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Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and

Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware. > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/issues/2011 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...

Xunjin 2y ago
Great point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?
- weinzierl 2y ago
  Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.
  - preisschild 2y ago
    Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.
    - weinzierl 2y ago
      Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Do you? Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware. On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.
        weinzierl 2y ago
        I had enough trouble with them that I don't even consider.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Such as? If you prefer, of course.
        weinzierl 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
        arghwhat 2y ago
        You're linking this everywhere, but it has absolutely zero relevance. Your beef is not with Hetzner, but whoever decided to run the service. Unless the customer violates local legislation or the hosting providers ToS, the appropriate action is to leave the service running, be it AWS, GCP or Hetzner. I would quite frankly have been very disappointed with them if they had done anything in response to you request.
        weinzierl 2y ago
        There is no beef, just evidence that they do to run their service as professionally as other more established providers, which was the original argument and premise of the discussion. Hetzner is German company and subject to German law. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Ignoring legal requirements is hardly professional. Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed. Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.
      - FpUser 2y ago
        I do. I just rent 2 computers from Hetzner. One is main another is failover. If main dies failover kicks in while main is restored on another computer. Still way way cheaper than AWS which I would not touch with wooden pole unless required by client.
      - jonathantf2 2y ago
        Yes. Haven't had an outage in near 2 years according to our monitoring.
      - preisschild 2y ago
        Yes, with more than 100 VMs on Hetzner Cloud. It's highly available though and the redundant replicas run on their separated physical machines https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/placement-groups/overview/ https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/placement-groups/overview/ Single machines die (and can't be started again for a few minutes to hours) every few months, but that's acceptable for me, and we also similar things happen at AWS.
  - throw3748859 2y ago
    Hetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company. US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!
    - voxic11 2y ago
      Software In The Public Interest Inc. (creators of free desktop) is incorporated in New York so they have to follow US sanction law anyways.
      - Xunjin 2y ago
        Maybe it's time to consider changing it to another country which is actually OSS friendly and doesn't change all the time their politics. PS: Sorry for the off-topic discussion.
        rwmj 2y ago
        RISC-V International moved from California (IIRC?) to Switzerland for basically this reason.
        freedomben 2y ago
        It's shocking and saddening to think one might need to change from the United States to some other country in order to seek freedom. But here we are
        rangerelf 2y ago
        The USA being "Free" has mostly been a myth. It's "Free" if you're a member of the owner class, else you're freedom is subject to the whims of politicians and the wealthy. Aristocracy, really.
        freedomben 2y ago
  - Xunjin 2y ago
    Sorry, but could you point out what is not professional? Not everyone needs a UI wrapper that offers tons of OSS services with high prices.
    - weinzierl 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
      - IntelMiner 2y ago
        How is this Hetzner's fault (or concern?) "Hey your customer is hosting a website with random pictures on it. One of them of me is unflattering. Please make them fix it"
        weinzierl 2y ago
        They were hosting a StackOverflow copy, which is OK because of Creative Commons. All my answers were still under my name as it should be. The only difference to the original was my profile picture, which was an explicit porn image. For several weeks everyone searching for my name or my StackOverflow answers saw that. I'm glad that I was not looking for a job at the time. I exhausted all possibilities on all channels to rectify this situation short of using a lawyer. I put a lot of effort into getting things in order and seriously considered going the legal route but ultimately decided against it mainly because courts are hit and miss here when it comes to reputation damage of regular individuals as opposed to companies or celebrities. EDIT: I should have answered your question how this is Hetzner's fault more directly. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed. Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.
rglullis 2y ago
I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud. Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hirako2000 2y ago
  VPS business is very different than the "cloud" space. Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different. For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    Of course they are not in the hyperscaler space, but they are far from being "just" a VPS provider. Their cloud always had on-demand, per-hour billing of servers and block storage volumes, all very easy to manage and provision via their API. Recently they got into object storage space. They even provide a switch to connect their cloud servers with a dedicated one, so you can have, e.g, a beefy GPU server running a LLM model and your web service auto running on the cheap. I believe that the only thing that really holds Hetzner at their price levels is that the price-sensitive people can always threaten to move to OVH.
    - 2y ago
mysteria 2y ago
Hetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52. Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.

Xunjin 2y ago

Great point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?

weinzierl 2y ago
Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.
- preisschild 2y ago
  Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Do you? Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware. On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.
      - weinzierl 2y ago
        I had enough trouble with them that I don't even consider.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Such as? If you prefer, of course.
        weinzierl 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
        arghwhat 2y ago
        You're linking this everywhere, but it has absolutely zero relevance. Your beef is not with Hetzner, but whoever decided to run the service. Unless the customer violates local legislation or the hosting providers ToS, the appropriate action is to leave the service running, be it AWS, GCP or Hetzner. I would quite frankly have been very disappointed with them if they had done anything in response to you request.
        weinzierl 2y ago
        There is no beef, just evidence that they do to run their service as professionally as other more established providers, which was the original argument and premise of the discussion. Hetzner is German company and subject to German law. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Ignoring legal requirements is hardly professional. Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed. Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.
    - FpUser 2y ago
      I do. I just rent 2 computers from Hetzner. One is main another is failover. If main dies failover kicks in while main is restored on another computer. Still way way cheaper than AWS which I would not touch with wooden pole unless required by client.
    - jonathantf2 2y ago
      Yes. Haven't had an outage in near 2 years according to our monitoring.
    - preisschild 2y ago
      Yes, with more than 100 VMs on Hetzner Cloud. It's highly available though and the redundant replicas run on their separated physical machines https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/placement-groups/overview/ https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/placement-groups/overview/ Single machines die (and can't be started again for a few minutes to hours) every few months, but that's acceptable for me, and we also similar things happen at AWS.
- throw3748859 2y ago
  Hetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company. US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!
  - voxic11 2y ago
    Software In The Public Interest Inc. (creators of free desktop) is incorporated in New York so they have to follow US sanction law anyways.
    - Xunjin 2y ago
      Maybe it's time to consider changing it to another country which is actually OSS friendly and doesn't change all the time their politics. PS: Sorry for the off-topic discussion.
      - rwmj 2y ago
        RISC-V International moved from California (IIRC?) to Switzerland for basically this reason.
        freedomben 2y ago
        It's shocking and saddening to think one might need to change from the United States to some other country in order to seek freedom. But here we are
        rangerelf 2y ago
        The USA being "Free" has mostly been a myth. It's "Free" if you're a member of the owner class, else you're freedom is subject to the whims of politicians and the wealthy. Aristocracy, really.
        freedomben 2y ago
- Xunjin 2y ago
  Sorry, but could you point out what is not professional? Not everyone needs a UI wrapper that offers tons of OSS services with high prices.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
    - IntelMiner 2y ago
      How is this Hetzner's fault (or concern?) "Hey your customer is hosting a website with random pictures on it. One of them of me is unflattering. Please make them fix it"
      - weinzierl 2y ago
        They were hosting a StackOverflow copy, which is OK because of Creative Commons. All my answers were still under my name as it should be. The only difference to the original was my profile picture, which was an explicit porn image. For several weeks everyone searching for my name or my StackOverflow answers saw that. I'm glad that I was not looking for a job at the time. I exhausted all possibilities on all channels to rectify this situation short of using a lawyer. I put a lot of effort into getting things in order and seriously considered going the legal route but ultimately decided against it mainly because courts are hit and miss here when it comes to reputation damage of regular individuals as opposed to companies or celebrities. EDIT: I should have answered your question how this is Hetzner's fault more directly. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed. Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.

rglullis 2y ago

I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud. Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hirako2000 2y ago
VPS business is very different than the "cloud" space. Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different. For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.
- rglullis 2y ago
  Of course they are not in the hyperscaler space, but they are far from being "just" a VPS provider. Their cloud always had on-demand, per-hour billing of servers and block storage volumes, all very easy to manage and provision via their API. Recently they got into object storage space. They even provide a switch to connect their cloud servers with a dedicated one, so you can have, e.g, a beefy GPU server running a LLM model and your web service auto running on the cheap. I believe that the only thing that really holds Hetzner at their price levels is that the price-sensitive people can always threaten to move to OVH.
  - 2y ago

mysteria 2y ago

Hetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52. Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.