Tell HN: I got 10x Hetzner storage at the same price
I had a 100GB BX10 Hetzner storage box for photo backups. I was paying €2.9/month.
Today, I logged into their console and noticed BX10 wasn't listed as an option. The lowest config now is a 1TB BX11 for the same €2.9/month.
Just changed the storage option to BX11 and now I have 10x the capacity for the same price! Had I not noticed, Hetzner would have kept me on a 100GB box for that price.
If anyone here is using that service, check if an unexpected capacity upgrade is available to you.
In this technical retrospective (2022), @lovelearning shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
I've used them for more than 15 years. Their business model started and still is to some degree desktop grade components for cheap servers and they've also added more server-grade components/systems in the last years. Generally their service is good, but there are some tradeoffs. With Hetzner it's mostly network redundancy and sometimes power. I have some experience with DC design and one of the most expensive and rarely used part is creating a fully redundant network layer. You're basically investing for something that you'd use rarely and most clients won't treat is as a differentiation to pay more for it. So even if you get some downtime you won't lose that many clients in the long run. If you are cost conscious and know how to manage your servers you can get a very good value for money with them. A mix of bare metal and some VMs can give you HA and performance. There are some downsides, some protocols are filtered on the network level locally so it may be more tricky to build a fully HA solution, but still it's much better than OVH, their only true competitor currently. Also, they have a Finland DC now, so off-site backups are possible. And the price structure is predictable and you won't get that emotional high of getting those damn AWS bills that always grow.
Thanks for sharing this information. There was at least one other post on HN when we first announced the new prices on 7 Feb 2022. (I think I answered a few questions there.) And we posted it on our social media channels (Twitter, facebook, on reddit (r/hetzner)). We'll also include it in our next monthly customer newsletter. We don't send out this newsletter by default. There is a double-opt in. Here's some general information on our Storage Boxes (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-vs-storage-share ↗), info about migrating to a new Storage Box model (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-vs-storage-share ↗), and how they compare to another storage product we have, called Storage Shares (https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/faq/storage-box-vs-storage-share ↗). --Katie, Hetzner Online
I didn't see BX11 in Hetzner's VPS offerings. After searching I realized it's a different "storage box" product. Looks like they support FTP, SCP, SFTP, rsync, WebDAV, HTTP, and more. I didn't realize anyone other than rsync.net offered SSH transfer for cloud storage. And this is about 1/10 the cost. Also rsync.net doesn't support anything HTTP-based by design[0]. This could be a nice alternative. @rsync do you know enough about Hetzner's offering to give us a breakdown of tradeoffs?
I'm feeling super jealous right now that these boxes aren't offered in the US currently. Anyone know if that's planned? Might be enough to get me off Backblaze/Wasabi. I'd love to have more options than S3 as protocol.
Also Hetzner's VPS bandwidth allowance (20TB/~$5/mo) is insanely good compared to the next best I'm aware of, which is DigitalOcean (1TB/~$5/mo), and that is offered in the US. This might be perfect for a tunneling service product I'm working on. Anyone have experience with how good the speeds are from their US East datacenter?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501103 ↗
I worked out in with a start-up in Berlin that used lots of Hetzner servers. This was around 2017, and we had a good number of outages at the peak of the summer heat where, presumably the cooling in the data center wasn't up to the task and they shut things down... At least that was our theory, since it only ever happened on really warm days and only at the warmest part of the day.
In fairness, we didn't lose any data, but it was a major headache for a month or two.
It is very common among hosting providers to introduce a new cheaper better service without actively reaching out to existing customers about it. Why would they? The older infrastructure is paid for and maintenance on it has a lower cost, and some customers don't want to move anyway because they lack the time to migrate, or don't want to take the outage.
That's why it pays to shop around periodically.