European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10

by rmoriz • 14 years ago

222 193 14 years ago

tzaman• 14 years ago

I already lease a couple of servers with them, and I must say they are #1 in EU when it comes to... well, everything.

_gfrc4• 14 years ago

That is true, but you have to keep in mind that you have to get the flexipack if you want to run more than 3 virtual machines with their own ip on it. And honestly - if my server had 64gb ram I would want to do that. "back in the days" I got my own subnet for free, now they are charging for it pretty heftily.

justincormack4• 14 years ago

Welcome to the last days of ipv4.

calloc2• 14 years ago

You get an entire /64 for IPv6. Time to make the switch.

Kudos• 14 years ago

The 100mb connectivity says otherwise.

tdr4• 14 years ago

Great hosters!

     - cheap prices for lots of power

     - everything "just works" (only contacted for questions)

     - quick, friendly & to the point support service

     - great uptime

     - they are eco

     - 14 days money back (for root servers)

Drawbacks

     - bigger latency for US/Asia/...

     - you do your own backups

     - they bill only after the end of month. had problems when card expired

jerguismi• 14 years ago

I have been using hetzner for all my servers for about 2-3 years, and have been very happy with them. I can remember only one, brief downtime.

thibaut_barrere4• 14 years ago

Did you measure the latency difference by any chance? I am really considering buying one host there, would love to get an idea on this.

tdr4• 14 years ago

NY: ~100ms

CA: just under 200ms

Asia: even +300ms

didn't check Southern hemisphere

MehdiEG• 14 years ago

That's what typical response times look like: http://i45.tinypic.com/qq1xmd.png

(this measures the total time to download a static Hello World HTML page 325 bytes in size hosted on IIS from an EX 4S server in Hetzner's DC15 data centre).

deanpcmad• 14 years ago

But also you could use Cloudflare to make your site faster in these regions :)

kragen3• 14 years ago

250ms to Fibertel in Buenos Aires.

WA• 14 years ago

I'm also a customer for quite some time with various servers.

Pros:

- virtual private servers (VPS) have a tun/tap device so that you can use the VPS as a VPN server. this is not necessarily common with all hosters

- good speed/connection/reliability

- good hardware for a fair price

Cons:

- I usually don't need to talk to customer support often, but I rent a managed server and once in a while, they shut it down for a major update. This is totally fine and they even try to do this in the night, but it happened already twice that they couldn't tell me the exact time (in a range of minutes) in advance when they shut it down and they just said something like "server is offline sometime between 7am and 11am". I have paying customers on my server and I want to put the website in maintenance mode to prevent data loss. "Sometime between 7am and 11am" is NOT an acceptable answer. The downtime itself is a matter of 5 minutes, but I would expect an accurate time to shorten the maintenance period.

- They announced a server downtime for "Tuesday night" once. So what is "Tuesday night"? Is it the night from Monday to Tuesday or Tuesday to Wednesday? Guess what, I put my website in maintenance mode in the wrong night. I hope, next time they'll get that straight and announce the correct date and time.

- They stored passwords for their managed server customers in plaintext until September 2011 and got hacked. I hope they learned from that, but still, extremely stupid.

coob• 14 years ago

> So what is "Tuesday night"?

I agree they should be more specific, but most people would reasonably assume Tuesday night to be Tuesday->Wednesday, as Monday->Tuesday is Tuesday morning.

Hates_• 14 years ago

The only issue we've had with Hetzner was related to billing. Our payment failed on a Friday afternoon, and even after updating the details, payment wasn't taken and the server resumed until Monday morning.

Apart from that one hicup, it's been very reliable so far.

werid• 14 years ago

> you do your own backups

they do offer 100Gb storage space though.

> they bill only after the end of month. had problems when card expired

you blame them when you don't update your payment information? i've been there long enoough to go through several cards, never had problems.

tdr4• 14 years ago

I didn't blame anyone:

> Great hosters!

And I mean it.

The payment problem appeared after my card expired (the second month of using Hetzner) and the new one didn't arrive. They understood the situation and allowed me to fix the situation in a couple of days.

nolok4• 14 years ago

Can somebody tell me why the EX 4S costs the same as EX 5 ? I feel like the 4S is actually superior, but I'm no expert.

thibaut_barrere4• 14 years ago

Maybe the difference in CPU? (no expert either :-)

See http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more... (I don't understand those folks)

The EX5 is the last one with the old-gen CPU and was kept because in the early days of the i7-2600 it was too expensive to offer high-ram servers like the 4S (which was introduced months later)

runako2• 14 years ago

>> EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more... (I don't understand those folks)

This seems prudent when going with a new vendor. Reduce financial risk until you gain trust.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

their API: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en

ruby:

    https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api 
    gem install hetzner-api

supo• 14 years ago

How is this possible? With the HW and operational costs they have to be in deep minus.. Eg linode.com is considered good and they seem to be more expensive by an order of magnitude. Can somebody tell me what the catch is?

latch• 14 years ago

As long as they are charging more than their operational costs, they'll eventually turn a profit on any hardware investment.

Get a discount for buying in bulk, calculate your operational cost and failure rate, and go for volume. They have years to make their money back on this..every month their investment in new hardware gets closer and closer to being profitable.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

Hetzner AG is highly profitable. They have to publish a balance sheet at http://www.bundesanzeiger.de/ (German only)

Annual net profits:

    2008:  4.077.791,31 €
    2009:  4.448.824,49 €
    2010:  8.925.128,81 €

Accumulated profits:

    2008:  9.030.980,10 €
    2009: 13.479.804,59 €
    2010: 22.404.933,40 €

key facts:

- cheap energy + human resources by building custom colocation facilities in regions where cheap cooling+power is available

- cheap self-made servers, no 19" form factor for decicated servers (they have 19" racks for colocation customers)

- hardware has to be refinanced in a couple of months. That's why the charge 149€ setup upfront.

- growing out of cash flow

- CEO and founder still CEO. Sometimes still interacts with customers regarding new ideas in their forum (German only).

see http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/presse/center for corporate press releases.

nolok4• 14 years ago

Similar to French OVH in a lot of way

rplnt• 14 years ago

Is it hardware or a virtual server?

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

bare metal hardware of course:

http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/405734_294418...

knotty66• 14 years ago

Question: If I host the domain for my UK business on one of these (and say it is a generic .com - not a .co.uk domain), will it influence my google.co.uk SERP ranking massively ?

How would Google know my .com site is UK based?

DanEdge• 14 years ago

Webmaster tools? Related: I host a org.uk site in the States which ranks well for relevant searches. It's a tourist site in the UK so I'm only really interested in UK traffic.

polshaw• 14 years ago

I am not an expert, but my understanding is that it would have some effect (worse than UK hosting, presumably better than outside EU), but I doubt very much. Faster hosting should have a positive effect, too.

tomx• 14 years ago

Is "hoster" a valid word? I do not see it listed in dictionary.com.

If you hosted a party, would you be a "party host" or a "party hoster"?

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

better?

hej• 14 years ago

It is in Germany (but you are right, it’s incorrect if used in English).

OzzyB2• 14 years ago

It's incorrect, until enough folks start using it, then the Oxford Dictionary gets an update :)

fpp• 14 years ago

Anybody having experience with running ESXi on these dedicated machines.

Their online documentation says that it supports ESXi 5 and they put in a CD when you tell them with your order.

oellegaard2• 14 years ago

I have an ESXi 4 server on one of their servers, the setup was rather tricky - but it ran since ESXi was made free and had absolutely no problems.

Erwin• 14 years ago

Compare with SoftLayer which has decided to charge through the nose for their RAM upgrades: going from 16 to 64GB RAM on their E5 servers is an additional $1200/month.

They're far more expensive than e.g. Rackspace there for some reason.

Smerity2• 14 years ago

I haven't looked at SoftLayer's offerings re: RAM but the most important thing to note with Hetzner is that only some of their dedicated machines have error-correcting code (ECC) memory. Hetzner's 16GB machine[1] (89 Euros/month) has ECC memory for example.

Whilst this might not sound like an enormous issue, DRAM errors are surprisingly common in real deployments[2] and can result in scary things happening to your data. If you're using a machine without ECC memory make sure you're prepared to deal with any possible issues that might arise, especially if it will impact your core business.

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8

[2] DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

jules2• 14 years ago

How common DRAM errors are is very unclear. The numbers in that paper are astronomically high, but other sources have published numbers that are 30x or 100,000x or literally 10,000,000x lower.

See this Stanford ee380 talk: http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100922-ee3...

The part about DRAM errors is about 57 minutes in.

Abstract here: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100922.html

Also, AFAIK most hosting providers don't even have ECC ram as an option for servers, e.g. Amazon.

nirvana6• 14 years ago

I think it is a good idea to architect your system under the assumption that once a year, some theif is going to sneak into the data center and make off with an entire server. Just one, but the whole server will then die horribly in a fire after a shoot-out with the police.

Lots of things can happen, you should have a higher level of replication such that you can handle a whole server going poof, not just a single bit going poof.

The cost of ECC at Hetzner-- the cheapest provider out there- is about half an additional server. So, buy three servers without ECC for the price of two servers with ECC, and replicate your data three times (and triple your bandwidth, horsepower, etc.)

This is not hard with platforms like Riak which are distributed homogenous clusters of nodes.

And if your service isn't built like that, then really it should be. (IMNSHO, of course.)

stevencorona• 14 years ago

SoftLayer charges an insane amount for memory

themichael• 14 years ago

Hello,

we have several servers at hetzner since 2009. The performance has been stunning. Biggest upside is probably the ability to buy 1 TB of bandwith for 6.90 €. What amazes me is the fact that they can provide such great service and still be highly profitable. Turnover in the fiscal year 2010 was 29.68 Million € with post tax profit being 8.925 Million €.

error• 14 years ago

The company rocks :)

I have two dedicated servers (EX 6 with ECC) they are awesome. Until now I had no issue with them.

I hope they continue this way.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

Once I had a performance issue with my 100Mbit/s VDSL and asked on the forum. CEO himself checked the peering capacity and wrote me an email. While I still have to pay for my dedicated servers, I really love the way they're doing business. :-)

ashleyw2• 14 years ago

Their VPS service looks fantastic also: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

Their 2GB plan is 3x cheaper than Linode…and you get over 4x the data transfer! Does anyone know how the performance compares?

Smerity2• 14 years ago

I did a light benchmark of their 512MB VPS[1] which is insanely cheap. The only things that change when moving to the 2GB VPS is RAM, hard drive space and total data transfer. The CPU remains a single core and the same speed according to [2]. It's possible there's less contention but you'd need to find a benchmark for the 2GB VPS to know for sure.

If you're after any specific benchmarks give me a yell and I'll see if I can provide one for you.

[1] http://smerity.com/articles/2012/hetzner.html

[2] http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/VServer/en#Which_clock_spee...

Edit: Came across a review of VQ19 (2GB VPS) vs EQ4 @ http://code.google.com/p/catz/wiki/DedicatedOrVPS

st3fan• 14 years ago

"Sent passport scan to Hetzner" - Really?

ulope• 14 years ago

I and several of my clients use quite a few of those and I'm very happy with the performance. IO performance is very good (especially for a virtualized system) for example apt-get update / upgrade takes less time on one of those than it does on a dedicated root server of mine (Core i7 Quad, 8 GB Ram, 7.2 kRPM SATA).

Any other specific questions?

meskyanichi6• 14 years ago

You could also just get a dedicated server with a good chunk of ram. Say, 32gb or the new 64gb one. Then install XEN or KVM on it and run your own VPS farm instead. It'll save you $800-1600 USD/month in the long-run once you fill up the whole box with VPSs.

Another thing to note is that the new 64gb instance trucks a hexacore (6) core CPU and includes hyper-threading. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this means you can run 12 virtual cores in your XEN/KVM instances with this, instead of only 1 which is provided by the Hetzner VPS's. That's quite a difference.

With my 32gb box (which is a quad core with hyper-threading) my XEN instances can spin up to 8 virtual cores, according to the (h)top utility.

corford2• 14 years ago

What happens when the host box dies? If you build in redundancy, the costs start spiralling quite quickly...

corin_3• 14 years ago

I'm no expert, but how many VPSs could you run nicely with just a typical CPU in there?

ashleyw2• 14 years ago

How hard is Xen to configure and maintain? I like VPSs because they're mostly hassle free, and all my projects are separate and isolated. It seems like running all my projects on one box would be a massive headache!

deadwait2• 14 years ago

i have their 10 euro plan for running tamahatta.com, dont have any traffic but the site has'nt gone down for the last 2 and a half mth. ( which is when i took it)

ra3don922• 14 years ago

Does any one know if their VPS servers are XEN or OpenVZ?

PascalW• 14 years ago

It's KVM.

ezequiel-garzon2• 14 years ago

Alvotech (also German) offers roughly the same specs for about half the price, after a 10€ setup fee [1]. Although I haven't yet pushed these virtual servers to the limit in any sense, I can say I'm a happy customer.

[1] http://www.alvotech.de/vserver/?lang=en

kragen3• 14 years ago

That does look like a very nice service, but it seems to be much lower-end, not "roughly the same". The CPU is an in-order 1.8GHz Atom, which is not roughly the same as a superscalar out-of-order Athlon 64 or Core i7, and their RAM tops out at 4GiB, which is not roughly the same as 64GiB.

macca321• 14 years ago

any ideas why it has a 32GB limit for windows?

tiernano• 14 years ago

Windows Standard edition is capped at 32Gb... if you want to use more, you need to use Enterprise...

ericd• 14 years ago

MS might be doing RAM-based license pricing.

ksajadi2• 14 years ago

If it is possible to run a hosting service as cheap as this, why is there none like it in the US? I thought the labour, tax and VAT costs in Germany should make it less competitive but this is just way cheaper than anything you can find in the US. Does anyone know of any similar offerings in the States?

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

There are some other companies in Germany and France that operate for over a decade at very affordable prices. OVH, Strato, 1&1 to name some.

If you're from outside the EU you'll probably even get the servers without having to pay the 19% VAT.

conradfr• 14 years ago

Online.net as well.

Companies never pay VAT anyway, usually professional services display mainly prices without it.

tonfa• 14 years ago

FYI, OVH is building a data center in Montreal:

http://www.vincentabry.com/en/ovh-web-hosting-will-install-i...

kami88452• 14 years ago

From what I know the cost of cooling and power in Germany are much lower than in the US, Hetzner is also very long-term oriented, the equipment they buy only becomes profitable after running for a couple of years.

ihsw• 14 years ago

RAM allocation is the baseline for determining monthly pricing and their product page specifically mentions DDR3 RAM, which generally costs 50% the price of DDR2 RAM.

jakeonthemove4• 14 years ago

Yes, 1and1 - they offer pretty much everything Hetzner has and more (250 GB free backup, unlimited 100 Mbps traffic, which is about 30 TB per month if I'm not mistaken, and fully automated OS recovery and reinstallation, as well as serial console, which is basically KVM-over-IP.

Their tech support is pathetic though, and the worst thing is that it takes them quite a while if any hardware fails - you could be out for days, with no possibility to even pay a premium fee for emergency repair... But of 5 servers I've had with them, only 1 (the cheapest) had issues (hanged on reboot)...

ksajadi2• 14 years ago

So far as I know, 1and1 is also German (they might have data centres in the US though) and their prices (as of now) are not competitive with Hetzner. Look at http://www.1and1.com/ServerPremiumXL?__lf=Static&__sendi...

Uchikoma• 14 years ago

10 years satisfied customer.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

If you're outside the EU, you probably don't have to pay 19% VAT. So it's even less than 109€...

bond• 14 years ago

The same if you have a company outside Germany and based in Europe

ashconnor2• 14 years ago

But only if you are VAT registered, at least in the UK.

meskyanichi6• 14 years ago

Purchased an EX 4S (32gb ram non-ecc) the other day from Hetzner, been running extremely smooth. They got it rigged up in about 2-4 hours. Installed Xen to run my own little VPS farm and it's dirt cheap compared to all the VPS providers out there, and more performant as well since you actually own the underlying hardware.

Just noticed they also added "1 Gigabit-Port" under "Additional Options" at only 39 EUR, along with an additional 15TB bandwidth increase (You get 100Mbit by default), and only 6.90 EUR for additional TB's of traffic. Pretty sweet if you're doing some kind of video/stream hosting. Of course it has it's downsides compared to S3 but when you compare pricing in "TB" to S3, you'll see how redonk the S3 pricing is. Now, if only Hetzner was also located in the US and Asia that would complete me.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

> Of course it has it's downsides compared to S3 but when you compare pricing in "TB" to S3, you'll see how redonk the S3 pricing is.

Remember, comparing "x TB of storage" to S3 is silly. S3 is designed to replicate your file to multiple datacenters (their site promises ELEVEN nines of durability!), provides things like a BitTorrent tracker for your files, etc.

nolok4• 14 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken he is not comparing TB of storage, but TB of bandwith used.

hamidpalo• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how they can provide bandwidth for so cheap? 7 EUR for a TB of traffic is insanely cheap.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

nearly-free peering at http://de-cix.net/ and http://www.n-ix.net/ to offload a big load of traffic + bandwidth and fibres are not that expensive here in Germany (unless you go with Deutsche Telekom).

ezequiel-garzon2• 14 years ago

That's great information. Why hasn't this happened in the US as well?

mrspandex• 14 years ago

Are there legal issues to think about when storing data on German servers?

jakeonthemove4• 14 years ago

They have strict laws for copyright infringement from what I hear... on the other hand, the FBI can't just pull out your servers :-)...

hopeless• 14 years ago

Yes. For us Europeans, it's much safer since there's no export of data outside the EU :)

antninja• 14 years ago

The German government is a good defensor of Internet freedoms, along with the Netherlands and Scandinavian contries.

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

well, at least the Pirate Party is very strong in Germany. >10% in country-wide surveys

http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm

toenail• 14 years ago

You can't distribute Nazi materials or ideology. Free speech is also limited, you can't just defame people. Also as a german business owner you are required to have an imprint with some specific info, no idea how this is for foreigners.

jakeonthemove4• 14 years ago

Interesting... the only hosting company with comparable prices and features in the US is 1and1 (which is actually owned by a German company), but their tech support has been pretty bad (takes them freaking days to replace hardware - on the other hand, EVERYTHING can be done remotely)...

I wonder if hosting in Germany would affect a site's response time and ranking on Google in the US?

irahul7• 14 years ago

I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious?

Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't feel like doing business with them anymore.

I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I already have shared my card number, I figure I can attach the card photo.

And even if I comply with the ridiculous request of providing a photograph of my credit card, most of the times I use a virtual credit card. My bank lets me creates virtual credit cards and link with my card/account. The card doesn't exist physically and it lets me reset the transaction limit. I reset the transaction limit before making a transaction ensuring I can't be overcharged. They would turn me down because I am concerned about my financial transactions?

Flam• 14 years ago

It's normal. Myself and another person I know had to do it too.

vladd2• 14 years ago

> The would turn me down because I am concerned about my financial transactions?

No, they would turn you down because you cannot present to them their risk guarantee criteria that enable their low prices.

irahul7• 14 years ago

> No, they would turn you down because you cannot present to them their risk guarantee criteria that enable their low prices.

What kind of risks are they putting up with without a photograph of my credit card?

Stolen cards? People deactivate their cards when the cards are lost. And if people don't, then the thief has an active credit card and can very well send the copy.

I won't make my payments? How does the photo of my credit card help? It makes sure I have a credit card - it doesn't make sure you can make transactions on my card(limit reached, card blocked, payment disputed) etc.

deadwait2• 14 years ago

when i ordered, i shared my apprehension with the credit card phone, but they wanted only the last 4 numbers to be visible, i blacked out the other numbers with mspaint and sent it across.

abhaga• 14 years ago

I am from India, have a server with them and was not asked for any documentation. May be it is a recent change.

Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.

irahul7• 14 years ago

> Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.

I am still not fully convinced, but this post makes some good points.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899929

jsnell• 14 years ago

It's definitely not a recent change, they required a copy of a photo ID as early as 2005 when I got my first server there. Don't remember being asked for a credit card scan ever though.

alexbowman• 14 years ago

>Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them.

It is not zero risk, the risk is quite high. A credit card company may reverse a transaction reported as fraudulent unless they perceived the fraud report was incorrect / steps had not been taken to prevent fraudulent card use. Web servers are good resources for uses which are often funded by fraud.

nirvana6• 14 years ago

TLDR: You do almost the same thing in the USA, only it is automated. We have the patriot act which requires collecting a lot of info-- the US has centralized databases (namely credit reports) that allow easy authentication of people. Outside the USA, they don't have the patriot act, but they have a lot of similar laws, and thus collecting a copy of your passport lets them know you're not an identity thief and lets them satisfy "know your customer" laws in their country. In the US the same thing can be authenticated by running a check thru a database, though in the US the law doesn't care whether you're an identity theif (which is why you don't need photographic proof) but whether you're on a terrorist list... the latter can be done just from the info you give.

They are the target of people who want to run torrent servers, criminal irc chat rooms, and stuff like that. These are not the customers they want. They also don't' want to incur the cost of setting up a dedicated server for someone whose just giving them stolen credit card info.

Since often stolen credit card info is distributed in text form, the theifs don't have access to the physical card. Showing you have access to the physical card and the physical passport does not prove that you didn't steal both from the rightful owner, but eliminates those people who just bought a list of credit card numbers.

While stolen cards are often cancelled relatively quickly, this can take anywhere from days to weeks to process thru, by which time they will have incurred the real labor costs (that they charge the 150 euro setup fee to cover) only to have those charges reversed because the card was stolen.

One thing that was illuminating for me as an american is the discovery that our banking system is set up very differently from many other countries. Thus things that are easy for us, are not as easy for them. (Taking a credit card is harder for a merchant outside the USA because the credit card system originated in the USA under the US legal structure. This is why shopping online is less common in, say, south america, than it is in north america.) Other things that are hard for us are easy for them-- if you want to give your friend $20, you just log into your bank and send him the money. The entire purpose of paypal was replaced outside the US as a simple feature on bank websites.

Asking for a photo of your passport and credit card is not really out of line. I understand why you would be hesitant to give these things up as an american-- when I first started doing business internationally, I was very hesitant as well. After awhile, though, you realize that trustworthy businesses are trustworthy. The data I'll be putting on hetzner servers is much more valuable than the image of my passport (Which every low paid border agent at a third world country I visit gets a copy of.)

If I can't trust them with my passport image, can I trust them with my data?

irahul7• 14 years ago

I mostly agree with what you say.

I was a bit angry because they didn't mention this at the time of signing up. It might be somewhere in the t&c but I think this kind of information should be explicitly told viz. we require your passport and credit card photo to sign you up with our service.

I didn't like the callousness with which they request the information. Another commenter mentioned he talked to them and they said only last 4 digits of the card would do for the photo. Now isn't this the kind of information they should be providing along with the request?

I understand I am giving them my card data for payments and the photo of my card contains less data than what is already there with them. But there are legal requirements for storing credit card info on which I can count. There are no such requirements for a photo of credit card exchanged over mail.

> The data I'll be putting on hetzner servers is much more valuable than the image of my passport

I was more concerned about credit card. I did find the passport request a bit weird, but then I had the same line of thought as you - a copy of my passport is with my employer, my landlord, custom offices and a bazillion other places. Identity theft is a possibility but an established business comes very low on the list of threats.

> I understand why you would be hesitant to give these things up as an american-- when I first started doing business internationally, I was very hesitant as well.

I am an Indian living in India. India as a nation is a late entry in online playgrounds, and as a result, most of us are skeptic when dealing online. As I detailed in my parent post, I mostly use my virtual credit card to make the payments with the limit set to the amount I am going to be charged to avoid being scammed(page says x, you charge me 100x). That is not a concern with established businesses though.

funkaster• 14 years ago

> This is why shopping online is less common in, say, south america, than it is in north america

not completely true: I'm a south american (Chilean) currently living in the US. Shopping online in south america is not as common because: a) access to credit cards is not as common as in the US b) there's only few companies doing the inter-bank connection and credit card processing, which btw charge some excessive fees, c) because of the previous two things, there's no culture for online payments, although that's changing. Oh, yes... also d) interest rates are stupidly high.

> if you want to give your friend $20, you just log into your bank and send him the money

Totally true: internet banking is so, so much easier in Chile than here in the US, that I really miss it! Back in Chile I could easily transfer money from my personal account to a friend's account instantly and from the bank's web site, with no fee. No wire transfer but seamless inter-bank money transfer. The security while it could improve is very good...

Anyway, just a side comment on comparing online and internet banking in south america and the rest of the world :)

drone2• 14 years ago

"You do almost the same thing in the USA, only it is automated. We have the patriot act which requires collecting a lot of info-- the US has centralized databases (namely credit reports) that allow easy authentication of people. Outside the USA, they don't have the patriot act, but they have a lot of similar laws, and thus collecting a copy of your passport lets them know you're not an identity thief and lets them satisfy "know your customer" laws in their country."

This is quite possibly one of the oddest things I have read all day, and what, the 5th time the patriot act has come up in this thread? What in the world does the Patriot Act have to do with credit card transaction authorizations? You also seem to imply that credit reports are used to authorize individual card transactions, please provide a citation as I have never heard of this.

Your post very nearly hit on exactly the issue, but was clouded by this first paragraph.

So, let's make it clearer: the reason for asking for a scanned copy of the credit card is to prove the person who made the transaction had a physical copy of the card with an impressed number on it. This is used as a means of reducing the chance of loss in the case of a chargeback as online transactions do not require swiping a card through a POS terminal which normally proves the presence of the card by reading the magnetic stripe[1]. An impression or image of a card is one of the most important means of reducing your liability as a merchant during a chargeback[2]. The scanned copy of the passport is just further validation. We do the exact same for any transaction initiating from a country where we have received a heightened rate of chargebacks from customers based in that country.

Your confusion about the Patriot Act seems to not differentiate the idea of an individual transaction from setting up a transaction account. Perhaps you should read up on that more. The Patriot Act anti-money laundering aspects are not about validating every single transaction through a government database, but about validating the identity of a person requesting to open a new account. [3]

[1] http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/B/6/4/%7BB64DD6E5-3B79-4920-... [2] http://www.heartlandpaymentsystems.com/article/Manually-Impr... [3] http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/rulings/html/312factsheet...

_gfrc4• 14 years ago

The first reason has been explained already: They are afraid of (online) credit card and identify theft.

The second reason, why a lot of people (especially from Germany) will not be asked to provide a scan, is that they have a credit history in Germany. It is really common to check your credit history first. The german credit agency they are using probably has no information about you, that is why Hetzner wants to make sure that you are not trying to defraud them.

It can be really tough to buy stuff online in Germany if the local credit agencies don't have information about your credit history.

parimm• 14 years ago

>My bank lets me creates virtual credit cards and link with my card/account.

What bank are you using?

irahul7• 14 years ago

ICICI

kayoone• 14 years ago

After over a year of hosting in the cloud (amazon aws) and spending alot of money in the process we also made the switch to hetzner recently... The cloud and its benefits is nice and good, but the computing power you get for 100 bucks from companies like hetzner is just incredible.. Of course there are higher costs of setting everything up, but on AWS we had todo most of the complicated stuff on our own anyway..

pja• 14 years ago

I've never seen anyone running a reverse auction to rent their old hardware out before:

https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

I guess if they're not short of space for hardware & cooling then this is a profitable way to put old hardware to use until the demand falls below the running costs. I wonder what the reliability is like?

dotBen• 14 years ago

Thinking about scraping this data and calculating performance-to-€ ratio to identify good deals/unclaimed bargains etc. Perhaps even calculate the mean average price a given server spec sells for etc.

If they have an affiliate scheme that would make s nice side project

swombat• 14 years ago

Totally random off the cuff... I've been fighting with an EX 4S server for the last week, trying to set up Xen under Debian Squeeze... anyone got some rock-solid instructions which they know work? I've tried both my own recipes and various tutorials on the web, but so far no luck. I managed to get Xen sort of working at one point, but then the networking wasn't working. I'm about ready to start throwing things out the window...

rmoriz13• 14 years ago

depends if you bought extra IPs (up to 4) or a whole subnet? There are some tutorials by customers on how to setup routing at http://wiki.hetzner.de/

givanfp• 14 years ago

Do you need debian? If not, 1 - Ask for a LARA install of Xen Server (20€ IIRC). 2 - Request an additional IP with MAC address 3 - Change the MAC address of your VM on XenCenter

kenmazy• 14 years ago

Last I checked Squeeze had a fairly straightforward Xen 4.0 package. I did have trouble with dropped packets, but I was doing some pretty complex stuff and it was already fixed upstream.

How exactly are you trying to setup networking? Bridged, routed, NAT on dom0 vs domU?

These two pages might help you, though both are slightly out of date:

http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-configure-and-enable-xen...

http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Xen_Networking#Two-wa... (more out of date, but ideas are correct)

EDIT: ZFSonlinux is worth looking into as it's becoming fairly mature and provides the perfect storage for xen instances.

calloc2• 14 years ago

Does it have to be Xen? I've had a lot of good luck using KVM and so far it seems to be more stable... and it can run OS's unmodified.

runako2• 14 years ago

Would anyone care to comment on the quality and English skills of their support?

We considered Hetzner, but were concerned about the potential pitfalls of doing low-level support with a language barrier.

nirvana6• 14 years ago

I haven't used their service yet so I can't comment from experience with them, but I will say this: In germany, you are taught english when you are growing up. We lived in Berlin for awhile and my german is very poor, but almost everyone we met knew enough english to get by. Hetzner is an international company, with a website in english, and I think the odds that they will have a real problem handling customer support requests due to language is very low. Much lower than support being overworked, or other potential issues.

In america, finding someone who knows a foreign language is rare. In germany, finding someone who knows at least some english is not uncommon- and in a company like this, I'm sure (but don't know for a fact) they hire english speaking support people.

tdr4• 14 years ago

Tested and it's very good.

They also answer quickly and document pretty well the problem/reason.

Egregore2• 14 years ago

If they don't outsource their support then most people in Germany I talked with know English very well.

nirvana6• 14 years ago

Hetzner is nirvana for pre-ramen profitable big data startups. You can build a cluster for a whole lot less than Amazon-- in many cases 1/10th the cost (depending on which resources are higher priority, for us.)

The question is-- can you host in germany and serve a customer base that is primarily in the USA? Our application isn't too latency intensive... but this is my primary concern.

Would it be stupid for an american startup to locate there?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has direct experience.

Roritharr• 14 years ago

Don't forget that "hosted in Germany" is a quality mark with which you can advertise. Especially International Customers don't like the idea of their data being stored in a country where the Patriot Act is a present reality.

OzzyB2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure how far "Vorsprung durch Technik"[1] would go as a competitive advantage with regards to your particular choosen hosting provider -- it will always just be hosting to your end users -- but I like the sentiment :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorsprung_durch_Technik

dirtyaura• 14 years ago

It's not even about a choice, as companies from EU countries can't store store user identification data of EU citizens in US servers. So you are more or less legally forced to have (some) servers in EU.

drone2• 14 years ago

Don't forget that "Hosted in Germany" is also a red flag for a lot of companies that they may be arbitrarily assessed massive fees to prop up other businesses[1]. As is the same with many EU countries[2][3]. You're taking a risk wherever your data is stored.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17785613 [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a... [3] http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/french-court-fines-google...

So, you can either have to implement good data protection so that your users don't have to worry about the FBI snooping in the U.S., or you can run the risk that some country in the EU decides to prop up some failing industry by extracting unreasonable tolls out of your company. Personally, I'd go with the former, but that's just my opinion.

dspillett3• 14 years ago

If the price is right and latency really is not an issue, I don't see why not. If you setup your infrastructure right it should be fairly easy to move to another host if things don't work out. The main thing to be wary of is laws that differ from yours in that locality - whether or not there is anything relevant that you need to consider here very much depends on what you are planning to host.

erichocean2• 14 years ago

I would as well. What is the typical latency from the west coast and east coast of the US?

moonboots• 14 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898404

nl• 14 years ago

Potentially you can work around some of the latency issues by using a CDN.

In Australia (where latency to anywhere cheap-to-host sucks) many people use Rackspace CloudFiles because that gives you cheap access the the Akamai CDN. Akamai has multiple points-of-presence in Australia, unlike the Amazon CDN.

For apps aimed at the US market there are a huge number of reasonably priced CDNs.

ra3don922• 14 years ago

Does anyone use http://burst.net/ ? I've found them to be one of the cheapest VPS providers. May want to check them out if hosting in Germany is not an option.

yatendra• 14 years ago

I use it to host http://livepost.in since last month. Pingdom reported some small downtimes but other than that it was ok. You get what you pay for, but I think burst.net is value for money.

LinaLauneBaer• 14 years ago

Germany has very strict information privacy laws when compared to the US. As far I know many German companies cannot use cloud based solutions from companies hosting in the US because of these laws. For example you are forbidden by law to save user data at all. There are exceptions (eg. If the service won't be able to function otherwise) but the discrepancy is still huge. I wonder if you have to comply to these rules per se when you host in Germany or not. I am no lawer. But maybe you want to consider the strict information laws ingermany before renting big servers...

vanessar• 14 years ago

We migrated our infrastructure to Hetzner at the beginning of the year and we are very happy with the change. Also, the support is great (and fast).

Egregore2• 14 years ago

Network availability 99% is very bad, it's about 3 days/year of downtime. (If you have clients - they will kill you)

corin_3• 14 years ago

Personally I pay little attention to network availability promises - all they mean is that you get pro-rated refunds if downtime exceeds them. 3 days downtime is possible wherever you go, and if it happens I don't care a huge amount if I get a refund of 10% of a month's costs or not - the damage is in the downtime, not the wasted money.

What's important is the company's track record, and the likelyhood of that record changing, and from what I've heard Hetzner look pretty good in this area.

dow2• 14 years ago

Can anyone provide an IP of a box hosted with Hetzner? I want to measure the latency when connecting from Middle East. That's one of things I worry about. Linode seems to have the best peering with the region from all the providers I've checked.

Thanks!

iSnow• 14 years ago

78.46.92.242 This is an oldish dual-core AMD box with 2GB RAM and low load.

dow2• 14 years ago

Thanks, iSnow.

It looks good, lower latency than US East or Singapore, little bit higher than London or Ireland.

The only thing that worries me are the fluctuations between pings:

164.622 ms 164.725 ms 166.828 ms 228.693 ms 234.214 ms

.. and it goes like this forever - bouncing between 164 and 230.

Linode and AWS are very constant between pings.

Is this something to be worried about?

Thank you

ashconnor2• 14 years ago

6.2 The client undertakes not to publish content that may violate the rights of third parties or otherwise violate the law. The placement of erotic, pornographic, extremist material or material not deemed in good taste is not permitted. We are entitled to block access to the account of any customer who violates this.

The same applies in the event that the customer publishes content which is capable of violating the rights of individuals or groups of people, or that insults or denigrates these people. This applies even without an actual legal claim. We are not obligated to review our customers' content.

That basically rules out many user driven content sites.

mufumbo2• 14 years ago

Right now I have three servers in hetzner. I have been using them for 5 years, but only last year my startup "boomed", so I had to cancel my old server and move it in the same rack as the other servers. If your startup has already "boomed" just make it sure to rent all your servers in the same rack or pay the reservation fee ($10 per server).

Hetzner prices are great for any software engineer. Having that powerful server waiting for my projects is one of the reasons that I had the chance of succeeding. I used to say that this is our profession and having a dedicated server is a mandatory thing.

Even with one server from hetzner I was able to virtualize it into 8 machines and create a real production environment that made it easier to scale. After you learn XEN it's faster than going through amazon interface.

From my past experience I always worked with people who wanted to use amazon or google appengine. I was always against it and said that the prices were ridiculously expensive. My colleges said that they didn't wanted to manage servers and the cost of appengine was only $2 per day, etc. This is a real story and when the time of high traffic came the $2 became $50 and now we pay $1500 in something that could be handled with ONE $100 hetzner server. After using hetzner I would NEVER advise appengine and I would only advise amazon if you must have the servers in the US.

For those who say that the site would have too much latency if it's in hetzner: just use a cdn for static content, http://www.maxcdn.com is very cheap and probably much better than just hosting in the US.

gaillard• 14 years ago

For all those who care about taking responsibility for the environment, this is what their site says:

"Hetzner Online exclusively uses energy from renewable sources to power the servers in its data centers. Our environmental partner is TÜV-certified NaturEnergie AG, a company that generates green energy from 100 percent carbon dioxide-free and environmentally-friendly hydropower. The energy generated by flowing water is, from an ecological viewpoint, considered to be the best form of power generation for the environment."

kragen3• 14 years ago

Hetzner's lowest-end server offering is €39/month, or US$51/month: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x3. I priced it out on PortaTech, and it looks like the physical hardware costs about US$300: http://www.portatech.com/catalog/viewitem.asp?ID=26840&O... I assume the six-month ratio is about the same for this larger server.

That seems like a pretty awesome deal, if you're doing something where you might need the machine for a few months, but aren't sure you'll still need it six months or a year from now. It sounds like a particularly no-hassle version of leasing a workstation. Except that the workstation comes with a hundred-megabit internet connection, and no monitor.

Unfortunately, it's also 250ms away from me here in Buenos Aires. Neither elserver.com nor servilink.com.ar seems to have anything comparable (and ServiLink's web page seems to be full of broken links and encoding errors, which doesn't inspire confidence; if their web team are such pelotudos de mierda, how likely are they to be able to quickly replace faulty hardware?) so I don't know where to turn.

European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon

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