Hetzner to Offer First Arm-Based Dedicated Servers in Europe
In this technical retrospective (2022), @dx034 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 234 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 122 comments
Actually this is Hetzner’s second attempt offering Arm-based dedicated servers. They launched the AX10 model[1] in 2015[2]. It seems like they started to use the “AX” prefix for the AMD-based line later.
[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-information/root-server-hardware/ ↗
[2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Guenstige-Rootserver-mit-32-Bit-ARM-Prozessoren-2789321.html ↗
A comparison between the mentioned Ampere Altra Q80-30 and AWS Graviton2:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/arms-race-ampere-altra-takes-on-aws-graviton2/ ↗
A similar instance to the RX220 at Equinix (bare metal) would cost around $1800/month [1]. (8x Hetzner's price)
[1] https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/ ↗
They are definitely not the first
https://www.ikoula.com/en/dedicated-server/raspberry-pi-4-micro-server ↗
Scaleway was the first to offer ARM based servers (non dedicated)
https://blog.scaleway.com/scaleway-become-the-first-arm-based-ubuntu-public-cloud-partner/ ↗ (2015)
Mythic Beasts have had ARM-based dedicated servers in Europe since 2017 (over 5 years ago). They have many Raspberry Pi with POE and NAS (no SD cards). (Mythic Beasts also host the Raspberry Pi web site.)
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2017/03/02/hosting-a-website-on-a-raspberry-pi-with-ipv6-and-ssl-part-1/ ↗
Not sure in what context these are "first" but Equinix Metal has had ARM servers for...definitely many years.
https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/ ↗