Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down?
You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.
It depends on the service and how critical that website is.
Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:
Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.
Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.
Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.
There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.
Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.
They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".
I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.
I moved two servers, one from Linode and the other from DO to Hetzner a few months ago, with similar savings. The best part was that the two servers had tens of different sites running, implemented in different languages, with obsolete libraries, MySQL and Redis instances. A total mess. Well: Claude Code migrated it all, sometimes rewriting parts when the libraries where no longer available. Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.
I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments. This account's operation was going on development subs complaining about how good Claude's latest model is and how awful it is being afraid of losing one's job to AI.
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but this kind of astroturfing is a new low and it's everywhere on forums such as these.
The whole internet is like this now, and it's only just getting started. Makes me sick tbh, and I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in.
For those who remember Digg, the recently relaunched a new version and shut it down almost immediately. They were getting hammered with AI bots when it was realized the Digg apparently still has good SEO. The explain it right on homepage.
I was really confused then realized the person you’re replying to misspelled “ad” and you’re moving forward with the premises GP is an ad and this HN submission is an ad and explaining a similar thing where you saw an account on a gamedev Reddit complaining AI is too good so the account is worried they won’t have a job
Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!
This is something we've[0] done a number of times for customers coming from various cloud providers. In our case we move customers onto a multi-server (sometimes multi-AZ) deployment in Hetzner, using Kubernetes to distribute workloads across servers and provide HA. Kubernetes is likely a lot for a single node deployment such as the OP, but it makes a lot more sense as soon as multiple nodes are involved.
For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.
We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:
- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)
- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)
- Less cache contention, etc [1]
Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.
The migration sharing is admirable and useful teaching, thank you!
I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).
I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.
The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.
If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.
Cute; I'd somehow missed ever seeing that one. The omitted con of electric engines (costs way more to build batteries than a gas tank so you're likely to have more expensive storage AND less of it) makes the XKCD joke miss. BUT... since there's probably something that Digital Ocean offers that Hetzner doesn't, that might actually be a very appropriate XKCD for the situation, precisely because there's a tradeoff the XKCD didn't mention. (I haven't used Hetzner so I don't know firsthand what the tradeoff is, but a quick search suggests Hetzner doesn't do Kubernetes so that might be the tradeoff for some people. Or it might be something else, everybody has their own situation).
> Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.
Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.
What are you doing for DB backups? Do you have a replica/standby? Or is it just hourly or something like that?
Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
Hetzner normally advertises their hardware servers as 2x 1 TB SSD, because it's strongly recommended to run them in SWraid1 for net 1TB. (Their image installer will default to that)
Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.
Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.
And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.
For over a decade I ran a small scale dedicated and virtual hosting business (hundreds of machines) and the sort of setup you describe works very well. Software RAID across 2 devices, redundant power supplies, backups. We never had a significant data loss event that I recall (significant = beyond user accidentally removing files).
For quite a while we ran single power supplies because they were pretty high quality, but then Supermicro went through a ~6 month period where basically every power supply in machines we got during that time failed within a year, and replacements were hard to come by (because of high demand, because of failures), and we switched to redundant. This was all cost savings trade-offs. When running single power supplies, we had in-rack Auto Transfer Switches, so that the single power supplies could survive A or B side power failure.
But, and this is important, we were monitoring the systems for drive failures and replacing them within 24 hours. Ditto for power supplies. If you don't monitor your hardware for failure, redundancy doesn't mean anything.
> Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware ...
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
Can you elaborate? I'm coming up with similar designs recently (static site plus redundant servers) but my designs so far assume no database and ephemeral interactions. (Realtime multiplayer arcade games.)
Curious what the delta to pain-in-ass would be if I want to deal with storing data. (And not just backups / migrations, but also GDPR, age verification etc.)
database isn't hard to have HA with, it's actually very easy to do any of this.
i already design with Auto Scale Group in mind, we run it in spot instance which tend to be much cheaper. Spot instances can be reclaimed anytime, so you need to keep this is kind.
I also have data blobs which are memory maped files, which are swapped with no downtime by pulling manifest from GCS bucket each hour, and swapping out the mmaped data.
i use replicas, with automatic voting based failover.
I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost.
Recently, got into postgres, so far so good. Before that i always used RDS or other managed solution like Datastore, but they cost soo much compared to running your own stuff.
Healthchecks start new server in no time, even if my Hertzner server goes out or if whole Hertzer goes out, my system will launch digital ocean nodes which will start soaking up all requests.
It's possible no one will care much if it's down even for that long. I couldn't care less if my HOA mobile app was down even for a week for example. We don't need constant uptime for everything.
Don’t forget that integrity matters as much as availability in many applications. You might not mind if your HOA takes time to bring a server back up but you’d care a lot more if they lost the financial records or weren’t able to recover from a ransomware attack.
If that's the tradeoff they're willing to make, who are you to say that they're doing it wrong?
Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.
A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.
That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.
No, they just don't know what value AWS provides. And honestly you'll never know until you roll out your own Dedicated servers and later you'll wonder why you never did it sooner.
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays.
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
I'm not a legal expert/lawyer but I do think a lot of this is not the company just randomly wanting to do it, but lawyer driven development. No company wants to introduce more friction for no reason, unless somehow there's precedent or risk involved in not doing it. Curious to know what legal precedents or laws have changed recently.
The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.
They have to operate within the laws of the countries they’re physically located in. Those countries want to know that they’re not hosting illegal content, providing services to crime rings, Russia or North Korea, etc.
If Hetzner allows you to host something and you use it for illegal acts, they aren’t going to jail to shield you for €10/month.
Hetzner is like 1/10th the cost of ripoffs like AWS now, the passport data is deleted after verification and I can actually trust this claim coming from an EU company under GDPR that doesn't have any use for my personal data. You can also just bypass the passport requirement entirely by making a €20 Paypal deposit to the account.
I started with DO in 2013 when they offered 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM for $5/mo. For some reason I paid no VAT then, but I do now. Their $4/mo option now is still 512MB, still 1 vCPU, but 10GB SSD. So it's like the last decade of technological progress with regards to RAM, CPU and storage that should either lead to price cuts/spec bumps didn't happen. And yeah, DO got expensive before AI bought up all the memory.
I've had excellent experiences with Percona xtrabackup for MySQL migration and backups in general. It runs live with almost no performance penalty on the source. It works so well that I always wait for them to release a new matching version before upgrade to a new MySQL version.
I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.
Am I missing something? I'm genuinely surprised it was not deployed from the start on a dedicated server. Don't you make a cost analysis before deploy? And if the cost analysis was ok at initial deploy, why wait to have such a difference in cost before migrating? How much money goes wasted in such situations?
Given the premise that zero day exploits are going to be frequent going forward, I feel like there is a new standard for secure deployment.
Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).
That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
I did the same this year. I really liked Digital Ocean though, compared to more complex cloud offerings like AWS. AWS feels like spending more for the same complexity. At least DO feels like it does save time and mental band width. Still though, the performance of cloud VPS is abysmal for the price. I'm now on Hetzner + K3's plus Flux CD (with Cloudflare for file storage (R2) and caching. I run postgres on the same machine with frequent dump backups. If I ever need realtime read replicas, I'll likely just migrate the DB to Neon or something and keep Hetzner with snapshots for running app containers.
I wish we had something like Hetzner dedicated near us-east-1.
They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
I had my fair share of Hyperscaler -> $something_else migrations during the past year. I agree, especially with rented hardware the price-difference is kind of ridiculous.
The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.
For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
When some component in OP's dedicated server fails, they will find out what that extra DO money was going toward. The DO droplet will live migrate to a healthy server. OP gets to take an extended outage while they file a Hetzner service ticket and wait for a human to perform the hardware replacement. Do some online research and see how long this often takes. I don't believe this Hetzner dedicated server model even has redundant PSUs.
Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.
Hetzner also offers a VPS with superior specs to their old DO server for €374.99/month, or €0.6009/hour. They could just switch to a VPS temporarily while waiting for the hardware fix.
Although since they were running a LEMP server stack manually and did their migration by copying all files in /var/www/html via rsync and ad-hoc python scripts, even a DO droplet doesn't have the best guarantee. Their lowest-hanging fruit is probably switching to infrastructure as code, and dividing their stack across multiple cheaper servers instead of having a central point of failure for 34 applications.
I moved from Heztner to DO because my Hetzner IPs kept getting spoofed and then Hetzner would shut down my servers for "abuse". This hasn't happened once on DO, and I'm happy to pay a little more.
The comparison is somewhat skewed, since they went from an (expensive) virtual server to a cheaper dedicated server (hardware).
One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.
With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.
And hopefully they also got some backup setup.
It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.
> We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.
Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.
“Your own server in a colo” means going to the colo to swap RAM or an SSD when something goes wrong. You rent a server and the benefit is the rentor has spare parts on hand and staff to swap parts out.
You have to deal with a lot more stuff. You have to order/pay for a server (capex), mount it somewhere, wire up lights-out-mgmt and recovery and do a few more tasks that the provider has already done.
Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.
For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.
Have you done this yourself? If you haven't I think you'd discover server hardware is actually shockingly reliable. You could go years without needing to physically touch anything on a single machine. I find that people who are used to cloud assume stuff is breaking all the time. That's true at scale, but when you have a handful of machines you can go a very long time between failures.
Yes, having done this for decades, it happens often enough that you need to plan for it. You need to have redundancy, spare parts, and staffing or you are basically gambling. All of this has to be tested, too, or you might find that your failover mechanism has dependencies you didn’t plan for or unexpected failure modes (I’ve twice experienced data center hard outages due to the power distribution system failing oddly when switching between mains and UPS power, or UPS and generator).
Using something like AWS can make it easy to assume that servers don’t fail often but that’s because the major players have all of that behind the scenes, heavily tested, and will migrate VMs when prefail indicators trigger but before stuff is done.
If you have failover redundancy of services across your systems of some kind to mitigate then great. With proper setup no worries. I guess it depends how much you want to take on vs hand off.
Just watch out Hetzner don’t fail to take a payment from you from their end then proceed to flag your account for non-payment all while communicating absolutely nothing about this to you arriving at the conclusion they will delete all your servers and ban your account and identity from ever using them again.
Happened to me.
I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.
And DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me in any other way. But worse, when they do that, they immediately destroy your data without any possibility to restore. Or at least that's what they told me with their bog standard, garbage support replies. I was a customer for nearly a decade. After it happened, I realized that never would have happened on GCP, AWS, etc. Because they take billing seriously with multiple contact info, a recovery period, etc. All the things a company would be expected to do to maintain good relationships with customers during a billing issue that lasts a few weeks. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they fixed some stuff. But the complete lack of support and unprofessional B2B practices was an eye opener.
DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.
Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.
Yeah just how it is even outside of the cloud. At some point nearly all companies eventually try to take advantage of inertia and vendor lock in, if you are willing to undertake the pain of switching it's almost always a savings.
As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.
The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.
You could have loaded the Hetzner pricing page and checked - the server in the article is currently listed around $30/month higher. Not enough to materially change the equation
It's a nice chunk of change, which you could use for other purposes. It might not make or break the company, but it could pay for something that actually generates business.
when i save money on something without losing performance or reliability, i feel like a real hacker and money saved is just cherry on top of self accomplishment i feel.
If you only have Rs. 100 in your pocket, you will think hard before spending Rs. 10. If you have Rs. 1000 in your pocket, you will not mind spending Rs. 10. That said, even if you are financially sound, why in the world would you want to pay $14k extra for a similar service that is available cheaper? That money could be better utilised elsewhere.
I suspect with that money you could get a full time customer support person for your business. Now think about it, what's creating more value to your customers: having your infra on Digital Ocean or having a better customer support?
Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down?
You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.
It depends on the service and how critical that website is.
Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:
Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.
Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.
Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.
There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.
Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.
They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".
I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.
I moved two servers, one from Linode and the other from DO to Hetzner a few months ago, with similar savings. The best part was that the two servers had tens of different sites running, implemented in different languages, with obsolete libraries, MySQL and Redis instances. A total mess. Well: Claude Code migrated it all, sometimes rewriting parts when the libraries where no longer available. Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.
Wow a Claude add embedded into a Hetzner add.
How deep does this go?
I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments. This account's operation was going on development subs complaining about how good Claude's latest model is and how awful it is being afraid of losing one's job to AI.
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but this kind of astroturfing is a new low and it's everywhere on forums such as these.
The whole internet is like this now, and it's only just getting started. Makes me sick tbh, and I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in.
For those who remember Digg, the recently relaunched a new version and shut it down almost immediately. They were getting hammered with AI bots when it was realized the Digg apparently still has good SEO. The explain it right on homepage.
https://digg.com/
I was really confused then realized the person you’re replying to misspelled “ad” and you’re moving forward with the premises GP is an ad and this HN submission is an ad and explaining a similar thing where you saw an account on a gamedev Reddit complaining AI is too good so the account is worried they won’t have a job
Just noting for fellow just-waking-up people
I think it is more the other direction. I asked Claude how to save money on my cloud costs, and it suggested migrating from DO to Hetzner.
Its certainly a choice to accuse antirez of all people
"ad", with a single "d".
So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.
You forgot that this entire forum is a VC/incubator ad. Its ads all the way down.
Come on can you really nitpick grammar when your original message contains: "when the libraries where[sic] no longer available"
Btw this type of grammar error can be found by proofreading your posts with ChatGPT powered OpenClaw assistant.
Ad for which elementary school?
By this logic your most recent comment was just an ad for Netflix.
Not every fscking story has to be about AI.
They really can't help themselves showing how they didn't put any effort doing a thing.
Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!
yeah, everything is about to be repriced.
This is something we've[0] done a number of times for customers coming from various cloud providers. In our case we move customers onto a multi-server (sometimes multi-AZ) deployment in Hetzner, using Kubernetes to distribute workloads across servers and provide HA. Kubernetes is likely a lot for a single node deployment such as the OP, but it makes a lot more sense as soon as multiple nodes are involved.
For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.
We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:
- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)
- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)
- Less cache contention, etc [1]
Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.
[0] https://lithus.eu
[1] I wrote more on this 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867
The migration sharing is admirable and useful teaching, thank you!
I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).
I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
Not sure if I understand what you’re trying to say, but Hetzner's Console works just like that too.
There are two interesting parts in the post.
One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.
The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.
If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.
i've my own flyio style deploy built, where i just use API of digital ocean to roll out my service
i hardly ever visit their website, everything from terminal.
https://xkcd.com/2948/
Cute; I'd somehow missed ever seeing that one. The omitted con of electric engines (costs way more to build batteries than a gas tank so you're likely to have more expensive storage AND less of it) makes the XKCD joke miss. BUT... since there's probably something that Digital Ocean offers that Hetzner doesn't, that might actually be a very appropriate XKCD for the situation, precisely because there's a tradeoff the XKCD didn't mention. (I haven't used Hetzner so I don't know firsthand what the tradeoff is, but a quick search suggests Hetzner doesn't do Kubernetes so that might be the tradeoff for some people. Or it might be something else, everybody has their own situation).
Coolify on a Hetzner server is giving me the one click service experience
> Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.
Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.
https://docs.hetzner.cloud/
What are you doing for DB backups? Do you have a replica/standby? Or is it just hourly or something like that?
Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
Hetzner normally advertises their hardware servers as 2x 1 TB SSD, because it's strongly recommended to run them in SWraid1 for net 1TB. (Their image installer will default to that)
Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.
Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.
And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.
For over a decade I ran a small scale dedicated and virtual hosting business (hundreds of machines) and the sort of setup you describe works very well. Software RAID across 2 devices, redundant power supplies, backups. We never had a significant data loss event that I recall (significant = beyond user accidentally removing files).
For quite a while we ran single power supplies because they were pretty high quality, but then Supermicro went through a ~6 month period where basically every power supply in machines we got during that time failed within a year, and replacements were hard to come by (because of high demand, because of failures), and we switched to redundant. This was all cost savings trade-offs. When running single power supplies, we had in-rack Auto Transfer Switches, so that the single power supplies could survive A or B side power failure.
But, and this is important, we were monitoring the systems for drive failures and replacing them within 24 hours. Ditto for power supplies. If you don't monitor your hardware for failure, redundancy doesn't mean anything.
> Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware ...
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
For the price, they could buy an exact replica bare metal server and still save money.
> they could
They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.
I would not have written the post I did if they had presented a multi-node bare-metal cluster or whatever more realistic config.
> They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.
What do you feel was misleading?
They could but then that exchanges cost savings for complexity. You now need to keep them in sync and it is double the cost.
I agree with the other poster, this is fine for a toy site or sites but low quality manual DR isn't good for production.
You can just run 3 dedicated servers and design your app so that it never fails.
Can you elaborate? I'm coming up with similar designs recently (static site plus redundant servers) but my designs so far assume no database and ephemeral interactions. (Realtime multiplayer arcade games.)
Curious what the delta to pain-in-ass would be if I want to deal with storing data. (And not just backups / migrations, but also GDPR, age verification etc.)
database isn't hard to have HA with, it's actually very easy to do any of this.
i already design with Auto Scale Group in mind, we run it in spot instance which tend to be much cheaper. Spot instances can be reclaimed anytime, so you need to keep this is kind.
I also have data blobs which are memory maped files, which are swapped with no downtime by pulling manifest from GCS bucket each hour, and swapping out the mmaped data.
i use replicas, with automatic voting based failover.
I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost.
Recently, got into postgres, so far so good. Before that i always used RDS or other managed solution like Datastore, but they cost soo much compared to running your own stuff.
Healthchecks start new server in no time, even if my Hertzner server goes out or if whole Hertzer goes out, my system will launch digital ocean nodes which will start soaking up all requests.
It's possible no one will care much if it's down even for that long. I couldn't care less if my HOA mobile app was down even for a week for example. We don't need constant uptime for everything.
Don’t forget that integrity matters as much as availability in many applications. You might not mind if your HOA takes time to bring a server back up but you’d care a lot more if they lost the financial records or weren’t able to recover from a ransomware attack.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but having an HOA app go down around the time when dues need to be paid could be a serious issue.
The easiest I’ve done is in MongoDB replication, sharding, failover, and all that is super easy.
Recently, I did it in PostgreSQL using pg_auto_failover. I have 1 monitor node, 1 primary, and 1 replica.
Surprisingly, once you get the hang of PostgreSQL configuration and its gotchas, it’s also very easy to replicate.
I’m guessing MySQL is even easier than PostgreSQL for this.
I also achieved zero downtime migration.
Replication is not a backup. It helps for migrations or clean single node failures but not human error, corruption, or an attack.
If that's the tradeoff they're willing to make, who are you to say that they're doing it wrong?
Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.
A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.
I saved about $1200 a year by moving from AWS to Hetzner. Can’t recommend it enough. AWS has kind of become a scam.
That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.
Scam? You mostly get what you pay for.
Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month). Sure it was awesome and "proper". But crazy expensive.
I host it now (and 5 similar things) for free on Cloudflare.
But if you need what AWS provides, you'll get that. And that means sometimes it's not the most cost-effective place.
it's not scam, it's like Casino House. Everything is designed to pull your money and make you believe that you are benefiting from it.
Your thesis is that everyone who uses AWS is being duped...?
No, they just don't know what value AWS provides. And honestly you'll never know until you roll out your own Dedicated servers and later you'll wonder why you never did it sooner.
Probably most are overpaying.
Cloud used to be marketed for scalability. "Netflix can scale up when people are watching, and scale down at night".
Then the blogosphere and astroturfing got everyone else on board. How can $5 on amazon get you less than what you got from almost any VPS (VDS) provider 10 years ago?
Hetzner Cloud or their VPS offerings?
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.
Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.
Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.
Anything worse about the service?
AWS has always been a scam.
It's worse than Oracle and they don't even use lawyery contracts.
The technology itself is the tendrils.
AWS only requires a card from me. I tried registering at Hetzner and they wanted a picture of my passport.
That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays.
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
It used to be "innocent until proven/suspected guilty." Now it's more like "let's see that ID, you know, just in case..."
I'm not a legal expert/lawyer but I do think a lot of this is not the company just randomly wanting to do it, but lawyer driven development. No company wants to introduce more friction for no reason, unless somehow there's precedent or risk involved in not doing it. Curious to know what legal precedents or laws have changed recently.
The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.
Im in DO and tried to open an account in Heztner. It wont accept my Visa card (which is use to pay DO). So no business from me.
I signed up for Hetzner a few weeks ago and didn't have to provide any ID. I pay by credit card.
Not sure what differs in our cases, I'm based in EU.
That's nuts. Why do they want a pic of your passport.
Absolutely no to this - reason enough to go with AWS or alternatives. And why are ppl willingly giving it to hosting provider?
Unnecessarily exposing yourself to identity theft if they get compromised.
They have to operate within the laws of the countries they’re physically located in. Those countries want to know that they’re not hosting illegal content, providing services to crime rings, Russia or North Korea, etc.
If Hetzner allows you to host something and you use it for illegal acts, they aren’t going to jail to shield you for €10/month.
Hetzner is like 1/10th the cost of ripoffs like AWS now, the passport data is deleted after verification and I can actually trust this claim coming from an EU company under GDPR that doesn't have any use for my personal data. You can also just bypass the passport requirement entirely by making a €20 Paypal deposit to the account.
i don't do anything bad and my passport isn't exactly any secret, i gladly submit it too Hetzner.
I started with DO in 2013 when they offered 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM for $5/mo. For some reason I paid no VAT then, but I do now. Their $4/mo option now is still 512MB, still 1 vCPU, but 10GB SSD. So it's like the last decade of technological progress with regards to RAM, CPU and storage that should either lead to price cuts/spec bumps didn't happen. And yeah, DO got expensive before AI bought up all the memory.
I've had excellent experiences with Percona xtrabackup for MySQL migration and backups in general. It runs live with almost no performance penalty on the source. It works so well that I always wait for them to release a new matching version before upgrade to a new MySQL version.
I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.
Migrated from OVH to Hezner last Winter too, 0 downtime since, rolling backup running fine and lower bill too.
Am I missing something? I'm genuinely surprised it was not deployed from the start on a dedicated server. Don't you make a cost analysis before deploy? And if the cost analysis was ok at initial deploy, why wait to have such a difference in cost before migrating? How much money goes wasted in such situations?
Given the premise that zero day exploits are going to be frequent going forward, I feel like there is a new standard for secure deployment.
Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).
That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
Anyone else doing something similar?
> For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
How much latency does this add?
When you find a gold, why tell everyone where it is? Silent happiness keeps the benefits:)
I did the same this year. I really liked Digital Ocean though, compared to more complex cloud offerings like AWS. AWS feels like spending more for the same complexity. At least DO feels like it does save time and mental band width. Still though, the performance of cloud VPS is abysmal for the price. I'm now on Hetzner + K3's plus Flux CD (with Cloudflare for file storage (R2) and caching. I run postgres on the same machine with frequent dump backups. If I ever need realtime read replicas, I'll likely just migrate the DB to Neon or something and keep Hetzner with snapshots for running app containers.
Super happy customer for about 5 years now..
And i say it every time they came up: Their cloud UX is brilliant and simple! Compared to the big ones out there.
I wish we had something like Hetzner dedicated near us-east-1.
They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
Try OVH Canada they have good prices and service
Depending upon the nature of the data, they may need to keep it within the US.
I had my fair share of Hyperscaler -> $something_else migrations during the past year. I agree, especially with rented hardware the price-difference is kind of ridiculous.
The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.
For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
Love Hetzner. Cheapest prices in all the land (aside from Hosting your own server) from what I’ve gathered online. Host:
https://slitherworld.com
My foray into multiplayer games.
We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
When some component in OP's dedicated server fails, they will find out what that extra DO money was going toward. The DO droplet will live migrate to a healthy server. OP gets to take an extended outage while they file a Hetzner service ticket and wait for a human to perform the hardware replacement. Do some online research and see how long this often takes. I don't believe this Hetzner dedicated server model even has redundant PSUs.
Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.
Hetzner also offers a VPS with superior specs to their old DO server for €374.99/month, or €0.6009/hour. They could just switch to a VPS temporarily while waiting for the hardware fix.
Although since they were running a LEMP server stack manually and did their migration by copying all files in /var/www/html via rsync and ad-hoc python scripts, even a DO droplet doesn't have the best guarantee. Their lowest-hanging fruit is probably switching to infrastructure as code, and dividing their stack across multiple cheaper servers instead of having a central point of failure for 34 applications.
I moved from Heztner to DO because my Hetzner IPs kept getting spoofed and then Hetzner would shut down my servers for "abuse". This hasn't happened once on DO, and I'm happy to pay a little more.
Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, Clouding, Upcloud...
The comparison is somewhat skewed, since they went from an (expensive) virtual server to a cheaper dedicated server (hardware).
One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.
With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.
And hopefully they also got some backup setup.
It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.
> We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
yeah we did the same, however we also run an identical backup server in a different data center so we can switch over in matter of minutes if needed.
> Cloud providers are expensive for steady-state workloads.
Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?
We used to run some servers in a colo, we had 4u.
The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.
Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.
> and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware
At one point in the early 2000's, my brother was soldering new capacitors onto dell raid cards. (I like to call that full-stack ops.)
Does dedicated hetzner servers handle this?
“Your own server in a colo” means going to the colo to swap RAM or an SSD when something goes wrong. You rent a server and the benefit is the rentor has spare parts on hand and staff to swap parts out.
You can also pay smart hands to do that. My experience with Equinix for example it's been great.
It's also expensive (redundant server hardware, xconnect, power, firewall(s), PSU access, smart hands, sysadmin).
But it's indeed cheaper with high, sustained workloads.
You have to deal with a lot more stuff. You have to order/pay for a server (capex), mount it somewhere, wire up lights-out-mgmt and recovery and do a few more tasks that the provider has already done.
Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.
For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.
Have you done this yourself? If you haven't I think you'd discover server hardware is actually shockingly reliable. You could go years without needing to physically touch anything on a single machine. I find that people who are used to cloud assume stuff is breaking all the time. That's true at scale, but when you have a handful of machines you can go a very long time between failures.
Yes, having done this for decades, it happens often enough that you need to plan for it. You need to have redundancy, spare parts, and staffing or you are basically gambling. All of this has to be tested, too, or you might find that your failover mechanism has dependencies you didn’t plan for or unexpected failure modes (I’ve twice experienced data center hard outages due to the power distribution system failing oddly when switching between mains and UPS power, or UPS and generator).
Using something like AWS can make it easy to assume that servers don’t fail often but that’s because the major players have all of that behind the scenes, heavily tested, and will migrate VMs when prefail indicators trigger but before stuff is done.
If you have failover redundancy of services across your systems of some kind to mitigate then great. With proper setup no worries. I guess it depends how much you want to take on vs hand off.
> why not your own server in a colo?
Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?
I Guess hetzner is basically "your server in colo"
Hey, congrats! What city do you live in?
Just watch out Hetzner don’t fail to take a payment from you from their end then proceed to flag your account for non-payment all while communicating absolutely nothing about this to you arriving at the conclusion they will delete all your servers and ban your account and identity from ever using them again.
Happened to me.
I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.
What's the HA plan?
Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?
I had to ban the whole DigitalOcean AS.
Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.
I moved my VPS from Rackspace to Hertzner. From $120/mo to $35.
Moving away from the US also felt great.
I use OVH btw.
I hope your backups are in order.
When I hear OVH I immediately think about their burning datacenters …
You guys have backups, right?
And DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me in any other way. But worse, when they do that, they immediately destroy your data without any possibility to restore. Or at least that's what they told me with their bog standard, garbage support replies. I was a customer for nearly a decade. After it happened, I realized that never would have happened on GCP, AWS, etc. Because they take billing seriously with multiple contact info, a recovery period, etc. All the things a company would be expected to do to maintain good relationships with customers during a billing issue that lasts a few weeks. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they fixed some stuff. But the complete lack of support and unprofessional B2B practices was an eye opener.
DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.
Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
I got blocked for non reason on DigitalOcean.
100
It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.
Yeah just how it is even outside of the cloud. At some point nearly all companies eventually try to take advantage of inertia and vendor lock in, if you are willing to undertake the pain of switching it's almost always a savings.
Where did you migrate out to?
Hetzner. Vultr.
Didn't Hetzner prices increase 30-40% recently? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145
As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.
The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.
You could have loaded the Hetzner pricing page and checked - the server in the article is currently listed around $30/month higher. Not enough to materially change the equation
without looking at either the article or the pricing pages, on any of the relevant providers, just what's on the title of this thread and your comment
> $1,432 to $233
a difference of 5/6 in price does not materially change the decision to move between providers, even with a 40% price increase
Now consider that DO is reasonably priced compared to the big three cloud providers.
Cloud is ludicrously marked up.
I always appreciate savings posts, but is $14k USD annual really make or break for a Turkish business? I would not know.
That's not the point. You should be asking why DO is so much more expensive.
Not everyone likes wasting money.
Guess I've been enjoying it for so long, I feel so stupid. Thanks for this.
It's a nice chunk of change, which you could use for other purposes. It might not make or break the company, but it could pay for something that actually generates business.
when i save money on something without losing performance or reliability, i feel like a real hacker and money saved is just cherry on top of self accomplishment i feel.
If you only have Rs. 100 in your pocket, you will think hard before spending Rs. 10. If you have Rs. 1000 in your pocket, you will not mind spending Rs. 10. That said, even if you are financially sound, why in the world would you want to pay $14k extra for a similar service that is available cheaper? That money could be better utilised elsewhere.
Most Turks will have zero Rs. in their pocket :)
Tale a look at https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-TRY?window=MAX
Bet I can get 2x more from spending that in anthropic tokens than paying you a full year salary
I suspect with that money you could get a full time customer support person for your business. Now think about it, what's creating more value to your customers: having your infra on Digital Ocean or having a better customer support?
You can get an (a bit less than) a full employee for that. And that's a better ROI than just throwing it away.
I don't think you can get someone decent in a tech related job for that much money anywhere.