You can argue about Hetzner's uptime, but you can 't argue about Hetzner's pricing which is hands down the best there is. I'd rather go with Hetzner and cobble up together some failover than pay AWS extortion.
I switched to netcup for even cheaper private vps for personal noncritical hosting. I'd heard of netcup being less reliable but so far 4 months+ uptime and no problems. Europe region.
Hetzner has the better web interface and supposedly better uptime, but I've had no problems with either. Web interface not necessary at all either when using only ssh and paying directly.
I used netcup for 3 years straight for some self hosting and never noticed an outage. I was even tracking it with smokeping so if the box disappeared I would see it but all of the down time was mine when I rebooted for updates. I don't know how they do it but I found them rock solid.
I've been running my self-hosting stuff on Netcup for 5+ years and I don't remember any outages. There probably were some, but they were not significant enough for me to remember.
netcup is fine unless you have to deal with their support, which is nonexistent. Never had any uptime issues in the two years I've been using them, but friends had issues. Somewhat hit or miss I suppose.
Exactly. Hetzner is the equivalent of the original Raspberry Pi. It might not have all fancy features but it delivers and for the price that essentially unblocks you and allows you to do things you wouldn't be able to do otherwise.
> I'd rather go with Hetzner and cobble up together some failover than pay AWS extortion.
Comments like this are so exaggerated that they risk moving the goodwill needle back to where it was before. Hetzner offers no service that is similar to DynamoDB, IAM or Lambda. If you are going to praise Hetzner as a valid alternative during a DynamoDB outage caused by DNS configuration, you would need to a) argue that Hetzner is a better option regarding DNS outages, b) Hetzner is a preferable option for those who use serverless offers.
I say this as a long-time Hetzner user. Herzner is indeed cheaper, but don't pretend that Herzner let's you click your way into a highly-availale nosql data store. You need non-trivial levels of you're ow work to develop, deploy, and maintain such a service.
> but don't pretend that Herzner let's you click your way into a highly-availale nosql data store.
The idea you can click your way to a highly available, production configured anything in AWS - especially involving Dynamo, IAM and Lambda - is something I've only heard from people who've done AWS quickstarts but never run anything at scale in AWS.
Of course nobody else offers AWS products, but people use AWS for their solutions to compute problems and it can be easy to forget virtually all other providers offer solutions to all the same problems.
>The idea you can click your way to a highly available, production configured anything in AWS - especially involving Dynamo, IAM and Lambda
With some services I'd agree with you, but DynamoDB and Lambda are easily two of their 'simplest' to configure and understand services, and two of the ones that scale the easiest. IAM roles can be decently complicated, but that's really up to the user. If it's just 'let the Lambda talk to the table' it's simple enough.
S3/SQS/Lambda/DynamoDB are the services that I'd consider the 'barebones' of the cloud. If you don't have all those, you're not a cloud provider, your just another server vendor.
Not if you want to build something production ready. Even a simple thing like say static IP ingress for the Lambda is very complicated. The only AWS way you can do this is by using Global Accelerator -> Application Load Balancer -> VPC Endpoint -> API Gateway -> Lambda !!.
There are so many limits for everything that is very hard to run production workloads without painful time wasted in re-architecture around them and the support teams are close to useless to raise any limits.
Just in the last few months, I have hit limits on CloudFormation stack size, ALB rules, API gateway custom domains, Parameter Store size limits and on and on.
That is not even touching on the laughably basic tooling both SAM and CDK provides for local development if you want to work with Lambda.
Sure Firecracker is great, and the cold starts are not bad, and there isn't anybody even close on the cloud. Azure functions is unspeakably horrible, Cloud Run is just meh. Most Open Source stacks are either super complex like knative or just quite hard to get the same cold start performance.
We are stuck with AWS Lambda with nothing better yes, but oh so many times I have come close to just giving up and migrate to knative despite the complexity and performance hit.
>Not if you want to build something production ready.
>>Gives a specific edge case about static IPs and doing a serverless API backed by lambda.
The most naive solution you'd do on any non-cloud vendor, just have a proxy with a static ip that then routes traffic whereever it needed to go, would also work on AWS.
So if you think AWS's solution sucks why not just go with that? What you described doesn't even sound complicated when you think of the networking magic behind the scenes that will take place if you ever do scale to 1 million tps.
Don’t know what you think should mean but for me that means
1. Declarative IaaC in either in CF/terraform
2. Fully Automated discovery which can achieve RTO/RPO objectives
3. Be able to Blue/Green and % or other rollouts
Sure I can write ansible scripts, have custom EC2 images run HA proxy and multiple nginx load balancers in HA as you suggest, or host all that to EKS or a dozen other “easier” solutions
At the point why bother with Lambda ? What is the point of being cloud native and serverless if you have to literally put few VMs/pod in front and handle all traffic ? Might as well host the app runtime too .
> doesn’t even sound complicated .
Because you need a full time resource who is AWS architect and keeps up with release notes and documentation or training and constantly works to scale your application - because every single component has a dozen quotas /limits and you will hit them - it is complicated.
If you spend few million a year on AWS then spending 300k on an engineer to do just do AWS is perhaps feasible .
If you spend few hundred thousands on AWS as part of mix of workloads it is not easy or simple.
The engineering of AWS impressive as it maybe has nothing to the products being offered . There is a reason why Pulumi, SST or AWS SAM itself exist .
Sadly SAM is so limited I had to rewrite everything to CDK in couple of months . CDK is better but I am finding that I have to monkey patching limits on CDK with the SDK code now, while possible , the SDK code will not generate Cloudformation templates .
> Don’t know what you think should mean but for me that means
I think your inexperience is showing, if that's what you try to mean by "production-ready". You're making a storm in a teacup over features that you automatically onboard if you go through an intro tutorial, and "production-ready" typically means way more than a basic run-of-the-mill CICD pipeline.
As most of the times, the most vocal online criticism comes from those who have the least knowledge and experience over the topic they are railing against, and their complains mainly boil down to criticising their own inexperience and ignorance. There is plenty of things to criticize AWS for, such as cost and vendor lock-in, but being unable and unwilling to learn how to use basic services is not it.
Try telling that to customers who can only do outbound API calls to whitelisted IP addresses
When you are working with enterprise customers or integration partners it doesn’t even have to be regulated sectors like finance or healthcare, these are basic asks you cannot get away from .
people want to be able to know whitelist your egress and ingress IPs or pin certificates. It is not up to me to say on efficacy of these rules .
I don’t make the rules of the infosec world , I just follow them.
This architecture[1] requires the setup of 2 NAT gateways (one in each AZ), a routing table, an Internet Gateway, 2 Elastic IP and also the VPC. Since as before we cannot use Function URLs for Lambda we will still need the API Gateway to make HTTP calls.
The only parts we are swapping out `GA -> ALB -> VPC` for `IG -> Router -> NAT -> VPC`.
Is it any simpler ? Doesn't seem like it is to me.
Going the NAT route means, you also need to have intermediate networking skills to handle a routing table (albeit a simple one), half the developers of today never used IP tables is or what chaining rules is.
---
I am surprised at the amount of pushback on a simple point which should be painfully obvious.
AWS (Azure/GCP are no different) has become overly complex with no first class support for higher order abstractions and framework efforts like SAM or even CDK seem to getting not much love at all in last 4-5 years.
Just because they offer and sell all these components to be independently, doesn't mean they should not invest and provide higher order abstractions for people with neither bandwidth or the luxury to be a full time "Cloud Architect".
There is a reason why today Vercel, Render or Railway others are popular despite mostly sitting on top of AWS.
On Vercel the same feature would be[1] quite simple. They use the exact solution you suggest on top of AWS NAT gateway, but the difference I don't have to know or manage it, is the large professional engineering team with networking experience at Vercel.
There is no reason AWS could not have built Vercel like features on top of their offerings or do so now.
At some point small to midsize developers will avoid direct AWS by either choosing to setup Hetzner/OVH bare machines or with bit more budget colo with Oxide[3] or more likely just stick to Vercel and Railway kind of platforms.
I don't know how that will impact AWS, we will all still use them, however a ton of small customers paying close to rack rate is definitely much much higher margin than what Vercel is paying AWS for the same workload is going to be.
> With some services I'd agree with you, but DynamoDB and Lambda are easily two of their 'simplest' to configure and understand services, and two of the ones that scale the easiest. IAM roles can be decently complicated, but that's really up to the user. If it's just 'let the Lambda talk to the table' it's simple enough.
We agree, but also, I feel like you're missing my point: "let the Lambda talk to the table" is what quickstarts produce. To make a lambda talk to a table at scale in production, you'll want to setup your alerting and monitoring to notify you when you're getting close to your service limits.
If you're not hitting service limits/quotas, you're not running even close to running at scale.
> The idea you can click your way to a highly available, production configured anything in AWS - especially involving Dynamo, IAM and Lambda - is something I've only heard from people who've done AWS quickstarts but never run anything at scale in AWS.
I'll bite. Explain exactly what work you think you need to do to get your pick of service running on Hetnzer to have equivalent fault-tolerance to, say, a DynamoDB Global Table created with the defaults.
Are you Netflix? Because is not theres a 99% probability you dont need any of those AWS services and just have a severe case of shiny object syndrome in your organisation.
Plenty of heavy traffic, high redundancy applications exist without the need for AWS (or any other cloud providers) overpriced "bespoke" systems.
To be honest I don't trust myself running a HA PostgreSQL setup with correct backups without spending an exorbitant effort to investigate everything (weeks/months) - do you ? I'm not even sure what effort that would take. I can't remember last time I worked with unmanaged DB in prod where I did not have a dedicated DBA/sysadmin. And I've been doing this for 15 years now. AFAIK Hetzner offers no managed database solution. I know they offer some load balancer so there's that at least.
At some point in the scaling journey bare metal might be the right choice, but I get the feeling a lot of people here trivialize it.
If youre not Netflix then just sudo yum install postgresql and pg_dump every day, upload to S3. Has worked for me for 20 years at various companies, side projects, startups …
> If youre not Netflix then just sudo yum install postgresql and pg_dump every day, upload to S3.
database services such as DynamoDB support a few backup strategies out of the box, including continuous backups. You just need to flips switch and never bother about it again.
> Has worked for me for 20 years at various companies, side projects, startups …
That's perfectly fine. There are still developers who don't even use version control at all. Some old habits die hard, even when the whole world moved on.
That doesn’t give you high availability; it doesn’t give you monitoring and alerting; it doesn’t give you hardware failure detection and replacement; it doesn’t solve access control or networking…
Managed databases are a lot more than apt install postgresql.
If you're doing it yourself, learn Ansible, you'll do it once and be set forever.
You do not need "managed" database services. A managed database is no different from apt install postgesql followed by a scheduled backup.
Genuinely no disrespect, but these statements really make it seem like you have limited experience building an HA scalable system. And no, you don't need to be Netflix or Amazon to build software at scale, or require high availability.
Backups with wall-g and recurring pg_dump are indeed trivial. (Modulo S3 outage taking so long that your WAL files fill up the disk and you corrupt the entire database.)
It's the HA part, especially with a high-volume DB that's challenging.
But that's the thing - if I have an ops guy who can cover this then sure it makes sense - but who does at an early stage ? As a semi competent dev I can setup a terraform infra and be relatively safe with RDS. I could maybe figure out how to do it on my own in some time - but I don't know what I don't know - and I don't want to do a weekend production DB outage debugging because I messed up the replication setup or something. Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't have the energy to deal with that :)
> Are you Netflix? Because is not theres a 99% probability you dont need any of those AWS services and just have a severe case of shiny object syndrome in your organisation.
I think you don't even understand the issue you are commenting on. It's irrelevant if you are Netflix or some guy playing with a tutorial. One of the key traits of serverless offerings is how it eliminates the need to manage and maintain a service or even worry about you have enough computational resources. You click a button to provision everything, you configure your clients to consume that service, and you are done.
If you stop to think about the amount of work you need to invest to even arrive at a point where you can actually point a client at a service, you'll be looking at what the value of serverless offerings.
Ironically, it's the likes of Netflix who can put together a case against using serverless offerings. They can afford to have their own teams managing their own platform services with the service levels they are willing to afford. For everyone else, unless you are in the business of managing and tuning databases or you are heavily motivated to save pocket change on a cloud provider bill, the decision process is neither that clear not favours running your own services.
> Plenty of heavy traffic, high redundancy applications exist without the need for AWS (or any other cloud providers) overpriced "bespoke" systems.
And almost all of them need a database, a load balancer, maybe some sort of cache. AWS has got you covered.
Maybe some of them need some async periodic reporting tasks. Or to store massive files or datasets and do analysis on them. Or transcode video. Or transform images. Or run another type of database for a third party piece of software. Or run a queue for something. Or capture logs or metrics.
And on and on and and on. AWS has got you covered.
This is Excel all over again. "Excel is too complex and has too many features, nobody needs more than 20% of Excel. It's just that everyone needs a different 20%".
You're right AWS does have you covered. But that doesn't mean thats the only way of doing it. Load balancing is insanely easy to do yourself, databases even easier. Caching, ditto.
I think a few people who claim to be in devops could do with learning the basics about how things like Ansible can help them as there's a fair few people who seem to be under the impression AWS is the only, and the best option, which unless you're FAANG really is rarely the case.
You can spin up a redundant database setup with backups and monitoring and automatic fail over in 10 mins (the time it takes in AWS)? And maintain it? If you've done this a few times before and have it highly automated, sure. But let's not pretend it's "even easier" than "insanely easy".
Load balancing is trivial unless you get into global multicast LBs, but AWS have you covered there too.
> You're right AWS does have you covered. But that doesn't mean thats the only way of doing it. Load balancing is insanely easy to do yourself, databases even easier. Caching, ditto
I think you don't understand the scenario you are commenting on. I'll explain why.
It's irrelevant if you believe that you are able to imagine another way to do something, and that you believe it's "insanely easy" to do those yourself. What matters is that others can do that assessment themselves, and what you are failing to understand is that when they do so, their conclusion is that the easiest way by far to deploy and maintain those services is AWS.
And it isn't even close.
You mention load balancing and caching. The likes of AWS allows you to setup a global deployment of those services with a couple of clicks. In AWS it's a basic configuration change. And if you don't want it, you just tear down everything with a couple of clicks as well.
Why do you think a third of all the internet runs on AWS? Do you think every single cloud engineer in the world is unable to exercise any form of critical thinking? Do you think there's a conspiracy out there to force AWS to rule the world?
If you need the absolutely stupid scale DynamoDB enables what is the difference compared to running for example FoundationDb on your own using Hetzner?
> The key thing you should ask yourself: do you need DynamoDB or Lambda? Like "need need" or "my resume needs Lambda".
If you read the message you're replying to, you will notice that I singled out IAM, Lambda, and DynamoDB because those services were affected by the outage.
If Hetzner is pushed as a better or even relevant alternative, you need to be able to explain exactly what you are hoping to say to Lambda/IAM/DynamoDB users to convince them that they would do better if they used Hetzner instead.
Making up conspiracy theories over CVs doesn't cut it. Either you know anything about the topic and you actually are able to support this idea, or you're an eternal September admission whose only contribution is noise and memes.
TBH, in my last 3 years with Hetzner, i never saw a downtime to my servers other than myself doing some routin maitenance for os updates. Location Falkenstein.
You really need your backup procedures and failover procedures though, a friend bought a used server and the disk died fairly quickly leaving him sour.
Younger guy with ambitions but little experience, I think my point was that used servers with Hetzner are still used so if someone has been running disk heavy jobs you might want to request new disks or multiple ones and not just pick the cheapest options at the auction.
(Interesting that an anectode like above got downvoted)
> (Interesting that an anectode like above got downvoted)
experts almost unilaterally judge newbies harshly, as if the newbies should already know all of the mistakes to avoid. things like this are how you learn what mistakes to avoid.
"hindsight is 20/20" means nothing to a lot of people, unfortunately.
What is the Hetzner equivalent for those in Windows Server land? I looked around for some VPS/DS providers that specialize in Windows, and they all seem somewhat shady with websites that look like early 2000s e-commerce.
