Hetzner introduces new server product with insane parameters for 59 EUR/mth

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4s

by ergo14 • 14 years ago

147 84 14 years ago

meow• 14 years ago

Is this host trustworthy ? Feature wise it seems too good to be true:

Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quadcore incl. Hyper-Threading Technology

    RAM 32 GB DDR3 RAM
    Hard disks 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD
    7200 rpm (Software-RAID 1)
    NIC 1 GBit OnBoard
    connected at 100 MBit
    Backup Space 100 GB
    Traffic Unlimited*

alexro• 14 years ago

I know many people who recommend it

Intermediate• 14 years ago

Yep, it's a well known german datacenter.

davidw• 14 years ago

They've been around for a while, and are fairly well known.

samarudge3• 14 years ago

They are one of the largest hosts in Europe (~50k dedicated servers if I remember correctly). Large doesn't always mean best, though. Similar to OVH, they provide good hardware, reliability and a decent enough network, but if anything goes wrong you best know how to fix it yourself. I also believe their network isn't /as/ good as somewhere like Rackspace however with CDN's etc. that's probably not as much of an issue.

TL;DR; Yes they're trustworthy, generally speaking

pors• 14 years ago

How do CDN's solve bad connectivity of your app server?

tluyben22• 14 years ago

OVH definitely does not provide good hardware; we have more broken disks and NICs there than all our other hosters combined.

Edit: I see we might be exceptions. We have been using OVH since 2005, running up to 40 servers about 2 years ago. We are also running at iWeb, Softlayer, Amazon and Leaseweb. Hardware wise the only one we have issues with is OVH, and i'm talking every 2 weeks since 2005 (in 2006 they managed to lose all our data on 2 clustered RAID machines; one died, all corrupted, then when we were busy setting up the replacement, the other one died...). But they are so cheap and easy (like the easy OS installation which is cloud-like, already for many years) we stick with them for some projects which need high spec hardware in clusters. Note: the SSD drives are great, no problems with those so far (knock on wood).

matthewcford• 14 years ago

It's where we host all of our staging servers for client apps now, pretty good value if you ask me.

lusr2• 14 years ago

I've used them for the past year with zero issues, but I then I haven't done anything too hardcore. Network is excellent although I've noticed one site (oron.com) cannot be routed to - haven't bothered figuring out if maybe this is because it's Germany and there's a block, or if there's something else going on. I've also been impressed with their server management tools (web-based VKVM access, you can boot into a rescue system if required, etc.).

ergo148• 14 years ago

Traffic is limited ie. they cap you too 10mbit after you exceed 10TB, (you can buy more uncapped traffic ofc.)

And yes the "host" is a very big datacenter, I have one server with them for 3 years, with pretty good uptime. 2-3 outages on their end over last 3 years. You need to remember that you need to buy additional packages for hardware raid or failover that will cost you about 20-30 EUR - if you need them, still it's one of best offers out there and def. best in Europe price wise.

lusr2• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the 10TB only applies to outgoing traffic. For most people this probably isn't that important but for my current project it's great because the bulk of my bandwidth will be users uploading data and/or me fetching that data on their behalf.

Loic• 14 years ago

I used to live 3 km from their datacenters here: http://www.datacenterpark.de/ Basically in the former East Germany. They are doing things the right way. I am not hosting with them at the moment, but I have been for a couple of years without issues.

You must also know that the EU paid some good money to get the datacenters there as part of economical development initiatives. Hetzner is operating since 1997.

rsynnott3• 14 years ago

In general, I've had nothing but good experiences with them. They're reasonably bare-bones, though; don't expect miracles in terms of support.

egze• 14 years ago

I love Hetzner. I got the more cheaper one a week ago http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4

imaginator• 14 years ago

We host all of buddycloud's servers on them and they really do rock. Support is good. No outages in over three years. Very solid.

avar• 14 years ago

I've been using Hetzner for about a year after migrating off Slicehost to Linode and then to Hetzner.

I'd recommend Linode if you need really good service (they once tracked down and patched a kernel bug for me), but if you don't want amazing support and just want some really good specs at a good price Hetzner is great, especially if you're in Europe.

zerathul• 14 years ago

can anyone explain how is this even possible considering how expensive that piece of hardware is?

louislouis• 14 years ago

I'm gona take a wild stab in the dark and say megaupload has freed a lot of servers lol.

JanezStupar• 14 years ago

I wouldn't host illegal content from within German borders.

ergo148• 14 years ago

I belive I saw some posts on webhostingtalk or some other forums that stated, that their method of operations is to buy tons of hardware - single platform (mobo) that they build their offering on - with greatly discounted prices from manufacturer. They will provide it for a year or so, and then they will create new platform again after a while after they are out of stock, this happens once every year I think. Also keep in mind those are not "server grade" components so don't count on expansions to the servers/ECC RAM - this kind of stuff - you want to scale - just buy more boxes, there are upgrade possibilities, but they are limited to my understanding.

latch2• 14 years ago

As long as the price > operating cost, they'll eventually make money on it. You could say that they take a different approach to say Rackspace or Softlayer which try to recoup the initial investment during the first month.

sp332• 14 years ago

But you have to subtract the operating costs, and still make your money back quickly before you have to pay to upgrade the hardware again.

ypcx• 14 years ago

It's a promo offer, they will only offer a limited number of them, and in few months introduce a better one.

Also I've been given faulty hardware at Hetzner and the support was quite ass-hatty. I said fuck it, replace the drive and reflash the OS, but they no, the RAID must rebuild. At the end of day, MySQL was still crashing under a heavy load, but that could have been software problem, not sure if I can blame Hetzner. What I didn't like, if you open the contract eg on 15th, then cancel a month ahead, eg on 10th, they will still bill you till the end of the month, 15 more days. They're still one of the best non cloud hosts though.

edit: now I remember - they actually insisted on the faulty drive (that I reported based on mdstat logs) to be hardware-checked in the machine while the machine is offline. Mind you, this drive was faulty from the get go.

calloc• 14 years ago

I had two failing drives in my Softlayer box (was about three years after they were put in service ... so not bad), and Softlayer insisted on running the HD diagnostics on our machine taking it down for an hour.

We just ended up purchasing a new box, migrating over and letting them take the old one offline. We ended up paying less per month for twice the specs...

_urga• 14 years ago

I started hosting with the South African branch of Hetzner (http://hetzner.co.za) for several years starting in 1999, back when the owner was manning the support line himself. In that time they were always service-oriented.

Uchikoma• 14 years ago

I'm using Hetzner for 10years, with very very few major problems (I only remember 1).

I compared them some time ago to EC2 pricewise:

http://codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-virtualized-servers-cloud...

And setup of a new server is quite fast too.

ergo148• 14 years ago

I agree, in every calculation I make, cloud seems to be too expensive for me.

LogicX3• 14 years ago

The awesome article "The Five Stages of Hosting" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526767 from yesterday should be mentioned. I brought some price-point discussions in the comments. Some good rebuttals lower down regarding EC2's committed cost options.

iusable• 14 years ago

I agree. Been using Hetzner for over 2 years & loving it. Great value for money IF you know what you are doing.

slig• 14 years ago

Do people outside EU get 19% off from VAT?

dasrecht• 14 years ago

I did yes... and even without asking them... it was like SOP

sek5• 14 years ago

A German company would get 19% back from the Government, but AFAIK a foreign company doesn't have to pay it in the first place, so you can calculate it out.

Incredible, maybe they made a mistake on their site. Hetzner has a very good reputation here in Germany, otherwise i would expect something fishy.

dav-id• 14 years ago

Within the EU you need to pay the VAT.

jusob2• 14 years ago

I'm French, but live in the US. I am an Hetzner customer and do NOT pay VAT.

LogicX3• 14 years ago

My issue with Hetzner is that by the time you add in management options necessary for a remote dedicated server, your monthly cost isn't that much better than other options.

Example: To have remote KVM/IP you'd need to first pay 15EUR for their flexipack for the privilege of adding additional features. then 19EUR mo and 149 EUR setup for KVM/IP Now you're up to $122USD/mo + almost $400USD for setup.

Compare to Incero's WebHostingTalk offer: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1121998 which is $99/mo paid in quarterly batches. Which is server grade, better CPU, ECC RAM, with KVM/IP and is in the US (Texas).

Hetzner is still cheaper overall with the 32GB -- because they're not dealing with much more expensive server class ECC RAM, but I just feel its important to bring the initial low number you see: 59 to a realistic place...

jorisw• 14 years ago

What would you need remote KVM/IP for? If your ssh ever dies, you can reboot the thing into rescue mode, log in over remote console, fix whatever's broken, and reboot the system.

I have been using an older server offer of theirs for years now, and never had to pay for anything other than the said fee.

mikehuffman• 14 years ago

KVM/IP is common for remote windows server admins. Sounds crazy, I know, but they are out there.

mtarnovan2• 14 years ago

What if you upgrade to a kernel which doesn't boot ? Trust me, KVM/IP gives you peace of mind, for 10-15EUR/month it's worth it. On some server configs it's even included in the price (EX8).

ergo148• 14 years ago

It is realistic if you don't order additional packages ;-)

sek5• 14 years ago

Don't forget it is incl. VAT, that means it really costs 19% less for foreign and business customers.

Edit: 59.00/1.19 = 49.58 (it really is minus 16%, my old accounting teacher would kill me ;-)

rsynnott3• 14 years ago

I wouldn't have called KVM/IP a requirement for a remote dedicated server. Nice to have, but by no means a requirement. What do you use it for?

mtarnovan2• 14 years ago

You're comparing a promo $99 WHT Promo (Regular Price $299)... not really fair. Take a look at EX8 if you need ECC, better CPU, and KVM/IP, for 90 EUR/month (not incl. price for storage, which is configurable for EX8). We got one of these servers this week, with 2 x 3TB enterprise hdds and 2 x 120GB SSD (ocz vertex 3). We've setup this server to use ZFS with the ZIL and the L2ARC on the SSDs, and it seems screamingly fast (haven't done any benchmarks yet).

dberg• 14 years ago

Is there a US version of this ?

ergo148• 14 years ago

The closest match would be http://leaseweb.com/, which is more expensive but they do have US based boxes too.

LogicX3• 14 years ago

See my other threads for my touting of Incero.com's WHT deals which get close IMHO.

mjwalshe• 14 years ago

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

gommm• 14 years ago

Anyone knows a good cheap dedicated server company like this in Hong Kong? I use Hetzner and love it but I need another dedicated server in Hong Kong or Singapore.

vintagius• 14 years ago

Pity one can't pay using paypal.

attheodo• 14 years ago

We use EX4 from Hetzner along with Amazon's Cloudfront for static files and we're REALLY REALLY satisfied.

nirvana4• 14 years ago

Been planning to set up a cluster with Hertzner using the EX 4, so the 4S is like getting 16GB more RAM for 10 Euros more a month. This is great news.

One thing I have wondered about is whether hosting in Germany is a good idea.

First is the latency issues. Will serving web pages to customers on the west coast of the US really suffer? (this is in the minimum viable product stage-- we're not google yet)

Secondly, I'm not all that familiar with all the laws of the EU. I don't want to run afoul of them, but I haven't found a good summary of best practices for services hosted in the EU.

njs12345• 14 years ago

Off the top of my head, one thing you might need to worry about is privacy/data protection - the EU laws on this seem to be a bit more stringent than in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

nirvana4• 14 years ago

Thank you. This presents some implications I'm going to have to consider in developing our application. Fortunately, in the early days we'll be collecting no personally identifiable data.

ergo148• 14 years ago

I have some applications logging to my server in hetzner from US (softlayer datacenters), and some from china. So far we didn't had any single issue with latency.

rsynnott3• 14 years ago

The data protection directive might be an issue for you; protection of personal information is much stronger in the EU than in the US.

Less likely, but because it's Germany, if you're hosting bigoted content, particularly Nazi-associated content, that will be a problem.

sek5• 14 years ago

That is a myth. You are not allowed to show symbols of an organization who is against our constitution, but only if it is not in the matter of science or history. The second law is, you are not allowed to call out for violence against a group/minority.

Censoring is illegal from our constitution, so you can only get sued by a court, but when you take it down it usually would be dismissed. It is not even an important public topic here.

lignuist• 14 years ago

Check out http://heise.de (one of the faster german sites), to get a feeling of the latency.

lsb2• 14 years ago

For ten more € a month, get error-corrected memory: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6

nirvana4• 14 years ago

Half the memory, with ECC. Since 16GB is pretty sufficient for my needs, I think I'd use the extra 16GB for pure caching. (Riak has an in memory mode so you can run two backends- one backed by disk and one not backed. Using the in RAM one gives you a distributed cache over a bunch of machines. If you keep 2 copies and you have 4 machines, that each have 16GB dedicated to this in memory backend, that gives you a 32GB of distributed cache where any item in the cache is at most one hop away.)

I recently tried to research what ECC means operationally (I'm not really an operations guy.) Is ECC good for correcting bits flipped by cosmic rays? Or is it going to tell you that memory is failing? I've never, in the past 20 years, had memory fail on me over time.

Also, I'm not going to be running a single server such that if a server goes down my service goes offline.

I'm running a Riak cluster, of at least 3 nodes, maybe 4 to start. If any server goes down, the service stays online.

My software architecture is, near as I understand it, well suited to commodity hardware.

The 10 euros extra per month, on 4 servers is 40 euros, which is nearly enough for an extra server.

So, wouldn't it be better to have 5 commodity servers than 4 servers with ECC?

I wouldn't know what to do if I started getting ECC errors anyway (I know, I'm stupid, but we're a startup, no budget to hire an ops person.) I'd probably just ask them to give me a new machine.

timc3• 14 years ago

Have been using them for just over 6 months with 3 machines currently. Highly recommended, no problems at all.

And you can run VMware esxi on these offerings.

dotBen• 14 years ago

For those wondering, at current exchange rates and with the VAT removed, the price for non-EU customers is US$65.29/m

fierarul• 14 years ago

I don't see an explanation about VAT, but outside Germany you shouldn't need to pay it, which makes the actual price about 50 euro/month + the one-time 125 euro setup fee.

Sadly I just reserved an instance for one year with Amazon the other month but this looks quite a good offer.

gokhan• 14 years ago

Yep, we're out of EU zone and got one server with them. We don't pay VAT.

halayli• 14 years ago

jusob2• 14 years ago

I have an EQ4 wit them (8GB RAM), anybody has experience in moving from one server to another within Hetzner? I don' think they have anything to facilitate such a move.

Hetzner introduces new server product with insane parameters for 59 EUR/mth

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