Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

https://isayeter.com/posts/digitalocean-to-hetzner-migration/

by yusufusta • 3 months ago

893 425 3 months ago

nixpulvis3• 3 months ago

We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?

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.

traceroute669• 3 months ago

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.

electroly• 3 months ago

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.

joefourier• 3 months ago

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.

missedthecue• 3 months ago

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.

spaniard89277• 3 months ago

Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, Clouding, Upcloud...

xhkkffbf2• 3 months ago

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.

infocollector• 3 months ago

Where did you migrate out to?

xhkkffbf2• 3 months ago

Hetzner. Vultr.

OneMorePerson2• 3 months ago

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.

orsorna2• 3 months ago

I always appreciate savings posts, but is $14k USD annual really make or break for a Turkish business? I would not know.

nixpulvis3• 3 months ago

That's not the point. You should be asking why DO is so much more expensive.

Not everyone likes wasting money.

dllrr• 3 months ago

Guess I've been enjoying it for so long, I feel so stupid. Thanks for this.

orsorna2• 3 months ago

The calculus is: is the labor spent on saving 14k annually worth less than the labor which adds features that net 14k income?

Certainly the former is more predictable than the latter though.

Choosing to do neither is wasting money.

littlestymaar• 3 months ago

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?

mrweasel• 3 months ago

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.

thisislife2• 3 months ago

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.

esafak• 3 months ago

Most Turks will have zero Rs. in their pocket :)

izacus4• 3 months ago

You can get an (a bit less than) a full employee for that. And that's a better ROI than just throwing it away.

ozgrakkurt• 3 months ago

I don't think you can get someone decent in a tech related job for that much money anywhere.

iammrpayments• 3 months ago

Bet I can get 2x more from spending that in anthropic tokens than paying you a full year salary

layer8• 3 months ago

Tale a look at https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-TRY?window=MAX

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

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.

rolymath2• 3 months ago

Think of it in percentage savings.

xuki• 3 months ago

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.

testing22321• 3 months ago

I moved my VPS from Rackspace to Hertzner. From $120/mo to $35.

Moving away from the US also felt great.

antirez3• 3 months ago

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.

rustyhancock• 3 months ago

Wow a Claude add embedded into a Hetzner add.

How deep does this go?

antirez3• 3 months ago

"ad", with a single "d".

So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.

senordevnyc• 3 months ago

By this logic your most recent comment was just an ad for Netflix.

sph4• 3 months ago

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.

tmpz22• 3 months ago

Its certainly a choice to accuse antirez of all people

jnwatson• 3 months ago

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.

rpcope12• 3 months ago

I mean if it were anyone else, yeah I might agree, but I think Salvatore is being genuine here (and have seen Claude do a similarly surprising job fixing ops issues).

godot2• 3 months ago

It would seem that way for sure, if it was just a random anon posting it, but the person you're replying to is the creator of Redis so I feel it's more likely a genuine opinion/experience rather than a Claude ad...

atherton94027• 3 months ago

This is the redis guy you're replying to, I doubt he's on Claude's payroll

post-it• 3 months ago

Do folks see a mention of Claude as indicative of an ad? I usually say it because at work we've got a couple different options and I like to mention which one in particular I was using. But maybe I'll just start saying AI on forums unless someone asks me to specify.

EasyMark• 3 months ago

I doubt if someone who has 30000+ karma waited for this precise post to submit a "clever" claude ad surreptitiously to draw you in.

whatisthiseven• 3 months ago

It's quite telling there are no other recommendations for "bare metal hosting" on HN other than Hetzner. I guess no others in the world exist?

Or maybe it's just advertising/astro-turfing. At some point it has to be obvious.

m00dy• 3 months ago

yeah, everything is about to be repriced.

tannhaeuser• 3 months ago

Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

sph4• 3 months ago

They really can't help themselves showing how they didn't put any effort doing a thing.

nutjob2• 3 months ago

You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

freedomben• 3 months ago

They didn't make it about AI, they mentioned a tool that helped with the migration. I find it relevant and helpful to know.

I don't see it as much different from "I used script X to do it" or something.

GaryBluto• 3 months ago

I don't see what checking a file system has to do with anything either.

locknitpicker7• 3 months ago

Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

It might surprise you to learn that nowadays there are a lot of people using LLM code assistants. Those who do can also use them to help them write blog posts.

fortyseven• 3 months ago

You are going to have a hard time living in the future.

cyanydeez2• 3 months ago

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!

qudat• 3 months ago

I’ve been experimenting with letting a local agent manipulate my remote servers using https://bower.sh/zmx-ai-portal

What’s exciting is how simple cli tools can be so impactful to dev workflows

elcritch• 3 months ago

I've been using Codex to make Ansible scripts to setup various servers. Its a nice in between.

p_stuart82• 3 months ago

IMO nobody was paying for magic compute. they're paying to not touch ten years of glue.

if agents eat that glue, the moat gets thin fast.

grim_io2• 3 months ago

agents eat that glue

No wonder they hallucinate :)

zamadatix• 3 months ago

Yeah, at the last job there was a single outdated external wiki server left sitting in DO for those kinds of reasons while everything updated and internal had moved already (if not twice). If it hadn't become such a security risk it would never have been moved.

drewnick2• 3 months ago

The problem is a lot of this glue is proprietary by design at the various cloud services. I realize there are open source and alternative abstractions for a lot of of the same services, but there’s still quite a bit of glue if you’re on AWS, for example, and looking to move to bare metal.

But maybe I’m just thinking of the current capabilities of agents, and if we fast forward a couple years, even removing these abstractions or migrating will be very low friction.

onemoresoop• 3 months ago

Don’t forget staples and the tape too. LLMs have a weakness for paperclips, hope we don’t end up on that path

oulipo24• 3 months ago

Sure, and then you realize it deleted the db to "simplify the migration" lol

Obviously I agree that AI can be useful to write boilerplate, but it's in no way something you should use blindly when trying to do a migration or anything touching prod

So, to be more precise: no, "Claude Code didn't migrate it all". Claude Code helped you write boilerplate so that you could migrate

zephen2• 3 months ago

Claude gave him the courage to do the migration.

And, recent research suggests that anthropomorphization may actually be positively correlated with intelligence.

pbgcp20263• 3 months ago

it deleted the db to "simplify the migration". That was real scenario of at least one Sev 1 outages in "leading cloud provider".

drewnick2• 3 months ago

I too, am bravely using Claude for more DevOps. I run all of my virtual machines on proxmox atop bare metal servers I own and I’m just blown away at how quickly Claude can optimize and set up entire new networks across all of these machines. Truly feels like a coworker or well paid sysadmin.

pbgcp20263• 3 months ago

"servers I own" - that's a temporary glitch and AI will fix it for ... someone else.

jgalt2122• 3 months ago

Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.

Syntax did a nice episode on this topic recently. They went over where it works well, and where it does not work well.

https://syntax.fm/show/992/migrating-legacy-code-just-got-ea...

fuckinpuppers• 3 months ago

Linode is going to lose my business in the next couple months as well. Been there over a decade, have referred countless customers to them, but they’ve kept bumping up prices over and over and I can get a dedicated server at Hetzner or other places with 8x the memory, dedicated NVMe disks, dedicated CPU for cheaper.

Sure you lose a little of the benefit of a “virtual” server which can be migrated but Hetzner’s support has always been super fast and capable, should I wind up in a situation where I’ve got downtime.

pbgcp20263• 3 months ago

... expect Hetzner raising prices in ... 3 ... 2 ... 1

TiredOfLife• 3 months ago

Linode was bought by Akamai couple years ago.

gib444• 3 months ago

Let me guess: the Pro subscription was totally sufficient even using the expensive model and it only took an hour?

alsetmusic• 3 months ago

I decided to put some tiny data online for a sync service for myself. I didn't want to learn some of the things that needed to be involved and had an agent do it for me. I wasn't willing to risk my real server incase the agent left security holes.

I got a dedicated VPS just for the one thing and it did everything. I don't have a perfect understanding of possible openings that might have been left by misconfiguration. The data in question is so trivial that it doesn't matter to me if it's read so long as my VPS doesn't become party to a botnet and I can monitor to make sure that doesn't happen and shut it down if it does.

pennomi• 3 months ago

I saved about $1200 a year by moving from AWS to Hetzner. Can’t recommend it enough. AWS has kind of become a scam.

nixpulvis3• 3 months ago

Anything worse about the service?

steve1977• 3 months ago

Hetzner Cloud or their VPS offerings?

echelon• 3 months ago

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.

delfinom• 3 months ago

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.

subscribed5• 3 months ago

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.

wiether3• 3 months ago

  > Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month)

I went on pricing calculator, and to arrive at $6/mo with only 500 requests, you'd need to run the lambda for 15 minutes with 2Gb of RAM.

On the other hand, we have dozens production workloads on Lambda handling thousands of requests daily and we spend like $50/mo on Lambda.

I'm really intrigued by what you did to get to those figures!

Silhouette• 3 months 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.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

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.

richwater• 3 months ago

Your thesis is that everyone who uses AWS is being duped...?

acdha6• 3 months ago

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.

alternatex• 3 months ago

AWS ain't no Mercedes. Mercedes feels premium and isn't full of bugs.

AWS and Azure a charging an arm and a leg, but the offered quality is mostly perceived. Most of the bits and bobs they charge for are not providing much value for a vast majority of businesses. I won't even go over the complete lack of ergonomics with their portals.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

The pricing was always like that. You pay premium for availability of the big spread of cloud services

Doohickey-d• 3 months ago

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.

kro• 3 months ago

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.

linsomniac• 3 months ago

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.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

Do not rely on raid alone.

Have 2x servers atleast then invest in proper monitoring.

Server can fail without disk failures.

traceroute669• 3 months ago

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.

treesknees• 3 months ago

For the price, they could buy an exact replica bare metal server and still save money.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

You can just run 3 dedicated servers and design your app so that it never fails.

daneel_w2• 3 months ago

Surely you must've noticed that pretty much all of their bare metal offerings ("dedicated" and the stuff on "auction") have multiple disks, allowing for various RAID configurations?

hnthrow0287345• 3 months ago

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.

wat10000• 3 months ago

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.

acdha6• 3 months ago

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.

kijin• 3 months ago

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.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

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.

acdha6• 3 months ago

Replication is not a backup. It helps for migrations or clean single node failures but not human error, corruption, or an attack.

JSR_FDED• 3 months ago

Cloud providers are expensive for steady-state workloads.

Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?

vb-84483• 3 months ago

I Guess hetzner is basically "your server in colo"

perbu• 3 months ago

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.

Yeroc• 3 months ago

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.

klodolph• 3 months ago

“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.

subscribed5• 3 months ago

You can also pay smart hands to do that. My experience with Equinix for example it's been great.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

So on average once or twice per 5 years per server. Remote hands are also service you can pay for.

Most expense is initial setup and automation, but once you get thru that hump and have non-spiky loads it can be massively cheaper

traceroute669• 3 months ago

why not your own server in a colo?

Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?

preinheimer• 3 months ago

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.

dunham• 3 months ago

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.)

RexM• 3 months ago

Does dedicated hetzner servers handle this?

subscribed5• 3 months ago

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.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

Bit of waste of time for a server. Only makes sense if you actually need at least half a rack

jonahs1972• 3 months ago

I use OVH btw.

BonoboIO• 3 months ago

When I hear OVH I immediately think about their burning datacenters …

jonahs1972• 3 months ago

You guys have backups, right?

subscribed5• 3 months ago

I hope your backups are in order.

largbae• 3 months ago

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.

dividuum• 3 months ago

Not sure if I understand what you’re trying to say, but Hetzner's Console works just like that too.

reddalo2• 3 months ago

I personally find Hetzner's Console even better than DigitalOcean's one, especially since DigitalOcean now looks like three slightly different consoles depending on which page you're in. It feels like they've been migrating to a new system, but they haven't finished it yet.

locknitpicker7• 3 months ago

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/

andai2• 3 months ago

https://xkcd.com/2948/

rmunn• 3 months ago

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).

nine_k4• 3 months ago

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.

dangero• 3 months ago

The hot spare switchover idea is good. Another related idea: restore each from backup regularly.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

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.

petesergeant• 3 months ago

Coolify on a Hetzner server is giving me the one click service experience

pellepelster• 3 months ago

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.

wouldbecouldbe• 3 months ago

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.

apitman• 3 months ago

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.

igtztorrero• 3 months ago

Try OVH Canada they have good prices and service

dessimus• 3 months ago

Depending upon the nature of the data, they may need to keep it within the US.

OutOfHere• 3 months ago

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.

0123456789ABCDE• 3 months ago

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

swiftcoder• 3 months ago

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

ararangua• 3 months ago

I got blocked for non reason on DigitalOcean.

onetimeusename• 3 months ago

AWS only requires a card from me. I tried registering at Hetzner and they wanted a picture of my passport.

therealmarv• 3 months ago

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.

pmdr2• 3 months ago

It used to be "innocent until proven/suspected guilty." Now it's more like "let's see that ID, you know, just in case..."

cyanydeez2• 3 months ago

I dont. I'm happy the grift economy has some controls on it. As much as I love open source and all the efforts in collective without government interference; some security is required, otherwise we'll just invite more grift based economics.

It's bad enough living in America without the rest of the world adopting the grift economy.

zackmorris• 3 months ago

It's partially because the internet only grants us free storage (noun), not free compute (verb).

Which is fundamental to so many XY problems, including why cloud services are so byzantine instead of just providing isolated secure shells with full root access within them. And why distrust is a growing force in the world instead of, say, unconditional love.

I always dreamed of winning the internet lottery so that I could help dismantle the systems of control which currently dominate our lives. Which starts with challenging paradigms from first principles. That looks like asking why we only have multicore computing in the cloud and not on our desktops (which could be used to build our own cloud servers).

When we're missing an abstraction layer, that creates injustice and a power drain from the many to the few. Some examples:

- CPU -> multicore MIMD (missing) -> GPU (based on the subset SIMD instead of MIMD upon which graphics libraries could be built)

- UDP -> connectionless reliable stream (missing) -> TCP (should have been a layer above UDB not beside it)

- UDP/TCP -> P2P (NAT and other limitations block this and were inherited by IPv6 as generational trauma) -> WebRTC (redundant if we had P2P that "just works")

- internet connection -> symmetric upload/download speed (blocked for legal reasons under the guise of overselling to reduce cost) -> self-hosted web servers (rare due to antitrust issues stemming from said legal reasons)

- internet connection -> multicast (missing due to suppression of content-addressable-memory/hash-tree/DHT/) -> self-hosted streaming (negates the need for regions and edge caching)

I had high hopes for Google and even Tesla (for disrupting the physical world). But instead of open standards, they gave us proprietary vendor lock-in: Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and NACS instead of J1772 (better yet both). Because of their refusal to interoperate at the lowest levels, there is little hope that they will do the real work of solving the hard problems at the highest levels.

For example, I just heard that China has built thousands of battery swap stations to provide effectively instant charging for electric vehicles, whereas that's something that Tesla can't accomplish because they chose to build Supercharger stations instead.

Once we begin to see the world this way, it's impossible to unsee it. It calls into question the fundamentals (like scarcity) which capitalism is based upon, and even the concept of profit itself.

From a spiritual perspective, I believe that this understanding is what blocks me from using my talents to use the system for personal gain to win the internet lottery. The people who own the systems of control don't have this understanding, and even view its basis in empathy as a liability. So we sacrifice the good of the many for the good of the few and call that progress.

uxcolumbo4• 3 months ago

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 providers?

Unnecessarily exposing yourself to identity theft if they get compromised.

acdha6• 3 months ago

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.

zaptheimpaler• 3 months ago

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.

fg137• 3 months ago

In my case, I submitted my drivers license, the real one, that matched other information I submitted.

They still decided my information was fake and terminated my account.

I'm never going to do business with them again.

victorbjorklund• 3 months ago

Never had to do this. Sounds like they were flagged as a high risk customer and that’s why.

goobatrooba• 3 months ago

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.

xtracto• 3 months ago

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.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

i don't do anything bad and my passport isn't exactly any secret, i gladly submit it too Hetzner.

ciex• 3 months ago

Do they always do this? I never had to present my passport as far as i can remember.

Strom• 3 months ago

They do not. I've never had to present any documentation whatsoever to Hetzner and have been a happy customer for many years.

As I understand it, they ask only from accounts that check several boxes for common cases of abuse. So basically, personal accounts (as opposed to business accounts) from poor countries (by per capita, so e.g. India qualifies as poor).

roel_v• 3 months ago

I signed up yesterday and didn't have to provide anything.

api• 3 months ago

Now consider that DO is reasonably priced compared to the big three cloud providers.

Cloud is ludicrously marked up.

gbro3n• 3 months ago

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.

aungpaing• 3 months ago

100

adamcharnock• 3 months ago

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

brianwawok2• 3 months ago

Moving around k8s deployments is really nice. Very little vendor lockin compared to many of the cloud things you can buy.

My entire stack is.. k8s, hosted Postgres, s3 type storage. I can always host my own Postgres. So really down to k8s and s3. I think hetzner has some kind of s3 storage but haven’t looked into, and I assume moving in 100 TB is a process….

traceroute669• 3 months ago

Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email:

Your post was reasonable until the spam tagline.

Not cool.

spider-mario• 3 months ago

HA

High availability, in case anyone else was wondering.

jwr2• 3 months ago

We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general

I measured this several years back and never looked at virtual servers again. Since CPU time isn't reserved (like RAM is), the performance is abysmal compared to real hardware.

https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

_mitterpach• 3 months ago

That’s a really good article, thank you for sharing. Has anything in the field changed since 2019, or is the situation still roughly the same?

OliverGuy• 3 months ago

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?

kuzivaai• 3 months ago

The "where's the HA?" comments are missing that this was a single DO droplet before. The migration didn't reduce redundancy, it just moved the single point of failure from one provider to another for 1/6 the cost. The HA conversation is worth having, but it's a separate conversation from this migration.

daveguy• 3 months ago

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?

sylware3• 3 months ago

I had to ban the whole DigitalOcean AS.

Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.

Vaslo• 3 months ago

My fail2ban is loaded with DO scanners everyday.

sylware3• 3 months ago

Do you have a growing issue with hydra communication like me?

sylware3• 3 months ago

... or hostpapa?

phamilton• 3 months ago

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?

locknitpicker7• 3 months ago

For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.

How much latency does this add?

2E3BCFFD• 3 months ago

We've testing something similar, not using in prod yet. Network was 20ms RTT. The real variable was processing time median was sub-5ms most days but some regions would be 30ms for 8-10 hour blocks randomly.

nickandbro• 3 months ago

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.

ianberdin4• 3 months ago

Hey, congrats! What city do you live in?

ianberdin4• 3 months ago

When you find a gold, why tell everyone where it is? Silent happiness keeps the benefits:)

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

Ever heard of economies of scale?

ianberdin4• 3 months ago

Tell me about Vercel :)

ianberdin4• 3 months ago

Or Anthropic. Monopolies have different rules.

raphinou• 3 months ago

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?

leros• 3 months ago

Managed services have value. It's less to set up, less to maintain, and less worrying about waking up at 3am when something breaks.

I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.

utopiah• 3 months ago

Migrated from OVH to Hezner last Winter too, 0 downtime since, rolling backup running fine and lower bill too.

Undrilled1• 3 months ago

Why? prices of OVH are very similar to Hezner one, both have phisical server ecc

rawoke083600• 3 months ago

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.

lloydatkinson• 3 months ago

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.

talkingtab• 3 months ago

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.

pmdr2• 3 months ago

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.

readyforbrunch• 3 months ago

You didn't consider inflation. 2013's $5 is $7 in today's money. Today's $4 equals roughly 2013's $2.82.

So a near 44% price reduction for a 50% reduction in only one of the components. Looks like progression to me.

mariopt• 3 months ago

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.

timwis• 3 months ago

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.

matteocontrini3• 3 months ago

Beware of Hetzner Cloud volumes, they're unusable for a database, they're too slow. I'm not sure what workloads people run on Hetzner but the low-performance volumes and unreliable load balancers don't seem like a good fit for real production stuff with traffic.

grey-area4• 3 months ago

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.

rzz3• 3 months ago

What struck me though is that OP did so much work to migrare the server with zero downtime. The _single_ big server. Something’s off here.

j454• 3 months ago

Respectfully, this type of "high availability" strawman is a dated take.

This is a general response to it.

I have run hosting on bare metal for millions of users a day. Tens of thousdands of concurrent connections. It can scale way up by doing the same thing you do in a cloud, provision more resources.

For "downtime" you do the same thing with metal, as you do with digital ocean, just get a second server and have them failover.

You can run hypervisors to split and manage a metal server just like Digital Ocean. Except you're not vulnerable to shared memory and cpu exploits on shared hosting like Digital Ocean. When Intel CPU or memory flaws or kernel exploits come out like they have, one VM user can read the memory and data of all the other processes belonging to other users.

Both Digital Ocean, and IaaS/PaaS are still running similar linux technologies to do the failover. There are tools that even handle it automatically, like Proxmox. This level of production grade fail over and simplicity was point and click, 10 years ago. Except no one's kept up with it.

The cloud is convenient. Convenience can make anyone comfortable. Comfort always costs way more.

It's relatively trivial to put the same web app on a metal server, with a hypervisor/IaaS/Paas behind the same Cloudflare to access "scale".

Digital Ocean and Cloud providers run on metal servers just like Hetzner.

The software to manage it all is becoming more and more trivial.

jijijijij4• 3 months ago

I feel like 95% of the web falls into this category. Like, have you ever said "That's it, I am never gonna visit this page again!", because of temporary downtime? Unless you are Amazon and every minute costs you bazillions, you are likely gonna get the better deal not worrying about availability and scalability. That 250€/m root server is a behemoth. Complete overkill for most anything. As a bonus, you are gonna be half the internet, when someone at AWS or Cloudflare touches DNS.

wild_egg• 3 months ago

A week of downtime every decade I think still works out to a higher uptime than I've been getting from parts of GitHub lately. So I'd consider that a win.

daneel_w2• 3 months ago

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".

VorpalWay• 3 months ago

To be fair, I migrated a VPS from Linode to Hetzner a few years ago. Minor downtime is a non-issue: personal website and email server. I approximately halved the monthly cost, and I haven't had any downtime except what I caused myself when rebooting to upgrade the kernel every now and then.

As a bonus, Hetzner is European.

Aurornis3• 3 months ago

These articles are popular where there's a mismatch between application requirements and the solution chosen. When someone over-engineers their architecture to be enterprise-grade (substitute your own definition of enterprise-grade) when really they were running a hobby project or a small business where a day of downtime every once in a while just means your customers will come back the next day, going all-out on cloud architecture is maybe not necessary. That's why you see so many comments from people arguing that downtime isn't always a big deal or that risking an outage is fine: There are a lot of applications where this is kind of true.

The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing

j454• 3 months ago

Downtime is a strawman.

Clever architecture will always beat cleverly trying to pick only one cloud.

Being cloud agnostic is best.

This means setting up a private cloud.

Hosted servers, and managed servers are perfectly capable of near zero downtime. this is because it's the same equipment (or often more consumer grade) that the "cloud" works on and plans for even more failure.

Digital Ocean definitely does not guarantee zero downtime. That's a lot of 9's.

It's simple to run well established tools like Proxmox on bare metal that will do everything Digital Ocean promises, and it's not susceptible to attacks, or exploits where the shared memory and CPU usage will leak what customers believe is their private VPS.

Nothing ever failing in the case of a tool like Proxmox is, install it on two servers, one VPS exists on both nodes (you connect both servers as nodes), click high availability, and it's generally up and running. Put cloudflare in front of it like the best preference practices of today.

If you're curious about this, there's some pretty eye opening and short videos on Proxmox available on Youtube that are hard to unsee.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

their original also run on single server ?

If you can tolerate few hours of downtime and some data rollback/loss, single server + robust backups can be viable strategy

chalmovsky• 3 months ago

What are you running on it is the only question which matters, obviously you dont want air traffic control to go down but some app… So what if it goes down? Backup is somewhere else if you even need it anyway. Github has uptime less than 90% according to this: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ . And the world keeps turning. Obviously we should strive for better, but also lets please not continue making this uptime fetish out of it, for vast majority of the apps it absolutely doesnt fucking matter.

wiether3• 3 months ago

To be fair they were using a single VM on DigitalOcean, so they didn't had the perks of a cloud provider, except maybe the fact that a VM is probably more fault-tolerant than a bare metal server.

Usually those articles describe two situations:

  - they were "on the cloud" for the wrong reasons and migrating to something more physical is the right approach
  - they were "on the cloud" for the right reasons and migrating to something more physical is going to be a disaster

Here they appear to be in the first situation. If their setup was running fine on DO and they put the right DR policies in place at Hetzner, they should be fine.

chillfox• 3 months ago

A lot of things don't need that.

Also, don't underestimate the reliability of simplicity.

I was a Linux sysadmin for many years, and I have never seen as much downtime from simpler systems as I routinely see from the more complicated setups. Somewhere between theory and reality, simpler systems just comes out ahead most of the time.

NicoJuicy• 3 months ago

Depends on the app and how long downtime would take.

Deploying a new docker instance or just restoring the app from a snapshot and restoring the latest db in most cases is enough.

BorisMelnik2• 3 months ago

I agree with you, even for the servers I am responsible for I always make decisions like putting db on supabase instead of local, hosting files on s3 with versioning/multi region etc. then of course come up with a backup and snapshot system.

ozim2• 3 months ago

If you can restore from snapshot to a new instance on cloud provider having running second copy is waste of money.

I know people like FAANG LARPing. Not everyone has budget or need to run four nines with 24/7 and FAANG level traffic.

Gud• 3 months ago

What time in maintenance? Hetzner has been rock solid for me.

jgalt2122• 3 months ago

Hetzner has cheap load balancers and VMs.

neya• 3 months ago

I was thinking the same. A managed database is just set and forget pretty much. I do NOT miss the old times where I had to monitor my email from routine security checkups hoping my database didn't get hacked by some script kiddie accompanied by blackmail over email.

wg0• 3 months ago

If you have the setup within server fully scripted and automated (bash, pyinfra or ansible etc) and backups are in place then recovery isn't that hard. Downtime for sure maybe couple of hours for which you can point your DNS entries to a static page while you're restoring everything.

Not a bad tradeoff for 99.8% of shops out there.

jdboyd• 3 months ago

DO doesn't do high availability droplets, and their migration policy is will try, if we detect poor health of server before it fails.

If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.

Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.

pinkgolem• 3 months ago

Tbh, my one server paperless deployment has a higher uptime then most services.

If your scaling need is not that high, you can get very far with a single server

littlecranky67• 3 months ago

To be fair, modern dedicated servers at hetzner have two power units, and come with a redundand ssd/hdd raid-1 config. AFAIK both ssd and power unit having hotplug capability, so in case either fails they can be replaced with zero downtime.

Given the downtimes we saw in the past year(s) (AWS, Cloudflare, Azure - the later even down several times), I would argue moving to any of the big cloud providers give you not much of a better guarantee.

I myself am a Hetzner customer with a dedicated vServer, meaning it is a shared virtual server but with dedicated CPUs (read: still oversubscribed, but some performance guarantee) and had zero hardware-based downtime for years [0]. I would guess their vservers are on similar redundant hardware where the failing components can be hotswapped.

[0] = They once within the last 3 years sent me an email that they had to update a router that would affect network connectivity for the vServer, but the notification came weeks in advance and lasted about 15 minutes. No reboot/hardware failure on my vServer though.

supermatt• 3 months ago

They already were on "1 big server" (a single VPS at digital ocean) and moved to another "1 big server" (a managed server at hertzner).

They saved money and lost nothing.

Now, if they so wish, they could use a portion of that to increase redundancy - but that wasn't the point of the article.

surgical_fire• 3 months ago

The vast majority of services are actually alright with a little downtime here and there. In exchange, maintenance is a lot simpler with less moving parts.

People underestimate how far you can go with one or two servers. In fact, what I have seen in ky career is many examples of services that should have been running on one or two servers and instead went for a hugely complex microserviced approach, all in on Cloud providers and crazy requirements of reliability for a scale that never would come.

ahofmann• 3 months ago

In 20 years of hosting all kinds of web services, some of them serving over 200m requests per month, a crashing single server was twice a problem.

Dealing with over engineered bullshit, that behaved in strange ways that disrupted the service was far more often a problem.

So, yes, redundancy is something that can be left away, if you're comfortable to be responsible for fixing things at a Saturday morning.

jijijijij4• 3 months ago

People also tend underestimate how much compute these dedicated servers got, compared to cloud offerings, and what that feels like without 100 layers of management abstraction in-between. You are likely not going to ever choke a plenty-cored, funny-RAMed root server at a fraction of your cloud costs. This overkill resource estate can be the answer to a lot of scalability worries. It's always there, no sharing shit all.

izacus4• 3 months ago

I had like... less than 10 minutes downtime on Hetzner in years (funny enough, that makes my personal containers more reliable than productionized AWS and GCP deployments with their constant partial outages). So perhaps all that complexity (beyond maybe a backup container) isn't really necessary for companies where a bit of downtime doesn't really affect revenue?

Like, I know Leetcode tells otherwise, but most companies really don't need full FAANG stack with 99.999% uptime. A day of outage in a few years isn't going affect bottom lines.

ozim2• 3 months ago

Second that I wrote the same in my comment somewhere above.

LARPing as a FAANG is waste of money and lots of companies doesn’t even need 3 nines let alone 5ve.

pier252• 3 months ago

I don't know about Hetzner but with Upcloud and Vultr my single VPS setups have been more reliable than multiregion with redundancy setups with other providers like Fly.

stephenhuey2• 3 months ago

A few weeks ago, I tested deploying Rails apps to Hetzner and Vultr for the first time using Hatchbox to deploy Rails apps onto them. I'm still supporting clients on Heroku, but there are potential new projects in the coming months that I might deploy elsewhere. Render is decent in some cases, but you can get a lot of bang for your buck deploying on Vultr, and Hatchbox makes it easy to do, whether you have one instance or a cluster. Hatchbox also helps with putting multiple apps/domains on a single server, a concept I had to give up long ago on Heroku. I've thought about deploying to DO plenty of times over the years, but there was always Heroku, and if I had to find a new home for Rails 8, I think I'd skip it in favor of a more powerful Vultr server. Hatchbox can provision Postgres for you, but Vultr has managed Postgres which is appealing to me. Or if you're just using Sqlite with Rails 8, that's easy to do with Hatchbox but not on Render since Render has an ephemeral file system.

grebc• 3 months ago

Downtime happens in all different contexts of life that a web site/service being knocked offline is soo far down the priority list for most people.

It’s amusing that the US government can shutdown for days/weeks/months over budget reasons and there’s no adult discussions that take place about fixing the cause. Yet the latest HN demo that 100 people will use need all 9’s reliability and hundreds of responses.

stephenhuey2• 3 months ago

I already made a comment here about testing Hatchbox. You point it to your servers and it can set up a cluster and load balancer with a few button clicks.

squirrellous• 3 months ago

I’d even argue that most things operated by tech doesn’t need 24x7x365 availability. If it’s about life-and-death, then yes make it super reliable and available. Otherwise, bring back scheduled downtime please.

ies7• 3 months ago

You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.

Look from my perspective, I'll got flying color from my owner because of the cost saving and got my team morale up that I really need them to maintain the system instead of lay them off.

Also in some cases that also mean new jobs opening.

apatheticonion• 3 months ago

I've been running a production workload for a cost sensitive customer on a small cheap Vultr VPS for 10 years.

Updates have zero downtime and there's lots of compute headroom so it never locks up.

No, there's no redundancy and it is only performant in a single region - but that's okay with the customer as it's just a custom CRM.

Not every use case requires Kubernetes, multiple nodes, dedicated database infra and auto-scaling.

locknitpicker7• 3 months ago

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?

It seems that to start off the original system was hosted on a single Digital Ocean droplet with 32vCPUs and a total 192GB of RAM.

They switched to a single Hetzner AX162-R instance.

So the blogger switched from a single odd with 32 vCPUs to a dedicated server running a AMD EPYC 9454P and 256GB of RAM.

That should answer your question with a clear yes.

You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.

desireco42• 3 months ago

I think Digital Ocean is not something where I would worry about costs. I would prefer server like Hetzner but I don't think DO is service where the costs are such that we need to do movement.

Plus, this is not what DHH was doing, he was not saving few bucks, but unlocking potential for his company to thrive.

shermantanktop• 3 months ago

Ah yes, create db replica, promote replica to primary. Seems so simple!

When I’ve seen this work well, it’s either built into the product as an established feature, or it’s a devops procedure that has a runbook and is done weekly.

Doing it with low level commands and without a lot of experience is pretty likely to have issues. And that’s what happened here.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

Old server: CentOS 7 — long past its end-of-life, but still running in production. New server: AlmaLinux 9.7 — a RHEL 9 compatible distribution and the natural successor to CentOS.

So they did same mistake all over again. Debian or Ubuntu would just be upgrade-in-place and migrate

hnarn• 3 months ago

I work with Linux deployments for a living and I have no idea what you are talking about.

neeraga• 3 months ago

Can someone tell me the AWS server cost with the same spec? Probably $5000 per month?

caymanjim• 3 months ago

Congrats on doing this successfully, but your setup is amateur. This would have been infinitely easier if you were using IaC (Terraform/Ansible), containerized applications (that you're not already doing that is madness), and had a high-availability cluster setup in place already. It sounds like avoiding downtime is important to you, yet there's no redundancy in the existing stack at all, and everything is done by hand.

This isn't something others should use as an example.

Zopieux• 3 months ago

Or just nix. The new hardware deployment would have been one nixos-build or colmena call, not accounting for the data migration of course.

Chaosvex• 3 months ago

Why take 24 hours when you can spend a month trying to get Nix to work instead? Slightly facetious but...

alfanick• 3 months ago

Is this sarcasm? It's still Hacker News - running servers by hand is what people do, and it is fun to do :)

mlhpdx• 3 months ago

I chose to ignore the cost savings and just enjoy the tale of migration. It’s a good one.

koolba• 3 months ago

Old server nginx converted to reverse proxy We wrote a Python script that parsed every server {} block across all 34 Nginx site configs, backed up the originals, and replaced them with proxy configurations pointing to the new server. This meant that during DNS propagation, any request still hitting the old IP was silently forwarded. No user would see a disruption.

What was the config on the receiving side to support this? Did you whitelist the old server IP to trust the forwarding headers? Otherwise you’d get the old server IP in your app logs. Not a huge deal for an hour but if something went wrong it can get confusing.

DaedalusII2• 3 months ago

does anyone else start to wonder about these companys issuing vps/online space with no hardening and no warning

you can basically go on hetzner and spin up a vps with linux that is exposed to the open internet with open ports and user security and within a few hours its been hacked, there is no like warning pop up that says "if you do this your server will be pwnd"

i especialy wonder with all the ai provisioned vps and postgres dbs what will happen here

_el1s73• 3 months ago

  > 30 MySQL databases (248 GB of data)
  > 34 Nginx virtual hosts across multiple domains
  > GitLab EE (42 GB backup)
  > Neo4J Graph DB (30 GB graph database)
  > Supervisor managing dozens of background workers
  > Gearman job queue
  > Several live mobile apps serving hundreds of thousands of users

He's doing all of that on a single server?!

I'm not against vertical scaling and stuff, but 30 db instances in one server is just crazy.

leetrout• 3 months ago

30 db instances

They didn't say that and the article didn't allude to that. 1 instance with 30 databases.

_el1s73• 3 months ago

Ah yes that's probably true, but still having 30 apps in a single db instance doesn't seem better...

vb-84483• 3 months ago

It's an average of 8GB per database, I guess he serves multiple clients and decided to "segregate" each client on its instance. If it's acceptable for the business it's nothing wrong with his setup.

_el1s73• 3 months ago

Several live mobile apps serving hundreds of thousands of users

It seems like he's having a database for each app.

jpablo3• 3 months ago

  If you’re migrating a large MySQL database and you’re not 
  using mydumper/myloader, you’re doing it the hard way.

If you aren't using xtrabackup you are doing it wrong. I recently migrated a database with 2TB of data from 5.7 to 8.4 with about 15 seconds of down time. It wouldn't have been possible without xtrabackup. Mysqldumper requires a global write block, I wouldn't call blocking writes for hours a "zero downtime migration".

embedding-shape3• 3 months ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but done with a proxy in-between that can "pause" requests, you could have done the move with 0 seconds and no rejected requests, and I don't think mydumper/myloader/xtrabackup matters for that. The "migration" would be spinning up a new database, making it catch up, then switching over. If you can pause/hang in-flight requests while switching, not a single one needs to fail :)

jpablo3• 3 months ago

The "making it catch up" is the tricky part. You need an initial backup for that. xtrabackup can take that backup "hot" without blocking read/writes. mysqldumper will block writes for whatever time that initial backup takes, for 2TB of data that's going to be hours.

Once you have that initial back up you can set your replica and make it catch up , then you switch. I choose to take the few seconds of downtime doing the switch because for my use case that was acceptable.

grasbergerm• 3 months ago

I have experience in migrating large DBs with replication and the article not discussing write blocks made my ears perk up as well.

Aside from the blocking you mentioned during the initial snapshot, you'd need to block writes to the old DB before the cutover as well. There's no way to guarantee in-flight writes to the old DB aren't lost when promoting the replica to a primary otherwise. I'm surprised the author didn't go into more detail here. Maybe it was fine given their workload, but the key issue I see is that they promoted the new DB to a primary before stopping the old application. During that gap, any data written to the old DB would be lost.

sva_• 3 months ago

Thank you. I was confused that nobody pointed out that this "zero downtime migration" requires there to be no write to the original host for the time of the migration...

godot2• 3 months ago

If I remember correctly (it has been a while since I looked), Hetzner although is a lot cheaper on the price sheet, they're European region by default and then if you look to get US region servers at Hetzner, the pricing is a lot higher and similar to Digital Ocean. Is that still the case?

For OP though who is a Turkey-based company and want European region servers anyway, it might make sense.

embedding-shape3• 3 months ago

For what I use Hetzner for, and OP from the article, Hetzner only has dedicated servers in Europe, so there really isn't anything to compare to :) If I need dedicated servers in the US, I'd probably go with Vultr.

I think Hetzner makes most sense (for myself, and OP seemingly too) because they have dedicated servers, and they're in Europe. Extra bonus is the unmetered connection, but primarily just good and cheap servers :)

kyledrake• 3 months ago

They're great but I wish Hetzner had a US (or CA) east coast presence, the latency of going across the ocean is really troublesome. They have some presence for their cloud offering, so they at least have some experience with the idea.

l5870uoo9y2• 3 months ago

Has Hetzner discontinued their US data center?

thelastgallon2• 3 months ago

In the big corporate world, this would be a $600m budget, creating multiple VPs, thousands of positions, multi-cloud and multi-dc kubernetes, tons of highly paid consultants, the migration would take 9 - 12 years, create so many success stories, lessons learnt, promotions, etc etc.

l5870uoo9y2• 3 months ago

Most VPS hosting companies have cheap entrance VPS but then steep pricing. 8 vCPUs on DigitalOcean cost 96$ and ~11$ on Hetzner.

bluepuma77• 3 months ago

A zero-downtime migration to a single database server? Power fails, disks fail, even CPU fans sometimes fail and bring a single server to a halt. Somehow I would have expected at least a high-available database cluster with multiple machines for applications "serving hundreds of thousands of users".

pwr1• 3 months ago

Did this about a year ago, went smoother than expected tbh. the main gotcha for us was DO's managed postgres — had to dump/restore manually since there's no direct migration path to Hetzner's managed DBs. ended up just self-hosting postgres on a separate box which has been fine, maybe even better.

mitjam• 3 months ago

I assume a vm on DO is HA protected. Also storage might live on a Cluster. Did you consider a socond dedi or do you just accept the risk of longer failover time and data loss time (RPO) for recovering to a newly provisioned server? Would love to know your thoughts on this especially as the migration was well designed and executed.

donmb• 3 months ago

We are currently moving from heroku to Hetzner. Same story, thousands saved / month.

ocean2• 3 months ago

Great article

dabinat• 3 months ago

I’m formulating plans to switch from AWS to Hetzner. Amazon gets you by charging high prices (sometimes 20x more than competitors) and forcing you to make long-term commitments in order to get the prices to somewhere more reasonable. Then they make it exorbitantly expensive to migrate your data anywhere else. It’s a very customer-hostile approach that I’m tired of at this point.

Amazon might think that they’re locking people in with the egress fees. But they’re also locking people out. As soon as you switch one part to a competitor, the high egress forces you to switch over everything.

It’s going to be complicated to switch, but it’s made easier by the fact that I didn’t fall into the trap of building my platform on Amazon-specific services.

boulos• 3 months ago

This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...

AWS matched a few months later:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!

Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.

tailscaler2026• 3 months ago

AWS DTO is a complete lie.

This doesn't actually work as advertised. I attempted free data egress from AWS in December. It took them 31 days to respond to my initial ticket. At which point they gave me a multi-page questionnaire to determine eligibility and they also told me I could not begin DTO until 60 days had passed from approval of the questionnaire.

By the time I was allowed "free egress" my cumulative S3 storage charges over the prior 100 days would have roughly matched the cost of egress if I just did so originally.

I'm in the US so the EU Data Act protections don't apply.

dwedge3• 3 months ago

Have you tried to use the DTO? I did. They make you fill in a form saying you'll migrate all services (despite the blog post saying that isn't necessary), and then they take up to 12 weeks to make a decision. In my case they rejected it on a formality after 2 weeks and said to try again (the timer starts again).

So in my case that would have been 14 weeks plus the time to migrate away. The egress costs are equivalent to around 17 weeks storage cost. So you save around 1c/gb if they don't find some reason to reject it.

matteocontrini3• 3 months ago

The EU Data Act forbids cloud switching charges, that's why they made these changes (while presenting them as if they cared about customers being charged for switching away):

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/data-act-...

localhoster• 3 months ago

Hard to read this article as it was written by Claude as a report after the migration that Claude did for you. If an llm helped you migrate and save this much money, kudos. But if you decide to write about it at least proof read it and remove redundant parts and llm storytelling.

smallpipe• 3 months ago

It's so bad, I know no one reads the original post on here, but this one was painful

marcosscriven• 3 months ago

I’ve had Proxmox on one of their AX42 servers for a year now. All of it is backed up to PBS, backed by Cloudflare R2 storage.

None of it is mission critical - but it’s certainly something I’d use in production with a few more instances.

Networking over Tailscale works flawlessly with my Proxmox nodes at home.

bth• 3 months ago

A few months ago, I looked into AWS alternatives for my small SaaS side project. My main motivations were to save money and maybe support some EU cloud providers. At first, I planned to go with Hetzner and accepted that I would need to do a lot of things myself.

However, the dealbreaker for me was that Hetzner IPs have a bad reputation. At work, I learned that one of the managed AWS firewall rules blocks many (maybe all) of their IPs. I can’t even open a website hosted on a Hetzner IP from my work laptop because it’s blocked by some IT policy (maybe this is not an issue for you if you are using CloudFlare or similar).

I've read online that the DDoS protection is very bad as well.

So in the end, I picked DO App Platform in one of the EU regions. Having the option to use a managed DB was a big plus as well.

mmarian• 3 months ago

Not sure what firewall rules you're referring to, but I'm genuinely surprised to see DO being trusted more than Hetzner. I often see DO's ASN when looking at scrapers/hackers, so I'd say it's only a matter of time until they're blocked as well.

Maledictus• 3 months ago

How convenient for Amazon to block a competitor this way :(

napolux• 3 months ago

DO IPs are way worse.

source: moved away from DO for this very reason.

TZubiri• 3 months ago

I wrote about this on a Tor thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279518

It looks like Hetzner is Tor (and Tor adjacent) friendly, I suggested this might affect IP reputation, 2 users responded they had no IP reputation issues. But it looks like that wasn't quite the whole story

https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/g...

It seems that Hetzner holds 7% of the Tor network. (if I understood the table right)

iririririr• 3 months ago

ironically, blocking aws and azure solved 99% of my bot problems. zero users affected.

so much that I'm thinking of selling nothing but an aws and azure blocker as a service.

pier252• 3 months ago

Is Hetzner as reliable as DO though?

Over the years I've heard plenty of horror stories from Hetzner customers.

Ken_At_EM3• 3 months ago

Yeah, well be careful of Hetzner, I used to love them but I just migrated away. They just shut all all of our VMs over a $36 billing dispute. (~30 VMs we were using for our CI/CD pipeline) We provided them evidence with records of the payment in totality from our bank, they refused to look at it / discuss the dispute, even when we were communicating urgently and just ultimately shut off all our access. We're on Scaleway now.

chris_engel• 3 months ago

Hm. Hetzners billing stuff is highly automated - but they usually give you about a month to pay your bill if the credit card payment failed for some reason.

antoniojtorres• 3 months ago

Have had some hiccups with payments not going through myself that ended up in server IPs being restricted but they were very helpful on the phone and service was restored in about 30 minutes after the call. Decidedly not ideal but has been easily manageable since.

Ken_At_EM3• 3 months ago

We were on invoice, and yes we had about a week or so of warning, but again, we had done the wire transfer to the full amount, and provided evidence of such.

jcrben• 3 months ago

Their customer service is surprisingly hostile. I still use them tho since I'm using them for low stakes stuff

Ken_At_EM3• 3 months ago

Glad I am not the only one, this makes me feel less crazy.

tylergetsay• 3 months ago

I'm currently paying $800ish a month for digital ocean servers that I know would fit on a single hetzner machine :/

rob• 3 months ago

I know they've been bought out by Akamai or whatever but I've been using Linode for over 10 years and I still go to them if I need a VPS. I don't have extreme needs, but they seem to be always improving or adding features comparable to other providers and the UI is consistent so I don't see a reason to change. Any time there has been an issue they've migrated me to a new host automatically without even needing to do anything. I combine it with Dokploy now and just deploy most of my projects via Docker Compose and private GitHub repos.

grzes• 3 months ago

is a pity that Hetzner does not have monitoring agent like DO. in DO you can set alerts and view all metrics. its this one thing that keeps me from migrating because i dont want to install custom monitoring solutions.

throwaway132448• 3 months ago

Why did the title get editorialized from the original to omit key facts? That’s some sleazy modding HN.

aaa_aaa• 3 months ago

Skyrocketing inflation and a dramatically weakening Turkish Lira against the US dollar

This reasoning does not add up. They could simply say they needed to move somewhere cheaper, like Hetzner. Inflation is still high but getting lower. Weakened Turkish Lira part is not correct because dollar is artificially suppressed for a very long time.

bornfreddy• 3 months ago

The key: proxy_ssl_verify off — the new server’s SSL cert is valid for the domain, not for the IP address. Disabling verification here is fine because we control both ends.

Yeah - no, it's not. They made the MitM attack possible with this change. The exposure was limited to those 5 minutes, but it should have been a known risk.

Also not certain how they could check the apps on the new server with the read-only database, while it was a replica?

Still, nice to hear it succeeded, the reasons sound very familiar.

SahAssar• 3 months ago

The key: proxy_ssl_verify off — the new server’s SSL cert is valid for the domain, not for the IP address. Disabling verification here is fine because we control both ends.

Not really, a MITM could do anything here. It's not very likely to happen here, but I think this comment shows a misunderstanding of what certificates and verification does.

TurdF3rguson2• 3 months ago

Hetzner oversells hardware which means your neighbors are a drag on your performance. If your server is mostly idle, this might be a good move. If not, it probably won't be worth it.

faangguyindia11• 3 months ago

It will still outpeform VPS of similar specs.

Hetzner cannot outsell your CPU or SSD

VMs on cloud can.

TurdF3rguson2• 3 months ago

Hetzner cannot outsell your CPU or SSD

On dedicated server they can't but we're talking about VPS (cloud plan)

BrunoBernardino• 3 months ago

Really interesting sharing, thanks! Why lower the TTL to 300 instead of something like 60 or 30, to make the switch even faster? The nameservers were DO's, so they should've been more than able to handle the increased load.

BTW, I've been a client of Hetzner (Cloud, Object Storage, and Storage Box) for a few years now, very happy with them!

written-beyond• 3 months ago

I considered going to hetzner at one point but I read a lot of stories around hetzner that didn't inspire confidence. Primarily that they're not really that much cheaper than going to other companies offering something similar.

If some people can chime in with their positive experiences I might switch.

elgertam• 3 months ago

I set up a VM on Hetzner a few weeks ago. I've been quite impressed so far, and was able to orchestrate everything with Terraform without a problem.

addybojangles• 3 months ago

Might give this a whirl, not move business infrastructure here, but see how it works for my personal VPN server.

infomiho• 3 months ago

Hey I made the meme in the header https://wasp.sh/blog/2025/04/02/an-introduction-to-database-...

Nice to see it used _twice_ :D

collinmanderson• 3 months ago

I just want to point out this guide uses many of the same tasks I use when migrating websites between servers while minimizing downtown.

- reduce dns ttl (if not doing an ip swap)

- rsync website files

- rsync /etc/letsencrypt/ ssl certificates

- copy over database (if writes don't happen often and database is small enough, this can be done without replica, just go read_only during migration)

- test new server by putting new ip in local /etc/hosts

- turn off cron on old server

- convert old server nginx to reverse proxy to new server

- change dns (or ip swap between old and new server)

- turn on cron on new server

Frannky• 3 months ago

I have been using hetzer for a few years now. I realized I just need a Linux VM and snapshots. It is so freeing to not have to deal with big tech's VMs and their cumbersome and soul-sucking steps and documentation.

zuzululu• 3 months ago

Only complaint about hetzner is how difficult it is to become a customer there.

No matter what I try, they refuse which is frustrating. Even setting up a new company is not a realistic solution as the verification still requires passport.

If anybody knows an alternative, kindly leave a suggestion.

itsthecourier2• 3 months ago

OVH is awesome

pruthviraja• 3 months ago

Great migration execution. The nginx reverse proxy method during DNS propagation is a smart way. we utilize a comparable approach when transitioning workloads across Kubernetes clusters but the traffic management occurs at the ingress controller level with weighted routing. I am wondering if you thought about containerizing any part of this stack during the transition or if the decision to use bare metal was deliberate in order to maintain a manageable migration scope???

jjtheblunt• 3 months ago

how's HIPAA maintainable, or not, in migration to Hetzner?

anonzzzies• 3 months ago

DO is so expensive compared with others; one of my clients insisted on using it as they found aws too costly; I got them over to Hetzner after a few months saving them 28k/month. I have no clue why people bother with DO vs AWS if they want to spend that kind of cash on hosting. I host million$ SaaS on Bunny.net and Hetzner for less than $200/mo; will never go back to the overcharging companies; and this is trivial to rsync migrate to whatever other provider too.

dependsontheq2• 3 months ago

Hetzner is in my hometown and they are such a team of decent, no marketing, no frills, we build infrastructure team.

dependsontheq2• 3 months ago

They remind me of all the other German Mittelstand family run companies - we will do one thing and we will do it in the most efficient way possible.

altern8• 3 months ago

I used to like Vultr because it was a cheaper Digital Ocean, still with a great-looking UI (if not better).

Now, prices are so bad that I have to choose between a bare metal server with 500 GB of SSD storage, 16-core CPU and 16 GB of RAM with OVH or a VM with 1/10 of that with Vultr.

It doesn't make any sense.

Also, Vultr has the nasty policy of topping your account $100 whenever you run out of money, even if your server is $3/month.

Last weekend, I transferred a handful of personal projects and my monthly expense for hosting went from $500 to $100, for vastly superior servers.

sho• 3 months ago

I use and love Hetzner as well. But you have to go into it eyes open. Concrete example - a month ago I was notified that network infra my systems ran over was going down for maintenance. Public link: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/ff8335b8-6fda-4370-8431-...

So, for me that was a production DB, fairly low usage but still. In the end I judged that it was going to take so much time to work around the outage that I just planned "maintenance downtime" myself and took it offline for a couple of hours until they finished.

Now, could I have architected better? No doubt. But it's a good reminder of what you're paying for and where the differences emerge in practise. AWS may be an overcomplicated, expensive mess - but I've literally never had any service of theirs go down for maintenance for any reason. Outages, sure, but taking things down for routine maintenace? Unheard of at AWS.

For me the formula is - I do whatever I want for my stuff, but if it's someone else's business, I use AWS.

andreynering• 3 months ago

I have something on Digital Ocean and I receive emails about maintenance windows all the time.

So, not an exclusivity of Hetzner for sure.

Ardren• 3 months ago

I don't remember ever having downtime on DO when I was using them.

I used to get those emails all the time, but the type of downtime they were talking about was extremely minimal (the entire point of VPS systems).

The last email I got about possible downtime was increased latency for the UI and API for ~10s last year. The email before that was ~5s of potential lost traffic to a droplet.

sulandor• 3 months ago

tbf there are reasonably priced bare metal hosting providers that don't have maintenance or other regular outages.

bborud• 3 months ago

Now that everyone seems to be discovering Hetzner I guess the countdown clock for enshittification has started ticking, so we have to start looking for the next place to escape.

_pdp_• 3 months ago

When you use AWS you pay for software. When you use Hetzner you pay for the hardware. Only one can go infinitely more expensive!

With decades of well engineered open source software and some help from AI virtually anyone can run their own bespoke stack on bare metal servers. You need to know a think or two but it is possible.

If you want to go crazy you can also deploy your own agent inside the machines to maintain them.

Fock1e• 3 months ago

The "Hetzner is 5-10x cheaper" framing is real but the comparison that actually matters is egress, not compute. A $5 DO droplet and a €4 Hetzner CX22 are both fine for a side project. What kills you on AWS/GCP at small scale is the per-GB egress - once I was pulling ~300GB/mo out of an eu-west-1 ELB and the egress line was 6x the EC2 line on the bill. Moving the same workload to Hetzner or even a single Fly.io region dropped it by >80% without touching the app.

One thing people skip: you also lose AWS's managed failure modes. Managed Postgres, VPC peering, IAM roles on instance metadata - you now own all of that. For a solo project or small team that's fine (rsync + pg_dump | pg_restore has worked for 20 years). For anything with on-call rotations it's a meaningful shift.

gynecologist• 3 months ago

AI response

jillesvangurp• 3 months ago

I migrated from Google Cloud to Hetner beginning of March. I currently have about 9 vms running and I pay a around 130 euro per month. There are very little other fees and generous freemiums for things like networking and storage. I have 3 projects, one LB, a handful of storage buckets, and a private network in one of the projects. That 130 is for everything. Their 40% price increase kicked in shortly after I signed up. It's still very affordable and good value. Their support was very helpful when a few days in I requested additional server quota.

The flip side is technical limitations and reliability. We've had a few network glitches. The vm boot disks are unencrypted (not ideal). And a few other things. Do your homework before you migrate. Most of these things you can DYI around.

I managed the whole migration via Codex orchestrating my Ansible scripts. It made fast work out of figuring out how to do NAT in Hetzner private networks and a few other hairy issues that would have otherwise derailed me for a bit. I got the whole migration completed in two days.

You get what you pay for with Hetzner and it is good value. But if you need more than they offer, you might want to look at other companies. They scale by keeping things simple. This is my second time with Hetzner. We used them around 2013 for a bit. I had six bare metal servers at the time for something like 300/month in total.

dnnddidiej• 3 months ago

65gb source copied using rsync seems... odd! And more cat than cattle.

diebillionaires• 3 months ago

I moved away from digital ocean about 6 years ago and never looked back. I found their customer support to be rude, and their offerings to be overpriced.

noisy_boy2• 3 months ago

Tried to sign-up for Hetzner. Says I need to provide my official ID for "enhanced verification". Yeah, right.

jebronie2• 3 months ago

Yes. Problem?

noisy_boy2• 3 months ago

If you don't see the problem, there isn't much I can say that will change your mind.

reddalo2• 3 months ago

They do that in order to keep their service safe from spammers and cryptominers.

flaxton• 3 months ago

Hetzner has been allowing a lot of spam lately and doing nothing about it, so I've been blocking it for all my clients. Something to consider. If you send email, it may be blocked.

tmdetect• 3 months ago

Great read. I also recently moved everything over from DO to Hetzner for https://tempmaildetector.com across different regions*, and greatly simplified the server infra in the process. The other added benefit is that the resources available on each server are so great in comparison to DO that there’s plenty of room to grow vertically before even taking into account the additional horizontal scaling we can use thanks to the load balancing in place.

So a big win win all round. So good to see European providers are finally having their moment.

* I wish there were even more available and not sold out regions across Europe.

Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

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