Hetzner's new server offer: 1 Gbit, 2 x 240GB SSD, 32GB RAM - 59 euros/month
In this technical retrospective (2013), @rmoriz 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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 97 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 83 comments
Was about time after Hetzner getting hacked the 2nd time.. My friend owns two of their largest dedicated boxes for some years now. His sysadmin is exceptionally good and his pay aswell (250€/h), I mean he can secure that box the best possible way, but he cannot do anything about Hetzner getting hacked.
Now guess how afraid they were when they heard that their project (6y effort) could be in risk.
I mean they have good offers and so on, but I wouldn't trust them after that. That's my opinion, maybe they changed or improved security. However I don't know a better alternative either.
Has anyone run into problems related to Hetzner's servers that use non-ECC RAM (which is most of them)? Reading stuff like [1] has made me wary of using non-ECC RAM for servers, but a lot of people seem to be getting by without it, so I'm not sure what to make of that.
[1] Google estimates that 8% of DIMMs per year will produce an ECC-catchable error: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf ↗
Why is this making headlines? It's European, so you suffer the transcontinental latency, and OVH offers superior dedicated servers in either their North American or European Data centers. EU: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/ ↗
NA(Canada): http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/ ↗
Just moved my startup to hetzner. Used my win 2012 iso image, installed everything without any problem. So far so good. Previously i was on ec2 and azure vm, but those cloud operators have really slow hdd and cpu for twice as much $ (expectable of course). But, because of Hetzner commodity hardware (no ecc, asus/msi motherboards, onboard lan, software raid,...) i had to add special backup procedures, if anything goes wrong, and I'm keeping one Azure VM on standby.
Also have had a great experience with Hetzner, 100% uptime for the 11 months since moving http://www.servicestack.net ↗ over to them. They ended up 1/4 cheaper than the previous dedicated leaseweb server with our redis benchmarks now completing in 1/8th of the time.