German discount host Hetzner launches new servers

https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

by oellegaard • 13 years ago

90 83 13 years ago

adventured• 13 years ago

The i7-920 is almost five years old at this point and only clocks a 5k on passmark. Very strange offering.

That being said, I'm sure the 4770 is great for Minecraft or as a testing server (lack of ECC ram makes them a bad idea for serious use).

sspiff5• 13 years ago

I'm not sure, but isn't the 920 also a lot more power hungry? That could explain the higher price.

Or they just quickly whipped up some consumer-grade Haswell servers to offer while working on more reliable offerings of the higher end segments.

Hetzner usually discards their old servers on their server bidding robot [1], I'm surprised these 920's haven't been moved there yet.

[1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

grk2• 13 years ago

This is most likely a mistake on their site. The i7-920 doesn't even support this much RAM. For >32GB it has to be some kind of xeon, maybe sandy bridge E.

oddx• 13 years ago

i7-920 works with 48GB http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/313665-30-48gb#4425619

hannibal53• 13 years ago

Is Amazon using EEC ram in their servers? Has anyone ever asked if they do?

theatrus2• 13 years ago

Amazon runs nothing but Xeons and Opterons, which require the use of ECC memory.

antirez2• 13 years ago

Be prepared to incredibly unreliable disks. Or better, ask for new disks for your box, even if this will require some additional cost.

Clarification: I had bad experiences with disk reliability, I told different friends, that in turn had very bad experiences including multiple disks in RAID breaking in the same time range.

sspiff5• 13 years ago

What makes you say this? I've been running on Hetzner for about half a year now, no issues so far.

carlio2• 13 years ago

Presumably his bad experiences make him say this.

gmac• 13 years ago

My 2¢: I've been on Hetzner for a few months, experimentally, and the sporadic 'offline uncorrectable sector' emails I'm getting from smartd are making me nervous.

FooBarWidget• 13 years ago

Maybe you're not stressing your disks enough. I recently setup a database server and a disk broke (as in becoming unaccessible, not just bad sectors) within a day.

WA2• 13 years ago

Why?

Argorak4• 13 years ago

Hetzner reuses disks to reduce cost. So a "new" server might come with old disks with shorter life-spans. Thats all okay, especially as they are not a 'premium' host. As long as you are aware of this, they are a good host. As others said, you can ask for new disks at a price.

Also be aware that their abuse department shoots first and asks later. I know of servers that were off the grid for multiple days without access because of abuse on a friday - everyone relevant went on weekend.

They _are_ cheap and that comes with a few trade-offs. Doesn't make the product bad, necessarily. If you are cash-strapped and need raw power, buy without hesitation.

orf• 13 years ago

I run a hosting service on Hetzner and we haven't had a disk failure on any of our servers for a year or so.

carlio2• 13 years ago

I have also had many disk failures, including two RAID'd HDs failing within a few days of each other. I think we've lost 5 HDs so far. (We only have 1 server)

antirez2• 13 years ago

I heard this story multiple times, apparently it is possible in the new servers to ask them for new disks and this solves most of the issues.

Also the procedure to get the disk replaced is insane and involves you dealing with disk IDs... It's a RAID, then should just check what is the broken disk and replace it, end of the story.

ElbertF• 13 years ago

Yep, I had disk issues on a new box too. Hetzner is great though. Also don't be too worried about high ping times, I recently moved http://readable.cc away from Linode and the site is much, much faster (and I'm in Australia, the other end of the planet.)

grk2• 13 years ago

I can confirm this, we're replacing at least two disks every month. You really have to design your architecture that allows a server to be taken offline for a few hours for disk replacement. Also, never use raid 0 on Hetzner.

epic9x• 13 years ago

RAID 0 is generally frowned on in pretty much all circumstances. Is there a specific reason you're using it? (Legitimately curious.)

oellegaard2• 13 years ago

We have a lot of servers running there and they indeed do fail once in a while. We designed it, so that we can recover very fast, by having a standby server ready. Its usually faster to order a new server, than HD swap.

stiff• 13 years ago

Besides the mentioned issues with reusing disks, they also had used and maybe still use some faulty series of Seagate drives e. g.:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracud...

So beware of having those installed, under high I/O they will fail at a random instant.

Udo2• 13 years ago

A Barracuda on my Hetzner server failed 1 hour ago. This is the second time I had disk trouble at Hetzner - the first time both RAID disks failed at the same time.

However, support is acting incredibly quickly, within 5 minutes of sending the support request they got to work on the server.

Nux• 13 years ago

I have a couple of ST33000651AS in my server, they failed several times, but the current pair has been running for more than 1 year, I guess they just got a nasty batch.

Needless to say, rebuilding 3 TB raid took a long time and downtime and pain... but all in all, it was worth it, considering the prices.

I can also confirm support was quite fast, even if some of the replacement drives were not new and some even came with bad sectors lol ... such is life.

boyter3• 13 years ago

Odd. I am thrashing the disk of my two hetzner servers with with massive amount of writes and reads for http://searchcode.com without any issues over 2 years. One takes care of HTTP/DB and the other the search index.

The DB server has pumped over 10 TiB of data in the last 80 days (mostly non cached) and the index is rebuilt constantly and well over 1.5 TiB in size.

Anecdotal I know but another data point to consider.

vidarh• 13 years ago

Similar situation here.

jbkkd• 13 years ago

Off topic: Your blog posts regarding building a search engine are quite fascinating, thanks for them!

sker• 13 years ago

That's one awesome project you have right there. I was just thinking of making something like that for F# with data from Codeplex and Github. But I guess your already-existent product blows my non-existent idea out of the water.

mkuhn• 13 years ago

A startup I know ran a Dropbox like solution with hundreds of servers mainly on Hetzner servers and had no significant issues with disk reliability although it was not a high stress situation.

no_gravity• 13 years ago

I can confirm this. Im running many servers with all kind of hosters since the 90s and the only one that had a Harddisk go haywire was the one Server I had with Hetzner.

ch0wn• 13 years ago

We also had very bad luck with hard drives at Hetzner. Even the replacement disks we got after one gave up had 25000+ hours of spinning time according to SMART.

X-Istence• 13 years ago

I've had hard drives go bad in a huge variety of different servers in many different locations. The Planet (now Softlayer), Digital Ocean (VPS ...), NAC.net, Atjeu, and others.

These days I just expect it to go bad, so I use ZFS within FreeBSD to watch for errors, and when they happen I ask them to replace a single drive, and then the other.

So far it has worked very well for me with no data loss. I've been fairly lucky in that both drives have't failed at the same time.

runarb3• 13 years ago

That is some impressive pricing. 32 GB ram, 20 TB Traffic at 49€ / month is cheap.

Is there any way of getting VMware or Xen on thus? I have a project ( http://www.opentestsearch.com/ ) that currently uses 9 small virtual machines, running some different operating systems and software that can't easily run on the same server. Currently colo has been the only viable option. Cloud servers would be too expensive and no cheap dedicated host I know about support virtualizations systems like VMware or Xen.

sspiff5• 13 years ago

Not sure about Xen or VMWare, but I use their auto-installer for getting Ubuntu on their servers, after which you can just install KVM.

runarb3• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I also need some Windows servers :( But running the Linux ones on one server, and the two Windows ones somewhere else is of course an option.

tiernano• 13 years ago

You can install anything you want on them. Ask them to attach Lara (their KMVoIP system) and give them the ISO to boot the machine... I had VMWare on one of these boxes previously, and they had the installer up and running for me within an hour or so of asking...

oellegaard2• 13 years ago

I successfully ran ESXi on it, without any issues. I had burn the image and insert it into the server, had to pay a small fee for that, but nothing noteworthy. I think I had to get a different NIC as well, an Intel one, costed like 30 eur or something like that.

annnnd4• 13 years ago

I have succesfully run Xen on 2 of their root servers for 3-4 years (with 5 to 8 virtual machines on each), ending this episode only recently (not because of technical difficulties). There were some occasional problems with Xen itself (some virtual machines went to zombie state from time to time - I hope Xen is more reliable nowadays), but nothing in connection to a hosting provider.

WA2• 13 years ago

Currently, I rent a managed server from Hetzner for my SaaS business. However, it has some limitations and I'm thinking about switching to a root server. Thing is, I don't want to deal with security and updates and administration and that stuff.

Can anyone recommend a solution? Is there a good software that works as good as their managed version, e. g. keeps itself updated and has a more or less tight security package out of the box? Or do I need to hire a system administrator?

I do have some Linux/command line skills, but I don't want to put a lot of time in it.

sgift• 13 years ago

If you want a root server hire an admin. Especially if you want a root server from Hetzner. We had two incidents where our machine either lost power because of a problem in the datacenter or was shut down outside of a predefined service window. Hetzners reaction to the resulting problems* was that they won't do anything because it is a root server. They didn't care that they were the source of the problem. We changed the hoster afterwards.

* First time was only a hanging connection to the server, because the machine was still performing disk checks (they didn't tell us that, we had to request local access), second time the hdd crashed and we learned the hard way that they are unable to configure a software raid properly (but tell you that the root servers are preconfigured with raid), which resulted in a complete data loss. External backups saved us here.

kbar134• 13 years ago

three thing you need to always expect when dealing with a provider who hosts your stuff:

1) offsite backups

2) potential that things go sideways during maintenance

3) offsite backups

Them external backups are always worth the cost!

ksec• 13 years ago

Ok, i am going to ask, any reason to go with Hetzner when your have OVH's DC in Canada offering similar if not better Server for more or less the same price?

babuskov• 13 years ago

If your customers are in Europe and you want everything to be fast.

gaadd333• 13 years ago

I've seen a lot of posts on various hosting forums that OVH's Canadian offering is pretty subpar as far as reliability of the network goes. One report (admittedly I think it was a bit old) showed a traceroute that went from Canada to Europe then back to where the user was.

Perhaps that's all been fixed now though.

comatose_kid• 13 years ago

happy OVH (Canada) customer here - good price, good h/w, no problems so far (just one box so definitely on the anecdotal side)

tokyovapr• 13 years ago

I don't see anything from OVH that comes close to an i7 with 32GB RAM for the price of Hetzner. Am I missing something?

rmoriz• 13 years ago

duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442

hackerboos2• 13 years ago

Pity Hetzner's policy on user submitted content is really strict. A single malicious user can get all of your servers take offline for 'breach of terms'.

nodata• 13 years ago

cite?

hackerboos2• 13 years ago

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb

Sections 6 and 7

dsl2• 13 years ago

If any abuse complaint goes 24 hours without a response your server will be powered down. If you are hosting user generated content that will generate a lot of complaints, you need to be responsive.

codesuela• 13 years ago

they usally give you 24hrs to fix it

DCoder2• 13 years ago

Be careful and ask support to confirm all the software in your stack will be runnable. We tried to launch an SQL Server (MSSQL) -backed system on one of their root servers and their support said "the Windows licenses we use do not allow installing MSSQL - you will have to buy your own licenses for Windows and SQL Server".

gaadd333• 13 years ago

You need a special version of windows to run MSSQL? In any case, isn't it normally the customer's responsibility to provide licenses for software they install and run?

DCoder2• 13 years ago

It appears I misremembered this a little bit - the issue was with license ownership, not license type. The answer we got from Hetzner support was: " we don't offer MSSQL licenses, if you want it you need your own license for MSSQL and also for Windows server 2008 R2, because you can't use your own licenses with our Windows license. "

And yes, it is reasonable to expect the customer to provide the licenses for the software, but hosting companies can also sell monthly software usage to their customers - we ended up choosing a host that did exactly this. The monthly cost we pay for Windows + MSSQL will not reach the total cost of a full MSSQL license for three years.

moreentropy• 13 years ago

As today seems to be advertising day, I'll plug HostEurope, http://www.hosteurope.de/, another large german datacenter operator from Cologne.

I've got a virtual server running there flawlessly for the last five years. Customer service is amazing (all communication is english and german), and I can only remeber one single downtime for a few hours in all the years.

thejosh• 13 years ago

This was on the frontpage just 13 hours ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6042442

runarb3• 13 years ago

Looks like hn do distinguish between http and https in submissions. This thread is about the same Hetzner page as the other thread, only the old thread was about the https url.

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

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

LogicX• 13 years ago

FTFY:

This: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-p...

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

thomaslutz• 13 years ago

Did anyone benchmark the SSDs yet?

krembo• 13 years ago

Can anyone name any big sites hosted on Hetzner datacenters?

German discount host Hetzner launches new servers

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