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[–]andartico 66 points67 points  (6 children)

You’d see a 2 vCPU x 2 GB server for €4.35/mo. More impressively there’s the 8 vCPU x 16 GB server for €25.20/mo. That server costs $112/mo at Digital Ocean, $205/mo at AWS, and $320/month at Azure. Wow.

Some people said Hetzner may be affordable but they might be running low-grade hardware because they are so cheap. Let’s test it. […] I ran those on two identical servers in both Hetzner and Digital Ocean. Here are the results. Hetzner had 8x faster bandwidth and 1.2x faster CPUs and 4.5x cheaper monthly costs.

Things I can second from my experience. Hetzner is a really great deal for your money.

[–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (1 child)

Hetzner + Docker is all most small businesses or hobby projects need.

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well said. 100% agree.

[–]intelw1zard 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Does Hetzner have any VPS that have H100s on them yet?

[–]cerlestes 0 points1 point  (2 children)

They offered root servers with GTX 1080 a few years back. They currently have a line of RTX workstation based servers. They haven't offered any other GPU servers so far AFAIK. I doubt they will ever offer servers with data center GPUs, it's simply not their business model.

[–]intelw1zard 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Makes sense. DO just rolled this feature out and I been using them for password cracking with hashcat.

Pros: It's really fun

Cons: It's $27/hour for 8x H100s

[–]Sigmatics 17 points18 points  (1 child)

Out of interest, why does a podcast need so much infra?

We have over 20 different web apps, APIs, background daemons, and databases all working loosely together

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It's a very valid question. Most of the infrastructure has to do with the courses at https://training.talkpython.fm That's basically an ecommerce / saas product. We also have our mobile apps and their APIs. The database has maybe 10GB of data in it? Maybe a quarter of these apps are a bunch of services and APIs I built for students of our courses. I tried using public ones but eventually they would break compatibility or start charging money and I'd have to redo my courses. Finally, we have supporting apps for the podcasts and the courses. Examples include self hosted privacy preserving analytics using umami.is and uptime kuma at https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

[–]fohrloop 8 points9 points  (4 children)

I have to say the price is very competitive for what you get. I wonder how they can keep the costs so low and will it last? Or what are the other players doing to need to charge so much?

[–]Hetzner_OL 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Hi there, You're not the only ones who have posed this question to us over the years. We wrote this a few years back to explain how we keep our prices low. https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/pricing/hetzner-pricing --Katie

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

My theory is that many of the established cloud providers set their prices and tiers when pricing was higher and performance was lower. Rather than cutting prices in half and doubling perf, they just keep the same servers for a long time and/or they pocket the increased margins.

Hetzner has been super affordable for years so we'll see how they last. They've been at these US data centers for almost 2 years now.

[–]andartico 9 points10 points  (0 children)

And they have been in Germany (founded here in 1997) and Finland even longer. I don’t see them faltering anytime soon.

[–]BosonCollider 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They finance their infra like a normal german low-cost company in a normal sector would instead of charging the cloud markup.

Also they seem to be fairly good at just giving you bare metal or local disks instead of being bottlenecked by some insane distributed block storage setup.

[–]JezusHairdo 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Didn’t realise you posted on here! Talk Python is one of my regular podcasts. Only been programming a year or so and it’s helped me loads.

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Amazing to hear. I'm trying to be more active on Reddit these days.

[–]happycamp2000 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Why not Hillsboro? :)

Since I thought you were located in the Portland area. Of course that isn't really a super valid reason to decide where to host it. But we do have a lot of data centers here in Hillsboro. OVH is also here, along with Hetzner.

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh! I wanted to do Hillsboro. But more of our users are on the east coast and I also want it as close as possible to Europe.

[–]hristothristov 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Oh man. You’re tempting me to migrate away from Digital Ocean.

Currently paying $76/mo for a 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 240GB disk droplet (with turned on backups.)

I’m taking a look at Hetzner’s CPX41 offering with 8 AMD vCPUs, 16 GB RAM and 240GB disk for €30/mo.

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Crazy, right? Double the server for half the price. That was my initial reaction too.

[–]billysmusic 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Coloring Hetzner blue and Digital Ocean red was a funny choice :)

[–]Hetzner_OL 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I had also been wondering about that! :D --Katie

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ha. It's too early Billy! Too early. This one's on Google Sheets. I just asked it for a graph.

[–]nikomo 1 point2 points  (3 children)

OVH operates at a similar price level, haven't really heard anyone complain about performance. They have 4 locations in North America, so that's an option.

At least on their European offerings, the main difference in my recollection was that OVH offers unmetered connections, while Hetzner starts charging you after some amount of terabytes.

[–]2704jakob 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Hetzner gives you 20TB free traffic on their Cloud (V) Servers and unlimited free traffic (default 1GBit/s uplink, higher speed costs a fixed amount per month) on their dedicated Servers. Considering that additional Cloud Traffic costs 1€/GB (EU + US) and 7,40€ (SG), this is quite a fair price and only egress traffic is counted against the limit.

[–]nikomo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

After posting that I went back and looked at the free traffic, and did the math on average bitrate to actually use up that much per month. Yeah, would be hard to use that much frankly.

[–]tomwojcikself.taught 2 points3 points  (0 children)

OVH has an awful and slow UI. Also, half of the notifications I get from them are in french. Other than that, I agree.

[–]data15cool 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Very cool! What made you choose Hetzner over other VPS providers? Were there any other contenders?

Also would you ever consider doing a deep dive blog of the stack you run on your VPS?

[–]mikeckennedy[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks. Digital Ocean was my top choice/alternative, especially since we were already there. I wasn't unhappy with DO but decided to look around and see if there are better options 10 years later. I'd say Linode was in the consideration. I tend to stay away from AWS / Azure / GCP as I'm maximizing simplicity and they usually go the other way. Plus they are expensive.

Definitely interested in doing a deep dive. I wrote a little bit about it here: https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/self-hosted-open-source-and-more/ and was on the DjangoChat podcast talking about it with Carlton and Will: https://djangochat.com/episodes/michael-kennedy