Big Hetzner fan, but the EX101 does not feel like a good value compared to the AX101 that they've had for a while. Yes, the i9-13900 is faster than the 5950X, but does that justify half the RAM and half the disk?
Having half the RAM is caused by the fact that both Raptor Lake and Zen 4 are limited to 64 GB of DDR5-4800, unlike the older CPUs (e.g. 5950X) that used DDR4-3200 memory.
Increasing the memory to 128 GB, i.e. to two DIMMs per channel, drops the memory speed, more severely for AMD (DDR5-3600) than for Intel (DDR5-4400).
Overclocking the memory, like in gaming computers, would be unacceptable in server computers.
I rent one AX101 and it has been extremely good value. The thing is so cheap and fast.
However my first one did often reboot randomly and the support wasn’t very helpful. They told me to just rent another one, which I did. The second one rebooted randomly once in about a year. I guess the first one went on auction and still happily reboots.
Hetzner feels like a hard discount cloud provider. I still prefer them over AWS or Azure for non critical workloads that have a little budget.
I'm currently renting around 40 x AX-line machines from them. The random reboots are a real thing, but not painfully so. I would say I see around 5-10 a year on average across all my boxes, so (very roughly) that's one random reboot per 50-100 machine-months.
I asked them about one of the incidents, and they said that the breaker serving the rack had popped. I would guess that is a fairly common cause of this problem.
Another issue is disk failures. They replace the disk incredibly quickly (<1hr) but unless you are willing to pay for a brand new disk they fit whatever they have in stock. Sometimes that seems to be a unit which is itself close to death, and in another couple of months, guess what happens. Mostly they give you something reasonable so it all works out in the end.
Hetzner are a discount cloud provider. For the money, I'm basically delighted with them. The only other realistic option at a similar price point would be to self-host... and I'm not at all convinced that would be worth the hassle.
About 10 years ago when they introduced the EX40 (I think?) those hard-froze randomly every couple hours to days on Linux. But only for some users. They couldn't track down the issue the first few weeks, I guess that's what you get for being an early adopter. They must have gotten (un)lucky during testing and only had setups that worked.
It was first suspected to be certain brands of RAM, so I requested a RAM-swap which unfortunately didn't help. Then a BIOS update which also didn't help. Then someone figured out that nohz=off on the KCL fixed the problem and I had it running like this successfully for a few years. Long after at least one dist-upgrade I remembered that and removed the option again, and the server still ran stable.
There's no real morale to this story I guess, but at least the support is super responsive, and as the root cause wasn't clear at that point didn't hesitate to swap random stuff if you requested so. Also had a faulty HDD last Sunday in one server and requested a swap, which they did within 20 minutes of me opening the ticket.
Because Hetzner is so cheap, if I end up with a faulty server I just order a new one. However that rarely happens, and mostly with the newer products. For me 98% of the servers have been very stable.
I guess it would be good habit to report the server to hetzner though.
> Hetzner feels like a hard discount cloud provider.
Not to discount your experience, but honestly, my experiences with Hetzner support have generally been unexpectedly good. They've been very quick to respond, tend to immediately start on whatever my issue is if I provide enough info in the initial ticket, etc. And unlike OVH, I haven't felt like I needed to call them on the phone to get decent service. Kind of surprising to hear that their solution was just "rent another".
Overall pleasant experience for me, especially given how cheap the servers are. My only real wishes would be dedicated servers in the US or Canada, and possibly something in between their unmetered 1Gbps and metered 10Gbps offerings -- being able to burst a bit higher than gigabit occasionally without paying the €1/TB bandwidth fee would be beautiful.
> being able to burst a bit higher than gigabit occasionally without paying the €1/TB bandwidth fee would be beautiful.
IIRC you get 30tb/month included - so it's not "pay nothing vs pay from first tb" - but I could be wrong - I've not yet had any projects where 10gbps made sense.
> Hetzner feels like a hard discount cloud provider. I still prefer them over AWS or Azure for non critical workloads that have a little budget.
They are a discount provider. In my experience however, this kind of problems are very rare. They pop up now and them. I would just order a new server. In one company I was involved with, hetzner was used from the start and architecture was built around it, and at some point we calculated the costs compared to using AWS or similar. The cost savings were insane.
Hetzner is more hassle, but the question is how much do you are willing to pay to get the hassle removed, and in which way.
Hu, weird. We run 15 AX101 instances, 13 for Elasticsearch and 3 for ScyllaDB, and I haven't had one reboot yet. Though even if they did it would not impact the stability of our databases.
That's just the compute though, not including bandwidth or disks. These come with effectively the equivalent of ~$3k worth of AWS data transfer and vastly more SSD storage.
> just the compute though, not including bandwidth or disks
But including a platform for access configuration, monitoring, deployment, automatic replacement, and many other things. AWS as a whole is not really comparable to getting servers from hetzner. (Unless that's all you want from them, but then you're overpaying for lots of stuff you don't use)
The biggest catch is that you're getting more desktop-grade hardware than server-grade (notice Intel's i series instead of Xeon, non-ECC RAM). Doesn't make a lot of difference for the vast majority of use cases, but something to keep in mind.
You can get server-grade hardware from them, but then the pricing difference isn't so significant when compared to other providers.
If you go with their AMD servers, you'll get ECC RAM which would be the main sticking point for me. ECC memory will be €5.50 extra on their €37 Ryzen 5 3600 (6 core, 12 thread) 64GB RAM server. Even at €43 with EEC RAM, it's still a great deal. It even comes with 2x512 GB NVMe storage.
Yes, non-ECC RAM is an issue, but that's easily upgraded on their AMD servers.
For €63 you'll get a Ryzen 7 7700 (Zen 4, 8 core, 16 thread) box with 64GB ECC RAM and 2x1TB NVMe SSDs. Google Cloud's N2D-Standard-16 with 8 cores (16 vCPU threads, Zen 2 or Zen 3), 64GB ECC RAM, and no storage costs $550/mo. Yes, it's may not be a perfect comparison, but it's also 8x the price - oh, and Google will charge you $0.085/GB for bandwidth that Hetzner throws in for free. Even Google's Spot Pricing is more than double the cost.
I do agree that non-ECC RAM is an issue, but if you're willing to go with AMD servers, it becomes a very cheap issue to fix.
i really wonder how they are housing the desktop grade hardware. im so used to rack and stack servers (1U/2U), but do you really need that big of a chassis for a desktop cpu, a couple ram dimm's and some ssd? what are you're thoughts?
They have ATX cases on shelves. You can take a look at this tour of their datacenter [1] for more insight. ATX cases are visible around the 3 minute mark.
SoYouStart (which is OVH) have a Singapore region, they also have an "Asia" region, but I don't know where precisely that is located - https://www.soyoustart.com/asia/
We use a mix of SYS and Hetzner here and have found them both to be excellent and very comparable.
The catch is they lack enterprise features. No PCI DSS, not more than 25(?!) Servers per Network etc.
Sure you can workaround these limitations, but thats the catch.
I think what Hetzner have done is just specialise in doing one thing really really well and that is their product, they run servers. They don’t offer any of the „cloudy“ vendor lock in things like functions, DBaaS, blah blah but if you want to run a server (VM or BM) they have quite a solid offering. I really like them and use their products in lots of my projects.
Indeed they do but if you look at the product range they offer its still in the "we help you run your server" territory, not in the "this is a service that eliminates Component X of your architecture". I really like the Hetzner cloud!
ECC memory on the Cloud products? I'd like to assume they're using AMD's CPUs (consumer grade ECC support; as everyone should), ECC RAM, and at least mirrored storage. However I'd really like to see such basic features confirmed.
After many years of using Hetzner dedicated servers, I recently started using their US cloud for a project. So far, extremely happy, and it's very cost effective. Even cheaper than Digital Ocean (which I also use extensively).
> They don’t offer any of the „cloudy“ vendor lock in things like functions, DBaaS
Neither of those are lock-in. Postgres is pretty much the same if you self-manage it, or if you let Scaleway or AWS or OVH manage it for you. Functions can be if in a special format (Lambda), but pretty much everyone has standardised on Containers as a Service (KNative/OpenFaaS).
To me, there kind of isn't one. I have generally had very good and fast support, even on the auction servers (which are even wilder in terms of pricing than the ones linked -- e.g., I was paying like 40 euros a month for 40TB storage + a modern i7 and 64GB RAM).
The real 'catch' is the more limited offerings; it isn't the kind of one-stop-shop that AWS is where you can rent 8x A100s in a dozen datacenters while having them manage your database and a billion other things.
But if you just need lots of CPU, memory or storage, don't want to pay exorbitant bandwidth fees, and Europe is fine, they are pretty great.
> It seems like Hetzner is the only company in the world offering these kind of priced, right?
OVH is not quite as cheap, generally, but they have lots of inexpensive offerings, especially on their SoYouStart/Kimsufi lines [1], with much more variety in terms of datacenters, including Singapore and Australia, depending on what you need in Asia/APAC -- likely better DDoS mitigation than Hetzner as well.
LeaseWeb can be really cheap as well. Their public pricing on the main website can appear kind of expensive, or at least not Hetzner-tier cheap, but if you're ordering a decent number of servers, they seem to offer great volume discounts.
For example, through a reseller [2], I've got 100TB of their "premium" bandwidth @ 10Gbps, Xeon E-2274G, 64GB RAM, 4x8TB hard drives, and a 1TB NVMe SSD in Amsterdam that I use as a seedbox for like 60 euros.
Another semi-low-cost provider, depending on what you need, in Asia that is worth mentioning is Tempest.
I believe they are owned by Path.net, and they've so they've got better DDoS mitigation than most other providers without costing an arm and a leg; in Tokyo, $140 will get you an E3 1240v2 + 16GB RAM and $200 will get you a Ryzen 3600X + 32GB RAM, both servers are 10Gbps unmetered.
Not a great option for someone who needs a ton of variety in their hardware, but if you need something high-bandwidth with decent specs in Asia, it's not awful.
[1]: Worth noting that, although unmetered, SYS is generally limited to something like 250Mbps speeds, and Kimsufi is 100Mbps. You do get lucky occasionally and sometimes your server magically has uncapped gigabit, but for guaranteed high-bandwidth servers, the main OVH site is the only option.
[2]: I'm using Andy10gbit, who is fine for my needs - e.g., I don't need to reinstall the OS 24/7 or have instant support since it's just used for torrents. It'd be a bad option for a business, though, since I wouldn't want to be relying on some dude on Reddit if something goes horrifically wrong. WalkerServers is another example of one of the ultra-cheap LeaseWeb resellers.
- EX44: Intel Core i5-13500 / 64 GB / 2x512 GB NVMe - From 44€ [2]
- EX101: Intel Core i9-13900 / 64 GB / 2x1.92 TB NVMe - From 84€ [3]
[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52
[2] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex44
[3] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex101