Hetzner continues its growth in the US with a new location
In this technical retrospective (2022), @matteocontrini 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 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
I've been using Hetzner for 10 years for a wide variety of bespoke networking services, in-store VPNs for commercial clients, video content distribution, and standard services like websites, mail servers, compute resources, and development servers. All sorts of things. They are one of my largest IT expenses, and I'm happy with their service in many respects.
They're easily my favourite hosting provider!
But their recent reputation around "crypto" [except we make up what that means on the fly] mega-bans is toxic to any business that wants to use Hetzner for reliable hosting of anything mission critical.
Here's how I understand their reputation at the moment. (Clarification from Hetzner would be very welcome!):
A combination of not clearly saying what they will ban, giving zero notice, banning all of a customer's servers at once, blocking access to backup data as well, and providing no recourse to recover (e.g. by stopping running something). So at best they should be used as a cheap backup or compute resource, but it's an uncomfortable risk to use them for something mission critical - a mail server or customer data processing server for example - as long as they keep to this "intentionally vague surprise mega-ban" policy.
They don't seem to ban a lot of customers, but the recent uncertainty affects more. It's not good that a number of customers, including me, simply can't tell if they are at risk of a ban, especially when running novel complex services. Even if they just banned one server and let you carry on operations with the others, that would be a big improvement. Or if they told you what to stop doing. Or if they provided time to get your data off or to correct an issue to their satisfaction.
It's one thing to have a policy preferring nobody runs a blockchain node, or a news or software distribution website which is blockchain-adjacent. Similar perhaps to those places that have a policy against IRC or gaming nodes. It's another thing to not say what the real policy is anywhere and associate it with abrupt mega-bans. The ToS only says mining.
Advice I've seen to someone banned that "you should have taken backups, tough" is mocking: After a ban you can't access your backups which they encourage to keep on their backup service, of course. It also makes sense technically to backup onto another Hetzner server, maybe at a different datacenter. Unfortunately the only safe thing to do is backup outside Hetzner entirely but they won't recommend that until it's too late.
As far as I can tell, there is no place at Hetzner which says what their mega-ban policy really is, and it looks capricious and unpredictable in practice. Different Hetzner staff say different things. The few public responses on this show that they appear to not care to understand the question, which adds to that sense that you don't know what activities are a risk and what aren't. Part of the problem is that peer-to-peer distributed systems in general are being ever more relevant, and look like "crypto" from the outside (and crypto-related techniques underly some technical methods of stabilising p2p networks).
Someone who only runs a website they think is safe will get banned one day under that policy, because it has some crypto news or something on it, or because some Wordpress module uses a p2p client to fetch some files, and they will be completely surprised.
It reminds me of Google and Stripe, where we hear a trickle of randomly banned customers whose lives or businesses are ruined through no fault of their own, with no recourse.
Except as far as I can tell, unlike with Google and Stripe, complaining about a Hetzner ban on Hacker News seems unlikely to have an effect. There is no Edwin for Hetzner. Or is there? Maybe that will change now they have a USA presence :-)
We're a long time Hetzner dedicated server customer currently transitioning from their dedicated servers in Germany to their US Cloud product (for reduced latency) which we can highly recommend as it was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs [1].
The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs after a restart [2], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases.
AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [3] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [4] where you can get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their free CDN.
[1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider ↗
[2] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server/ ↗
[3] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream ↗
[4] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ ↗
I don't like that they're milking old SB servers. I have a 12 year old server there ddr3 RAM, xeon e3 v2, 4x2tb hdd with raid controller. I paid 51€ for this for years, then like a year ago asked if I could get a price reduction. They agreed, down to 35€ but ni backup. Then, 3 months later, they increased prices because "electric cost" and now they'll increase them again because "inflation". So that I'll pay freaking 45€ for soon 13 year old hardware that can break any moment. It doesn't cost them even half of it. The server barely has any load, rarely reboots and they still increase prices. And I can't even run a discord bot because their network is banned. And they keep sending me false email spam positives, from freaking sign up confirmation mails. When you criticize them on their forum you get banned. I had the computer since 2014. It was already paid when I rented it. It had now been paid 4 times over. And they still increase prices.
If there was a similarly priced alternative I'd be gone in a second.
Their idk.. the guy who makes the systems and orders hardware is stuck in the past. Arno or what his name is. I'd rather have 4×2TB than 2×10TB HDDs. I'd rather have low powered cores but more cores than those beast machines. Anything below highest tier is a consumer computer. And that highest tier is expensive, more expensive than comparable alternatives from Leaseweb or similar providers. Connectivity is only good for the country it's in and the immediate neighbors. That's for Germany. The Helsinki DC has an unreliable connection to Europe mainland. 20ms-60ms-80ms latency is not what I'd consider stable.
They are greedy.
They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic.
The most recent and egregious example would be banning users who run cryptocurrency-related nodes, even if not mining, despite only mining and similar activities being prohibited in the ToS. Here's a reddit comment from the official account stating that trading is also prohibited: https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/is_it_allowed_to_run_a_crypto_block_chain_node/ilfoj8u/ ↗
While banning mining is perfectly understandable (the data centers are likely built around an assumption of normal usage patterns and not 100% CPU 100% of the time, and at least one cryptocurrency is infamous for wearing out SSDs with its mining), banning trading bots, proof of stake, and the operation of nodes for blockchain analysis is extremely surprising, even if you have read the TOS. And like in the earlier cases I've heard about, the servers seem to have been blocked without warning.
I really like Hetzner (very inexpensive and generally good quality), but their TOS are difficult and their DMCA is just broken.
The TOS are vague. You're not allowed to "violate the rights of third parties", but they don't have a clear policy on what is a violation. If you review a product and the company files a DMCA, they may or may not say that naming a brand is a violation (I've experienced them coming down on both sides of the issue), when it's clearly fair use.
For DMCA claims, they tell you to use a form to reply, but the responses from the form will not be received and/or read reliably, so half the time you get a follow up email after 24h saying you haven't replied, so they will now manually check resolution and might block your server.
Tech and pricing are fine and I recommend them, legal is an issue, and I'd include some "but only if you're in an industry where DMCA claims are unheard of" caveat with my recommendation.