 35,58 8 vCPU 32 GB RAM 240 GB NVMe SSD 20 TB Traffic
``` ---------------------
OVH
``` VPS SSD 1 1 vCore(s) 2 Go de RAM 10 Go SSD 3,99 € VPS SSD 2 1 vCore(s) 4 Go de RAM 20 Go SSD 6,99 € VPS SSD 3 2 vCore(s) 8 Go de RAM 40 Go SSD 12,99 € ```
Compared to Scaleway, Scaleway gives you two vCPUs (not one) and 50GB storage (not 20GB) for their entry level cloud server, at around 3€/month.
URL: https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ ↗
The problem with Scaleway is that they are working at capacity and are almost always out of stock.
They are expanding now (and are hiring!), https://blog.online.net/2017/11/13/scaleway-enters-a-new-growth-phase/ ↗
The big difference between Hetzner and all the rest of the cloud servers, is that they start with 2GB RAM for their entry level packages.