I have a tiny Hetzner VPS (2 vCPUs, 2 Gb RAM) in their west us datacenter that costs me $5.59 a month. I get 1 TB a month free outgoing bandwidth and unlimited incoming bandwidth, plus additional outgoing bandwidth at a rate of $1.20 per TB. I host my personal project's git LFS server there, a file server, and a Caddy instance that proxies over Tailscale to a more powerful box in my apartment. It's a great homelab architecture and I couldn't be happier with it. Thanks Hetzner!
They still have VPSes with 2G of RAM? I'm checking the cloud price page* and you can get CX23 with 2 vCPU, 4G RAM and 20TB of traffic (seems to say that it's 1TB for US) for 3,49€/month (~4 USD).
You can save additional 0,50€ if you go with only IPv6.
Maybe it's location dependent, I can't get it to show me prices for US.
Hi there, At the top of the website, you should be able to choose euros or dollars and the VAT rate. When people become customers and create a full customer account, we ask them to choose between euros or dollars, and then using the customer's location from their account, we automatically apply the correct VAT. So customers see the correct price on the interface where customers create their orders. But you may have to set it manually on the website. --Katie
Yep, just checked, 2 GB RAM. That CX23 sounds like a great deal, 20 TB of free outgoing is ridiculous. But I live in west us and I rarely hit my 1 TB free bandwidth cap anyway, so the added latency isn't worth it
Regarding Robot, I think that it's completely fine for what it is. I almost never interact with it, and instead just configure my server as I see fit over ssh. Hetzner's value proposition is extremely cheap no frills servers -- you're paying for the server, not the management interface. If you want management interfaces that do a lot of useful work, use a cloud.
I love Hetzner. That said their IPv6 support is poor. A server gets a /64 only, if you want a /56 (allowing 256 container networks) then you have to pay €15. As for virtual networks: they only support IPv4!
In practice this can be made to work but a networking expert can probably explain better than me why splitting a prefix into chunks smaller than a /64, and assigning them to virtual networks within a host is a bad idea.
In Hetzner's specific case: they won't give me one or more additional /72s: only a /56 if I pay for it. Per server.
A container should absolutely not even need a /72. The traditional reason for /64 is for slaac but you most certainly don't need that for one container (if at all honestly).
Why do you need ipv6 on your internal network? Is 10/8 really not enough/overlap? For 99.99% of people it's fine for the internal interfaces and if anything actually simplifies configuration.
The purpose of a network is to allow any two consenting parties to communicate. IPv4 cannot deliver that if either party has an RFC1918 address. NAT is a foul perversion of this foundational principle of the Internet Protocol.
For a lot of use cases a major advantage of IPv6 is to get away from ambiguous rfc1918 addressing.
You can then just put an allow rule between arbitrary v6 addresses anywhere on the internet when you need connectivity without any other hacks like proxies, NAT, etc and the associated complexity and addressing ambiguity/context dependence of rfc1918 addresses.
So fex you can just curl or ssh to your mycontainer.mydomain.net or you can put an allow rule from mycontainer.mydomain.net to a vm or laptop on your home network.
If your containers have a Global Unicast Address then it's possible to look at connetion logs and figure out which container made a particular request, for instance.
"Mittelstand" in Germany seems to be roughly: below 500 Employees, below 50 Million € turnover. Hetzner makes more like 400 Million € turnover but with 300 Employees. So it's technically above it but they are propably a very tight margin buisness. As such i'd say yes.
I would say decidedly yes for Hetzner. Mittelstand can somewhat be characterized by size, but it's mostly that they are more like a family, have different values and more long term thinking than the larger industry and public companies. It's also kind of a brand that many companies would like to attribute to themselves, even much larger companies that like that seal of quality.
Hetzner certainly has this cult-like following mostly because of their low cost.
I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems (I don't speak german and didn't translate the video).
It looks like they're using lots of consumer hardware and very little redundancy; you'll notice that the power supplies are generic ATX units and they're not doubled up. And then they're also running the onboard networking with a second connection which looks like it's for just a management system. Might not even be 10 gigabit networking.
It's interesting that in an era where almost all of the major players are moving toward cable-free arrangements i.e. backplanes with fully integrated power and networking, etc., they're instead opting for the rat's nest of cabling. It must have something to do with lower labor costs vs hardware costs. The amount of density that they are achieving with those systems is also incredibly low relatively speaking.
Same old world thinking.. Google use single PSUs too, real redundancy came from having multiple machines, and Hetzner certainly makes that cheap enough to accomplish on a budget. You can also pay for 10 Gbit as an option with Hetzner, and a bunch of other custom upgrades, but the further you move outside their sweet spot the more it's going to cost.
I think a lot of the following comes the old-fashioned nature. In an age of hyperscalers that want to sell you a private cloud and full stack certification to make it your job to use their software and want to charge you $500/mo for a server with 64GB of ram and decent bandwidth, Hetzner will just rent you a server, relatively cheap.
Amazon has _95 pages_ of EC2 instance types. They have so many products that I literally had to google the name to know what product type to put into the estimator to get a boring server.
What's all that data center best practice get you[1], the customer, if it doesn't provide lower prices and higher availability?
[1] -- I'm assuming you are not Netflix. After some scale all those crazy AWS services are pretty great to have.
Again, I don't speak German, so I'm just watching the video; they have a mix of commodity 1u servers in there as well, so maybe that's their newer stuff?
Their technical support is also quite good, at least in my experience. Any questions I had they easily answered in a way that was easy to understand for me as a technical person. Not sure how it is for a non-technical person. But they might not rent Hetzner.
25 Gigabit networking is mentioned in the video. As for the low density, it might have something to do with their mentioned freecooling concept, which does not use cooling machines, but a controlled stream of air coming from outside.
This summer their Amsterdam DC went down because of the record breaking temperature in Amsterdam. Wondering if they use the same cooling technique there. They did mention it was because of cooling.
They no longer use consumer grade off-the-shelf hardware. They use their own mainboards (yes, custom layouts due to their unique cooling solution). Checkout the video from Der8auer on youtube.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2P8mjWRqpk
The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's unique semi-custom hardware.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/606528332#map=13/50.46220/...
Deleted Comment
You can save additional 0,50€ if you go with only IPv6.
Maybe it's location dependent, I can't get it to show me prices for US.
* https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
Deleted Comment
Robot is a brutally functional tool but it does function (well) and had zero issues.
I like brutally functional it just needs to get me to SSH and I'm good.
At least they're not as bad as Azure... :)
In Hetzner's specific case: they won't give me one or more additional /72s: only a /56 if I pay for it. Per server.
You can then just put an allow rule between arbitrary v6 addresses anywhere on the internet when you need connectivity without any other hacks like proxies, NAT, etc and the associated complexity and addressing ambiguity/context dependence of rfc1918 addresses.
So fex you can just curl or ssh to your mycontainer.mydomain.net or you can put an allow rule from mycontainer.mydomain.net to a vm or laptop on your home network.
Internetworking, they call it.
If your containers have a Global Unicast Address then it's possible to look at connetion logs and figure out which container made a particular request, for instance.
I would say decidedly yes for Hetzner. Mittelstand can somewhat be characterized by size, but it's mostly that they are more like a family, have different values and more long term thinking than the larger industry and public companies. It's also kind of a brand that many companies would like to attribute to themselves, even much larger companies that like that seal of quality.
Deleted Comment
I assume it is a recent push toward these kind of open frame, super minimalist, consumer hardware based systems (I don't speak german and didn't translate the video).
It looks like they're using lots of consumer hardware and very little redundancy; you'll notice that the power supplies are generic ATX units and they're not doubled up. And then they're also running the onboard networking with a second connection which looks like it's for just a management system. Might not even be 10 gigabit networking.
It's interesting that in an era where almost all of the major players are moving toward cable-free arrangements i.e. backplanes with fully integrated power and networking, etc., they're instead opting for the rat's nest of cabling. It must have something to do with lower labor costs vs hardware costs. The amount of density that they are achieving with those systems is also incredibly low relatively speaking.
Amazon has _95 pages_ of EC2 instance types. They have so many products that I literally had to google the name to know what product type to put into the estimator to get a boring server.
What's all that data center best practice get you[1], the customer, if it doesn't provide lower prices and higher availability?
[1] -- I'm assuming you are not Netflix. After some scale all those crazy AWS services are pretty great to have.
If by recent you mean that was how Hetzner has been since start (20+ years ago) then yes