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? Import duties on parts, maybe? (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.)
We've just finished migrating from Hetzner's dedicated servers in Germany to their Cloud US VM's for improved latency. You don't get the same raw performance as their dedicated servers, but they're VMs are still good performers that still ended up being the best value US cloud provider we found [1]
I'll be sure to take a look, but we're really depending on the "high-spec" part as well as the "low RTT" part. IIRC Hetzner's cloud offerings only go up to 48vCPU+192GB memory+1TB disk, all of which are well below our needs.
We're currently using these at OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/bare-metal/high-grade/hgr-hci... — and we really need the cores, the memory, the bandwidth, and the huge gobs of direct-attached NVMe. (We do highly-concurrent realtime analytics; these machines run DBs that each host thousands of concurrent multi-second OLAP queries against multi-TB datasets, with basically zero temporal locality between queries. It'd actually be a perfect use-case for a huge honking NUMA mainframe with "IO accelerator" cards, but there isn't an efficient market for mainframes—so they're not actually price-optimal here compared to a bunch of replicated DB shards running on commodity hardware.)
OVH also has US East Coast and West Coast datacenters, so you can get a little closer to your customers if you need the latency. Though in my experience, support isn't great for any of the OVH affiliated companies.
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? Import duties on parts, maybe? (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.)