Hetzner Launches Three New Dedicated Servers

tl;dr Mini rant (pro dedicated, anti-cloud)

Amazon has done an amazing job of convincing people that their hosting choice is between cloud (aka, AWS) or the higher-risk, knowledge intensive, self-hosting (aka, colocation). You see this play out all the time in HN comments. CTOs make expensive and expansive decisions believing these are the only two options. AWS has been so good at this, that for CEOs and some younger devops and developers, it isn't even a binary choice anymore, there's only cloud.

Do yourself, your career, and your employer a favor, and at least be aware of a few things.

First, there are various types of hosting, each with their own risk and costs, strength and weaknesses. The option that cloud vendors don't want you to know about are dedicated servers (which Hetzner is a major provider of). Like cloud vendors, dedicated server vendors are responsible for the hardware and the network. (If you go deeper than say, EC2, then I'll admit cloud vendors do take more of the responsibility (e.g. failing over your database)).

Second, there isn't nearly enough public information to tell for sure, but cloud plays a relatively minor role in world-wide server hosting. Relative to other players, AWS _is_ big (biggest? not sure). But relative to the entire industry? Low single-digit %, if that. The industry is fragmented, there are thousands of players, offering different solutions at different scales.

For general purpose computing/servers, cloud has two serious drawbacks: price and performance. When people mention that cloud has a lower TCO, they're almost always comparing it to colocation and ignoring (or aren't aware of) the other options.

Performance is tricky because it overlaps with scalability. But the raw performance of an indivisible task matters a lot. If you can do something in 1ms on option A and 100ms on option B, but B can scale better (but possibly not linearly), your default should not be option B (especially if option A is also cheaper).

The only place I've seen cloud servers be a clear win is GPUs.

Question for the audience: if Hetzner's highest-specced bare-metal servers would work great for my use-case, except that my customers are mostly in America and my service is realtime-ish enough that I need a low-latency RTT to them, then what's the next best option? What's the "Hetzner of North America"? (I know Hetzner has US datacenters, but they don't do any dedicated hosting there AFAIK, only cloud hosting.)

Personally, so far, the best near-equivalent provider I've found that actually offers well-specced machines in North America, is OVH, with their HGR line and their Montreal DC. Are there any other contenders?

And if not, why not? what's so hard about getting into the high-spec dedicated hosting space in the US specifically? (I've found plenty of low-spec bare-metal providers in the US, and plenty of high-spec cloud VM hosting providers in the US, and plenty of high-spec bare-metal providers outside the US; but so far, no other high-spec bare-metal providers in the US.)

Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but Hetzner was the best value US Cloud provider we've found [1].

Have been a happy dedicated server customer since 2013, although we've just finished our transition to Hetzner Cloud as latency was more important than better value hardware.

Always happy to see Hetzner's name in lights, DHH also used them when announcing their MRSK tool that they're using to automate deployments as they begin transitioning off the cloud.

[1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider ↗

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL1cV2FXZ5I ↗

Another good low cost provider to consider is WholeSaleInternet.net. Their datacenter is located in Kansas City. I've been colocating and renting dedicated servers through them for since 2005.

Servers start at $9 per-month. A comparable example:

Dual Xeons - 36 cores / 72 threads - 128GB memory - dual 1TB nvme - 5 IP's $80 per-month $0 setup. Setup with dual 2Tb nvme is $100 per-month.

I'm colocating a couple of servers there for $40 per-month each, bandwith is 1Gbit unmetered and comes with 5ip's. A couple 1U's and towers. I recently bought a used 1U server off Amazon for $400. It has 48 cores, 96 GB memory and 4x1TB drives and came with a one year warranty on the components.

Hetzner was solid, but their network was sketchy at times.

I've been using Hetzner servers for ~15 years with multiple clients and employers, and always been disappointed with other providers compared to what Hetzner delivers. OVH with their frequent network level outages, the 2021 fire and so on. DigitalOcean with their way too frequent and long lasting maintenance windows. And AWS/GCP/Azure with their obscene pricing, ridiculous SLA and occasional hour-lasting outages. One application platform I managed was migrated from DO to Hetzner with huge cost savings, much better uptime and insanely much higher performance running on bare metal servers rather than cheapo VMs. If you need more than two vCPUs and a few gigs of RAM, I see absolutely no reason to use overpriced AWS/GCP/Azure VMs.