6 ms·

AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

131 points by JeremyTheo 2y ago

jojobas 2y ago
You don't get valued $2T for charity.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
infocollector 2y ago
Summary: Hetzner does offer reliable and cheap machines compared to AWS/Azure/GCP. The pricing is more on par with Digital Ocean/Linode.
- nik736 2y ago
  No, it's at least 4x cheaper.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  For many things DO is 2x or more though. Linode I never tried.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Not sure it still applies, but I didn't like Linode because they minded the disk arrangement too much. Prescribing the layout/geometry in the UI. Something about their implementation prevents one from just loading a typical cloudy image. Maybe, just maybe, I want to use LVM or something entirely unknown to them. Not necessarily in a privacy sense, but control.
jabwd 2y ago
The offering from Hetzner I find especially appealing are the consumer grade hardware ones. No I wouldn't host business critical services on one, but I don't have those so easy win for me price wise.
- thegeomaster 2y ago
  I would probably host even some business-critical services on Hetzner's infra. I'm thinking of "worker"-type workloads, where each machine is 100% stateless and just serves to do some compute-intensive work. With that configuration, single-node data loss doesn't really affect you, and the CPU is plentiful and cheap with Hetzner bare metal (e.g. AX101 AMD machines).
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yeah, but where would you store state? The hyperscalers give you pretty reasonable durable storage (even datalakes). Most people don’t get storage tiering or using PaaS for workers, though.
    - thegeomaster 2y ago
      I'd shy away from storing any non-volatile state on Hetzner. As I said, I'd mostly consider it for stateless compute-bound applications. If I was looking to scale up an existing operation considerably and minimize costs as much as possible, I'd consider spinning up e.g. a Postgres cluster or minio on their infra, which would be significantly cheaper than RDS or S3. But it's not something that I would gladly do---the storage deals provided by hyperscalers are quite reasonable, as you say.
- nik736 2y ago
  Why not? It's ECC RAM and a server grade motherboard. The only downside is 1 PSU, but you can buy 10x the amount of servers compared to AWS :-)
  - deadbunny 2y ago
    They're running ECC on consumer level Intel chips?
    - Havoc 2y ago
      Just the amds Plus Xeon’s ofc
6c696e7578 2y ago
Sssh please don't tell Hetzner this, I'm using them!
hggigg 2y ago
Worth noting us large AWS customers get huge discounts, huge credit, actual real engineers on hand 24/7 on Slack, contractual service guarantees that last years and a large market of people we can leverage to build stuff in there. And a lot of the services are low to zero cost that would be expensive to run on Hetzner or don't exist and you have to build out. YMMV but all costs aren't instance costs.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Yep, most corporations have 2-3 _named_ account reps who are available on the company Slack and will visit your office 1-2 times a year to sync up that everything is working as it should. And they're not just salespeople, they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    > they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way. Can you give examples of this? I'd love to hear more about the kinds of guidance they can give.
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      We were building a matchmaking service for our mobile game and thought about using Amazon GameLift FlexMatch[0]. On the surface it would've worked. BUT, it's _very_ highly geared towards fully-online games where everyone playing the game is connected to a server all the time. Our game was asynchronous PvP where the attacker was online, but the defender wasn't. I had a 30 minute chat with them and they confirmed that it _could_ be made to work, but it'd be extremely janky and expensive in our use case. We ended up building our own (or actually expanding our existing setup a bit). -- We've also got pretty good estimates on how much something might cost: we have an application that needs a specific number of writes/reads with X amount of data per write, what would be the cost on different Amazon services. Again they came back with numbers and with many services (DynamoDB especially) it would've been either impossible or prohibitively expensive. We ended up changing the application structure to do less IOPS + more aggressive caching and ended up using plain S3 as storage. Without their consultation (And inside knowledge about AWS internal hard limits) we would've spent weeks building a solution that will eventually fail as the data stored per user goes up. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/match-intro.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/m...
jiggawatts 2y ago
Most cloud customers don't pay on-demand retail prices. For example, Azure VM Reservations or Savings Plans typically provide a 50-65% discount. AWS has similar plans. For example, instead of the ancient F8 series used in the article, a modern D8as_v5 Azure instance under a 3-year Savings Plan is $115/mo. Also, the article compares CPX41 to EC2 and Azure VMs with dedicated cores, not shared cores. The CCX33 Hetzner model is closer to the normal clouds, and costs $50/mo, so now we're at 2x the price instead of 10x the price. (Conversely, the B8als_v2 size uses shared cores and is also 2x the price of CPX41 at $74/mo) For that 2x cost you get a lot more features, first-party and third-party support, more locations, faster networking, etc... That's worth it for most large enterprises that care about ticking checkboxes on audit reports more than absolute cost. Or to put it this way: the annual price difference is just $600, which is the same cost to an org as half a day of engineer-time or less. If Hetzner is the slightest bit more difficult than a large public cloud VM for anything, ever, then it's not cheaper. This could be patching, maintenance, migrations, backup, recovery, automation, encryption, or just about anything else. There are other differences as well. Hetzner has a separate charge for load balancers and IP addresses, whereas with Azure they're included in the price of the VM. The biggest cost difference is that the public clouds charge eyewatering amounts for Internet egress traffic. Azure is about 100x as expensive as Hetzner, which is just crazy.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  I certainly can't dispute the other points...but to me the AWS Savings plan always felt like vendor lock-in...and sort of like a virtual "on prem", in that i have to commit to something for X amount of time (like old school provisioning hardware and have it live for X time), and then i lose the flexibility of what i thought *the cloud* in general was supposed provide: that is, freedom to scale up, down or *out*, etc. I won't fault AWS and others for making their money; this is capitalism after all regardless of the vendor. I guess maybe the cloud sort of lost its shine, and it doesn't feel as liberating as maybe it once did, and both cost and complexity are overblown, maybe?
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification. "In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with you, the unpredictable nature of your individual usage is averaged out and the cloud vendor gets a (slightly) noisy but manageable usage level of their resources. They have to work a little harder to predict future capacity needs, but you pay a premium for this. "A little later" the MBAs realise that they can squeeze 5% more profit out of their customers with lock-in contracts that make everything "nice and predictable" instead of the stochastic noise they had to "deal with" before. Getting rid of that makes things a lot harder for you as the customer, but they don't care. They care about that 5%. Ta-da... we're back at having to "procure", we're back at budgets that have to be planned for 3 years in advance, we're back at having to have time machines.
theshrike79 2y ago
...when using bare metal servers. Hetzner doesn't have the services AWS provides, that's the reason most companies I know use AWS for. If we could run our crap on any server, we would, but managed services are still cost-effective vs hiring our own 24/7/365 rotation of on-call ops people.
- FiberBundle 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?feature=shared&t=1282 https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?feature=shared&t=1282
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    DHH + Basecamp aren't exactly a run of the mill company hiring mediocre talent. They have the skills, cash flow, and resources to do whatever they want.
- timeon 2y ago
  > our crap Yeah if people had less shaky stacks. But it is always easier to pay someone to run the hack.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  This.
tetha 2y ago
> Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? That’s the main question here. This is one of the more important points and why the point "The learning curve of a single server isn't so big, especially when compared to AWS" is sitting a bit wrong with me. Sure, if you talk about 1 VM, I agree. And I wouldn't second guess doing this, at all. It would be my initial plan as well as long as I don't have to make any strong availability guarantees. And for this use case, I'd call AWS a bad choice. It's not a simple VM provider. But once you start running e.g. a redundant postgres cluster for updates without downtime, the amount of stuff to know also grows, a lot. Suddenly you also need backups, tests of backups. And this is where AWS/the cloud allows you to save time, and treadmill time.
- JeremyTheo 2y ago
  The article was originally intended at manufacturing companies, not at IT startups, that currently go "all-in" on AWS and Azure with all of their managed services, when actually 95% of their workloads are in virtual machines, and the remaining stuff could easily be handled on a single VM. Or maybe a couple of VMs and a managed postgres somewhere (e.g., maybe even at AWS or Azure). Would probably give them way more budget in actually building applications than running the infrastructure. Maybe I'll extend the article to include the point of using a managed postgres at AWS / Azure / fly.io, whatever, in combination with Hetzner VMs.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I have a single VM for my personal stuff, but I use Azure’s backup and automated fail-over mechanisms as well as managed services for database and data processing for this very reason.
CharlieDigital 2y ago
On GCP and Azure, most folks would be better off running serverless containers via Cloud Run or Container Apps (AWS has no direct equivalent that scales to 0 and incurs no cost). Both of these scale to zero and offer 180k vCPU/s free per month, 360k GB/s free per month. You incur billing only against the active execution time. Cloud Run Jobs has a whole separate free monthly grant as well. You can run A LOT for free within those constraints. Certainly a blog or website. To prevent cold starts, just set up Cloud Scheduler (also free for this purpose) to ping the container every few minutes. Use Supabase for a DB or one of the serverless options (if it works for your data use case) like Firestore, CosmosDB and you can run workloads for a few cents per month with an architecture that will scale easily if you need it to. 6 min video showing the receipts and how easy this is: https://youtu.be/GlnEm7JyvyY https://youtu.be/GlnEm7JyvyY
- obenn 2y ago
  The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    Neither Fargate nor App Runner scale to zero (unless something changed). So there is always a baseline cost of a few dollars.
    - obenn 2y ago
      Lambda container would be the closest equivalent with that functionality, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...
      - paulvnickerson 2y ago
        Agreed. I ran a small GPT chatbot on Lambda through API Gateway with a dynamodb storage backend and don't recall incurring any cost (or if I did, was just pennies per month).
Kostarrr 2y ago
Also note: traffic costs. On Hetzner, it's almost impossible to pay for traffic. Even their tiniest machine has 20 TB outgoing traffic (and unlimited incoming). If you used it up (you most probably wont), that's another 1,792 USD of costs saved by your tiny 4$/month VM compared to AWS. (At least if I was able to use the AWS cost calculator correctly). They will have object storage soon, but dont hold your breath for one-click kubernetes etc. So the fancier you infrastructure, the more you your startup would need to invest in time and money to use Hetzner and thus make it "not worth it".
- puterich123 2y ago
  There is a nice one-click kubernetes for hetzner if you use the terraform module: https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne... There is also a gpt that you can use that will genereate you the module block based on your requirements.
  - davidgl 2y ago
    Also highly recommended https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
- diggan 2y ago
  Additionally, go for the dedicated servers from Hetzner and you get a unmetered connection (eg: don't pay per GB ingress/egress at all). Not affiliated, but been happy with them since day 1.
jasode 2y ago
>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? [...] There’s a growing movement among tech companies and startups to opt for more cost-effective hosting solutions like Hetzner. The high costs associated with AWS and Azure Many (most?) YC startups are not using AWS as a low-level dumb data center with blank EC2 virtual machines and installing infrastructure software like Linux and PostgreSQL on it. Instead, they are using higher-level AWS managed services such as DynamoDB, Kinesis, SQS, etc : Therefore, the more difficult comparison (that almost no blog post ever does) is the startup's costs for its employees to re-create/re-invent the set of higher-level AWS services that they need. Sure, there's the "but you don't need to pay expensive AWS costs for DynamoDB when one can just install open-source Cassandra at Hetzner; and instead of AWS Kinesis, install your own Kafka, etc". Well, you add up more and more of those "just install and manage your own X,Y,Zs" and you can end up crossing the threshold where paying AWS cloud fees cost less than your staff maintaining it. The threshold for AWS isn't just massive scale of 100+ million users. The threshold can be the complexity and scope of higher-level services you need the cloud to take care of on your behalf so your small team can concentrate on the aspects of the business that are true differentiators. In other words, instead of employees installing Cassandra, they're adding features to the smartphone app. If your company doesn't need any of the Big 3 clouds' higher-level platform services, it's easier to save money with alternatives.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than supporting AWS products? That you're already paying through the nose for?
CalRobert 2y ago
I just moved a personal project from digitalocean to OVH and I’m hooked. So damn simple, cheap, and powerful. Far fewer layers of abstraction.
- a-french-anon 2y ago
  Been using their VLE-2 offer over what Hetzner gives because it's basically the same price, but unlimited bandwidth and they use AMD Epyc CPUs, which can't be a bad thing benchmark wise (especially memory bandwidth wise).
  - ac29 2y ago
    CPX machines at Hetzner use EPYC also
theshrike79 2y ago
Hetzner pro tip: https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb If you're looking for a cheap one-off server, the server auction has some very good deals.
earnesti 2y ago
I believe that I've saved millions thanks to the fact that I stumbled on Hetzner back in the days and started using it for the company I was working on. Not saying it is a perfect service, but I very much like my money, and seeing on what kind of invoices are racked up by using these cloud services, I'm pretty confident that the alternative costs would have been 4-5x more.
beaviskhan 2y ago
Well that is true, but I don't use AWS or Azure because I want to run servers. If you treat a public cloud like a datacenter, you're likely to have a bad time.
code_runner 2y ago
This just in: use the tool that is most cost effective for your specific use case. There is no one-size-fits-all. More to come after this advertisement
miyuru 2y ago
I am actually surprised that more people haven't just create and host the same software/service on AWS for cheaper on hetnzer. I have only stumbled on one service that do it. its a datadog alternative, so the bar is not that high for pricing.
nijave 2y ago
Do people want to use VMs? Imo they're much more annoying to manage than higher-level managed services. The last few places I've worked we spent our time trying to get rid of VMs and replace them with equivalent managed services. Even with automation tools like Ansible or immutable server images, packing as Docker images and running on a container orchestrator have always been much easier.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Depends if you want to pay more in money(a lot more) indefinitely, or pay more in time up front to set up automation. If you have immutable images, I don’t see how there is much difference at all. There are many container orchestrators available.
  - nijave 2y ago
    All these "VMs are sooo much cheaper" articles are always pricing bare VMs. It'd be more useful if someone actually calculated Total Cost of Ownership for a completed solution. You likely also need to price in load balancers, database servers, DNS, backups, access management, monitoring to get a fair quote and a meaningful comparison if you actually plan to run a real application
    - sgarland 2y ago
      > load balancers These also run on VMs. > database servers These also run on VMs. > DNS This is such a tiny cost that it’s not worth mentioning at any scale. > Backups This can go any number of ways, with price tags all over the place, yes. > Access management There are plenty of free and paid solutions available. > Monitoring See Backups.
      - rcarmo 2y ago
        All your points skip over the need to hire people to do Ops on those VMs.
asah 2y ago
Company of mine just migrated from AWS for a high bandwidth service. Full payback in month one, plus more savings as they scale. They're leaving other things on AWS, i.e. partial migration is quite doable.
alberth 2y ago
Hetzner, please bring dedicated servers to the US.
JCM9 2y ago
These types of articles always read like “yeah you could buy a Land Rover, but this Kia hatchback over here still gets you from A to B and is only a fraction of the cost.” It seems lost on the authors that yes that might work for some folks just fine, but others really do want the Land Rover and all its additional baked in features beyond getting you from A to B.
- timeon 2y ago
  Analogies are not good for arguments. Most people do not need 4x4.
999900000999 2y ago
AWS is like the tool I know. I pay roughly 30$ for a CaptainRover install running on Lightsail. Hetzner starts at 50 Euro, only has servers and Europe and is going to require a ton more work. AWS has the right idea, they give everyone who asks nicely thousands in free credits to get started. Then 2 years in your hooked. I don't want to learn a new system.
- JeremyTheo 2y ago
  Hetzner does start at a much lower price point, and has servers also in Singapore and US (but only since a couple of months)
- sgarland 2y ago
  Hetzner Cloud has US and Singapore locations as well, and starts at 5 Euro. It will take slightly more effort than Lightsail, yes.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    I'm looking at the bare metal servers. I'm always open to being wrong... I still don't think I feel like migration though. Captain Rover isn't exactly lightweight.
Havoc 2y ago
Don’t think anyone sane that just needs cheap VM compute goes to AWS.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  There's a seemingly endless supply of small to medium-sized companies doing exactly that. That's why there's consultants who offer to migrate you off EC2 onto 2-3 bare-metal hosts.
lelag 2y ago
It's not the same product, even if you consider just virtual machines rather than higher level services that others commenters are referring to. Sure public cloud is more expensive but you pay for the reliability of not being bound to physical hardware. When you buy a dedicated machine from OVH or Hetzner, you get a great deal for the compute power, but if something goes wrong with the hardware, you're stuck waiting for a technician to fix it. Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If Lichess had been on AWS, the provider would have automatically moved their workload to a functioning server, and the outage would have been much shorter or possibly avoided altogether. For Lichess, a non-profit, this tradeoff still make sense. Their service, while important to its users, isn't critical. Nobody dies if Lichess is down and the cost savings help them keep running. But if your business can't afford downtime, the extra guarantees from a public cloud provider can definitely be worth paying for.
- factormeta 2y ago
  >Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If you not a HN person with systemadmin skills yes. But is NOT that hard to have in house RADI hd setup, with failover server. Or failover NAT gateway. AWS and cloud provider are just a rip off.
  - olieidel 2y ago
    Even something as magical as a RAID won't make a technician instantly teleport to your server, power it down in zero seconds, swap out the hard drive and boot it back up in another zero seconds. OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime. But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers famously also have outages, while physical servers often have uptimes of multiple years. So what's better? It's hard to tell, but at the very least, none of these solutions is downtime-free.
CyanLite2 2y ago
Azure/AWS provide much more base services (multiple regions/AZs, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, etc) that are pennies to operate and aren't really targeting the cheap low end that Hetzner is.
m-i-l 2y ago
This matches my experience. I ran one of my side-projects on AWS for a couple of years before switching to Hetzner - AWS was around £35 a month while Hetzner was around £7 a month, so Hetzner was around 80% cheaper for an equivalent service[0]. The other big thing was all the little costs in AWS - it took 2 months to get the AWS bill down to £0 due to all the hidden extras like backups and Elastic IP address. [0] Full details at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/migrating-off-aws-has-reduced-running-costs-by-80/ https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/migrating-off-aws-has-re...
rao13 2y ago
Great Read!
alex_35 2y ago
A free tool to compare Hetzner VMs with other cloud vendors: https://calculator.holori.com/?currency=EUR&payment_ https://calculator.holori.com/?currency=EUR&payment_

131 points by JeremyTheo 2y ago

jojobas 2y ago

You don't get valued $2T for charity.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

infocollector 2y ago

Summary: Hetzner does offer reliable and cheap machines compared to AWS/Azure/GCP. The pricing is more on par with Digital Ocean/Linode.

nik736 2y ago
No, it's at least 4x cheaper.
anonzzzies 2y ago
For many things DO is 2x or more though. Linode I never tried.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Not sure it still applies, but I didn't like Linode because they minded the disk arrangement too much. Prescribing the layout/geometry in the UI. Something about their implementation prevents one from just loading a typical cloudy image. Maybe, just maybe, I want to use LVM or something entirely unknown to them. Not necessarily in a privacy sense, but control.

jabwd 2y ago

The offering from Hetzner I find especially appealing are the consumer grade hardware ones. No I wouldn't host business critical services on one, but I don't have those so easy win for me price wise.

thegeomaster 2y ago
I would probably host even some business-critical services on Hetzner's infra. I'm thinking of "worker"-type workloads, where each machine is 100% stateless and just serves to do some compute-intensive work. With that configuration, single-node data loss doesn't really affect you, and the CPU is plentiful and cheap with Hetzner bare metal (e.g. AX101 AMD machines).
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Yeah, but where would you store state? The hyperscalers give you pretty reasonable durable storage (even datalakes). Most people don’t get storage tiering or using PaaS for workers, though.
  - thegeomaster 2y ago
    I'd shy away from storing any non-volatile state on Hetzner. As I said, I'd mostly consider it for stateless compute-bound applications. If I was looking to scale up an existing operation considerably and minimize costs as much as possible, I'd consider spinning up e.g. a Postgres cluster or minio on their infra, which would be significantly cheaper than RDS or S3. But it's not something that I would gladly do---the storage deals provided by hyperscalers are quite reasonable, as you say.
nik736 2y ago
Why not? It's ECC RAM and a server grade motherboard. The only downside is 1 PSU, but you can buy 10x the amount of servers compared to AWS :-)
- deadbunny 2y ago
  They're running ECC on consumer level Intel chips?
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Just the amds Plus Xeon’s ofc

6c696e7578 2y ago

Sssh please don't tell Hetzner this, I'm using them!

hggigg 2y ago

Worth noting us large AWS customers get huge discounts, huge credit, actual real engineers on hand 24/7 on Slack, contractual service guarantees that last years and a large market of people we can leverage to build stuff in there. And a lot of the services are low to zero cost that would be expensive to run on Hetzner or don't exist and you have to build out. YMMV but all costs aren't instance costs.

theshrike79 2y ago
Yep, most corporations have 2-3 _named_ account reps who are available on the company Slack and will visit your office 1-2 times a year to sync up that everything is working as it should. And they're not just salespeople, they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  > they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way. Can you give examples of this? I'd love to hear more about the kinds of guidance they can give.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    We were building a matchmaking service for our mobile game and thought about using Amazon GameLift FlexMatch[0]. On the surface it would've worked. BUT, it's _very_ highly geared towards fully-online games where everyone playing the game is connected to a server all the time. Our game was asynchronous PvP where the attacker was online, but the defender wasn't. I had a 30 minute chat with them and they confirmed that it _could_ be made to work, but it'd be extremely janky and expensive in our use case. We ended up building our own (or actually expanding our existing setup a bit). -- We've also got pretty good estimates on how much something might cost: we have an application that needs a specific number of writes/reads with X amount of data per write, what would be the cost on different Amazon services. Again they came back with numbers and with many services (DynamoDB especially) it would've been either impossible or prohibitively expensive. We ended up changing the application structure to do less IOPS + more aggressive caching and ended up using plain S3 as storage. Without their consultation (And inside knowledge about AWS internal hard limits) we would've spent weeks building a solution that will eventually fail as the data stored per user goes up. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/match-intro.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/m...

jiggawatts 2y ago

Most cloud customers don't pay on-demand retail prices. For example, Azure VM Reservations or Savings Plans typically provide a 50-65% discount. AWS has similar plans. For example, instead of the ancient F8 series used in the article, a modern D8as_v5 Azure instance under a 3-year Savings Plan is $115/mo. Also, the article compares CPX41 to EC2 and Azure VMs with dedicated cores, not shared cores. The CCX33 Hetzner model is closer to the normal clouds, and costs $50/mo, so now we're at 2x the price instead of 10x the price. (Conversely, the B8als_v2 size uses shared cores and is also 2x the price of CPX41 at $74/mo) For that 2x cost you get a lot more features, first-party and third-party support, more locations, faster networking, etc... That's worth it for most large enterprises that care about ticking checkboxes on audit reports more than absolute cost. Or to put it this way: the annual price difference is just $600, which is the same cost to an org as half a day of engineer-time or less. If Hetzner is the slightest bit more difficult than a large public cloud VM for anything, ever, then it's not cheaper. This could be patching, maintenance, migrations, backup, recovery, automation, encryption, or just about anything else. There are other differences as well. Hetzner has a separate charge for load balancers and IP addresses, whereas with Azure they're included in the price of the VM. The biggest cost difference is that the public clouds charge eyewatering amounts for Internet egress traffic. Azure is about 100x as expensive as Hetzner, which is just crazy.

mxuribe 2y ago
I certainly can't dispute the other points...but to me the AWS Savings plan always felt like vendor lock-in...and sort of like a virtual "on prem", in that i have to commit to something for X amount of time (like old school provisioning hardware and have it live for X time), and then i lose the flexibility of what i thought *the cloud* in general was supposed provide: that is, freedom to scale up, down or *out*, etc. I won't fault AWS and others for making their money; this is capitalism after all regardless of the vendor. I guess maybe the cloud sort of lost its shine, and it doesn't feel as liberating as maybe it once did, and both cost and complexity are overblown, maybe?
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification. "In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with you, the unpredictable nature of your individual usage is averaged out and the cloud vendor gets a (slightly) noisy but manageable usage level of their resources. They have to work a little harder to predict future capacity needs, but you pay a premium for this. "A little later" the MBAs realise that they can squeeze 5% more profit out of their customers with lock-in contracts that make everything "nice and predictable" instead of the stochastic noise they had to "deal with" before. Getting rid of that makes things a lot harder for you as the customer, but they don't care. They care about that 5%. Ta-da... we're back at having to "procure", we're back at budgets that have to be planned for 3 years in advance, we're back at having to have time machines.

theshrike79 2y ago

...when using bare metal servers. Hetzner doesn't have the services AWS provides, that's the reason most companies I know use AWS for. If we could run our crap on any server, we would, but managed services are still cost-effective vs hiring our own 24/7/365 rotation of on-call ops people.

FiberBundle 2y ago
https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?feature=shared&t=1282 https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?feature=shared&t=1282
- theshrike79 2y ago
  DHH + Basecamp aren't exactly a run of the mill company hiring mediocre talent. They have the skills, cash flow, and resources to do whatever they want.
timeon 2y ago
> our crap Yeah if people had less shaky stacks. But it is always easier to pay someone to run the hack.
rcarmo 2y ago
This.

tetha 2y ago

> Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? That’s the main question here. This is one of the more important points and why the point "The learning curve of a single server isn't so big, especially when compared to AWS" is sitting a bit wrong with me. Sure, if you talk about 1 VM, I agree. And I wouldn't second guess doing this, at all. It would be my initial plan as well as long as I don't have to make any strong availability guarantees. And for this use case, I'd call AWS a bad choice. It's not a simple VM provider. But once you start running e.g. a redundant postgres cluster for updates without downtime, the amount of stuff to know also grows, a lot. Suddenly you also need backups, tests of backups. And this is where AWS/the cloud allows you to save time, and treadmill time.

JeremyTheo 2y ago
The article was originally intended at manufacturing companies, not at IT startups, that currently go "all-in" on AWS and Azure with all of their managed services, when actually 95% of their workloads are in virtual machines, and the remaining stuff could easily be handled on a single VM. Or maybe a couple of VMs and a managed postgres somewhere (e.g., maybe even at AWS or Azure). Would probably give them way more budget in actually building applications than running the infrastructure. Maybe I'll extend the article to include the point of using a managed postgres at AWS / Azure / fly.io, whatever, in combination with Hetzner VMs.
rcarmo 2y ago
I have a single VM for my personal stuff, but I use Azure’s backup and automated fail-over mechanisms as well as managed services for database and data processing for this very reason.

CharlieDigital 2y ago

On GCP and Azure, most folks would be better off running serverless containers via Cloud Run or Container Apps (AWS has no direct equivalent that scales to 0 and incurs no cost). Both of these scale to zero and offer 180k vCPU/s free per month, 360k GB/s free per month. You incur billing only against the active execution time. Cloud Run Jobs has a whole separate free monthly grant as well. You can run A LOT for free within those constraints. Certainly a blog or website. To prevent cold starts, just set up Cloud Scheduler (also free for this purpose) to ping the container every few minutes. Use Supabase for a DB or one of the serverless options (if it works for your data use case) like Firestore, CosmosDB and you can run workloads for a few cents per month with an architecture that will scale easily if you need it to. 6 min video showing the receipts and how easy this is: https://youtu.be/GlnEm7JyvyY https://youtu.be/GlnEm7JyvyY

obenn 2y ago
The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  Neither Fargate nor App Runner scale to zero (unless something changed). So there is always a baseline cost of a few dollars.
  - obenn 2y ago
    Lambda container would be the closest equivalent with that functionality, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...
    - paulvnickerson 2y ago
      Agreed. I ran a small GPT chatbot on Lambda through API Gateway with a dynamodb storage backend and don't recall incurring any cost (or if I did, was just pennies per month).

Kostarrr 2y ago

Also note: traffic costs. On Hetzner, it's almost impossible to pay for traffic. Even their tiniest machine has 20 TB outgoing traffic (and unlimited incoming). If you used it up (you most probably wont), that's another 1,792 USD of costs saved by your tiny 4$/month VM compared to AWS. (At least if I was able to use the AWS cost calculator correctly). They will have object storage soon, but dont hold your breath for one-click kubernetes etc. So the fancier you infrastructure, the more you your startup would need to invest in time and money to use Hetzner and thus make it "not worth it".

puterich123 2y ago
There is a nice one-click kubernetes for hetzner if you use the terraform module: https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne... There is also a gpt that you can use that will genereate you the module block based on your requirements.
- davidgl 2y ago
  Also highly recommended https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
diggan 2y ago
Additionally, go for the dedicated servers from Hetzner and you get a unmetered connection (eg: don't pay per GB ingress/egress at all). Not affiliated, but been happy with them since day 1.

jasode 2y ago

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? [...] There’s a growing movement among tech companies and startups to opt for more cost-effective hosting solutions like Hetzner. The high costs associated with AWS and Azure Many (most?) YC startups are not using AWS as a low-level dumb data center with blank EC2 virtual machines and installing infrastructure software like Linux and PostgreSQL on it. Instead, they are using higher-level AWS managed services such as DynamoDB, Kinesis, SQS, etc : Therefore, the more difficult comparison (that almost no blog post ever does) is the startup's costs for its employees to re-create/re-invent the set of higher-level AWS services that they need. Sure, there's the "but you don't need to pay expensive AWS costs for DynamoDB when one can just install open-source Cassandra at Hetzner; and instead of AWS Kinesis, install your own Kafka, etc". Well, you add up more and more of those "just install and manage your own X,Y,Zs" and you can end up crossing the threshold where paying AWS cloud fees cost less than your staff maintaining it. The threshold for AWS isn't just massive scale of 100+ million users. The threshold can be the complexity and scope of higher-level services you need the cloud to take care of on your behalf so your small team can concentrate on the aspects of the business that are true differentiators. In other words, instead of employees installing Cassandra, they're adding features to the smartphone app. If your company doesn't need any of the Big 3 clouds' higher-level platform services, it's easier to save money with alternatives.

EdwardDiego 2y ago
Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than supporting AWS products? That you're already paying through the nose for?

CalRobert 2y ago

I just moved a personal project from digitalocean to OVH and I’m hooked. So damn simple, cheap, and powerful. Far fewer layers of abstraction.

a-french-anon 2y ago
Been using their VLE-2 offer over what Hetzner gives because it's basically the same price, but unlimited bandwidth and they use AMD Epyc CPUs, which can't be a bad thing benchmark wise (especially memory bandwidth wise).
- ac29 2y ago
  CPX machines at Hetzner use EPYC also

theshrike79 2y ago

Hetzner pro tip: https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb If you're looking for a cheap one-off server, the server auction has some very good deals.

earnesti 2y ago

I believe that I've saved millions thanks to the fact that I stumbled on Hetzner back in the days and started using it for the company I was working on. Not saying it is a perfect service, but I very much like my money, and seeing on what kind of invoices are racked up by using these cloud services, I'm pretty confident that the alternative costs would have been 4-5x more.

beaviskhan 2y ago

Well that is true, but I don't use AWS or Azure because I want to run servers. If you treat a public cloud like a datacenter, you're likely to have a bad time.

code_runner 2y ago

This just in: use the tool that is most cost effective for your specific use case. There is no one-size-fits-all. More to come after this advertisement

miyuru 2y ago

I am actually surprised that more people haven't just create and host the same software/service on AWS for cheaper on hetnzer. I have only stumbled on one service that do it. its a datadog alternative, so the bar is not that high for pricing.

nijave 2y ago

Do people want to use VMs? Imo they're much more annoying to manage than higher-level managed services. The last few places I've worked we spent our time trying to get rid of VMs and replace them with equivalent managed services. Even with automation tools like Ansible or immutable server images, packing as Docker images and running on a container orchestrator have always been much easier.

sgarland 2y ago
Depends if you want to pay more in money(a lot more) indefinitely, or pay more in time up front to set up automation. If you have immutable images, I don’t see how there is much difference at all. There are many container orchestrators available.
- nijave 2y ago
  All these "VMs are sooo much cheaper" articles are always pricing bare VMs. It'd be more useful if someone actually calculated Total Cost of Ownership for a completed solution. You likely also need to price in load balancers, database servers, DNS, backups, access management, monitoring to get a fair quote and a meaningful comparison if you actually plan to run a real application
  - sgarland 2y ago
    > load balancers These also run on VMs. > database servers These also run on VMs. > DNS This is such a tiny cost that it’s not worth mentioning at any scale. > Backups This can go any number of ways, with price tags all over the place, yes. > Access management There are plenty of free and paid solutions available. > Monitoring See Backups.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      All your points skip over the need to hire people to do Ops on those VMs.

asah 2y ago

Company of mine just migrated from AWS for a high bandwidth service. Full payback in month one, plus more savings as they scale. They're leaving other things on AWS, i.e. partial migration is quite doable.

alberth 2y ago

Hetzner, please bring dedicated servers to the US.

JCM9 2y ago

These types of articles always read like “yeah you could buy a Land Rover, but this Kia hatchback over here still gets you from A to B and is only a fraction of the cost.” It seems lost on the authors that yes that might work for some folks just fine, but others really do want the Land Rover and all its additional baked in features beyond getting you from A to B.

timeon 2y ago
Analogies are not good for arguments. Most people do not need 4x4.

999900000999 2y ago

AWS is like the tool I know. I pay roughly 30$ for a CaptainRover install running on Lightsail. Hetzner starts at 50 Euro, only has servers and Europe and is going to require a ton more work. AWS has the right idea, they give everyone who asks nicely thousands in free credits to get started. Then 2 years in your hooked. I don't want to learn a new system.

JeremyTheo 2y ago
Hetzner does start at a much lower price point, and has servers also in Singapore and US (but only since a couple of months)
sgarland 2y ago
Hetzner Cloud has US and Singapore locations as well, and starts at 5 Euro. It will take slightly more effort than Lightsail, yes.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  I'm looking at the bare metal servers. I'm always open to being wrong... I still don't think I feel like migration though. Captain Rover isn't exactly lightweight.

Havoc 2y ago

Don’t think anyone sane that just needs cheap VM compute goes to AWS.

fxtentacle 2y ago
There's a seemingly endless supply of small to medium-sized companies doing exactly that. That's why there's consultants who offer to migrate you off EC2 onto 2-3 bare-metal hosts.

lelag 2y ago

It's not the same product, even if you consider just virtual machines rather than higher level services that others commenters are referring to. Sure public cloud is more expensive but you pay for the reliability of not being bound to physical hardware. When you buy a dedicated machine from OVH or Hetzner, you get a great deal for the compute power, but if something goes wrong with the hardware, you're stuck waiting for a technician to fix it. Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If Lichess had been on AWS, the provider would have automatically moved their workload to a functioning server, and the outage would have been much shorter or possibly avoided altogether. For Lichess, a non-profit, this tradeoff still make sense. Their service, while important to its users, isn't critical. Nobody dies if Lichess is down and the cost savings help them keep running. But if your business can't afford downtime, the extra guarantees from a public cloud provider can definitely be worth paying for.

factormeta 2y ago
>Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If you not a HN person with systemadmin skills yes. But is NOT that hard to have in house RADI hd setup, with failover server. Or failover NAT gateway. AWS and cloud provider are just a rip off.
- olieidel 2y ago
  Even something as magical as a RAID won't make a technician instantly teleport to your server, power it down in zero seconds, swap out the hard drive and boot it back up in another zero seconds. OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime. But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers famously also have outages, while physical servers often have uptimes of multiple years. So what's better? It's hard to tell, but at the very least, none of these solutions is downtime-free.

CyanLite2 2y ago

Azure/AWS provide much more base services (multiple regions/AZs, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, etc) that are pennies to operate and aren't really targeting the cheap low end that Hetzner is.

m-i-l 2y ago

This matches my experience. I ran one of my side-projects on AWS for a couple of years before switching to Hetzner - AWS was around £35 a month while Hetzner was around £7 a month, so Hetzner was around 80% cheaper for an equivalent service[0]. The other big thing was all the little costs in AWS - it took 2 months to get the AWS bill down to £0 due to all the hidden extras like backups and Elastic IP address. [0] Full details at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/migrating-off-aws-has-reduced-running-costs-by-80/ https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/migrating-off-aws-has-re...

rao13 2y ago

Great Read!

alex_35 2y ago

A free tool to compare Hetzner VMs with other cloud vendors: https://calculator.holori.com/?currency=EUR&payment_ https://calculator.holori.com/?currency=EUR&payment_