This is actually great. I maintain a library[1] for interacting with the Robot interface using Rust, but testing is heavily gated because of the potential costs it might incur, which is why a lot of the purchasing/cancellation APIs haven't been thoroughly tested.
With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank.
And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible.
I haven't actually. I believe they do offer modest amounts of credit for creating useful libraries, documentation and such targeting their platform, but I never really looked into it.
> At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers
For (some) dedicated servers, I think. Last time I checked the lowest tiered dedicated servers didn't have any setup fees. If it's not mentioned, assumed it'll remain.
As diggan said, there's usually at least one of their dedicated server offerings for which setup fees are waived, so I figure my tests would use the API to find out which one and use it :)
I have a dedicated server in Hetzner and I don't understand what this means. How do they decide when the server is "used"? Based on CPU allocation? SSH sessions? HTTP traffic? Power?
It's easy to shut down virtual servers and continue from the same position. It's not that easy to do the same for servers.
I'm not so sure about this, their description specifically calls out one-time-only costs like domain registrations as being the only things excluded. Cautiously optimistic in addition to the recent reappearance of new GPU models being offered to existing customers, Hetzner may be prepping an hourly-billed bare metal GPU product at a great price
Hetzner bare metal already deploys in a couple of minutes when renting existing hardware, and there is plenty of precedent for hourly-billed bare metal services around. I think they're intending to move all their bare metal over to hourly billing.
On the cloud product listing they make it pretty clear that "in use" means "allocated" and not "consuming electricity". Pretty sure their fees are staying the same, and we are still paying for every hour a server exists.
„Used“ means as long as you rent them / as long as they’re assigned to your account / as long as you have access. Dedicated servers are physical objects in the real world, contrary to virtual servers they don’t stop „to exist“ just because they’re no longer yours.
Previously you could only rent physical servers for an entire month. If you’re doing this the price is still the same. But going forward it will be possible to rent for a portion of the month only (x amount of hours).
If I understand correctly your cost will stay the same. The bill for march might be a bit different but the total cost should be identical. Their usage will also stay the same-ish with usage = allocation for CPUS, Ram and storage.
I think you're getting lost in semantic games. Cloud providers sell you access to their computational resources. When you pay for a server, you're paying for the right to access that server and do what you wish to do with it. Much like when you rent a car, you still pay for it if you keep it parked.
This is true, but it still may be how Hetzner decides usage. I'm not sure if this is the case, but it seems pretty reasonable when you're talking about bare metal.
They‘ve stated clearly that you pay the same. Its just calculating stuff differently that you can now remove a dedicated machine mid-month and get the remaining time‘s money back. Which wasnt the case until now.
They have been using this business model for years for their VPS products and Hetzner has slowly been moving to unify their products because it's such a disjointed mess right now.
Like, it's completely unreasonable to expect to pay more.
Hopefully the people that are running it now are better than the people that started it, however I will never use Hetzner's services for anything again as long as I live.
In their early days they "accidentally" deleted my servers and backups, and their engineers had the gall to attempt to blame me for their process failures.
I had posted about it on HN awhile ago and had to provide proof to Dan to be able to be allowed to share my story.
They responded to my HN comment apologizing and trying to claim that those people shouldn't have been interacting with customers, don't work for the company anymore and blah blah, but there is no way I could trust a company a second time after losing a month's worth of work.
It was the not apologizing and doubling down on their mistakes that put me off.
Hetzner's cloud console (https://console.hetzner.cloud/) was introduced for their vServer migration (competing with the likes of Linode). Robot (https://robot.your-server.de/) was used for their vServers previously and is still used for their dedicated servers and domain names and such.
Traditionally, cloud referred to an abstraction above "someone else's computer", keeping the specific details of those computers hidden from the user, allowing the operator to do things like swap out the hardware, move the data to another datacenter, etc. without the end user ever noticing.
But tech people love to come up with new definitions for the same terms all the time, so anything goes.
I've heard that Hetzner is a good provider, so I want to buy a cheap unmanaged VPS server in the USA. But can not find any mention about VPS. Any help, please?
Virtual private server == anything that is not a whole machine, usually referring to small VMs.
In hetzner speak you want a "shared vCPU server".
That's roughly what others offer as VPS, just more clearly spelled out (IMHO). You get fractional CPU usage that should be burstable and roundabout one core.
VPS are a part of the cloud offering now. Just like EC2 is part of AWS. Once change is that traditionally VPSs used local disk storage, while cloud servers use network block storage.
Usually clouds offer additional higher level features, in addition to basic VMs, such as load balancers, object storage and managed containers. Though Hetzner currently offers very little in that regard.
I've had a similar experience where my account was banned despite providing all the info they requested (including my passport).
Hetzner was the only provider where I was banned despite providing everything I was asked for. I've deployed services on plenty of providers (AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc) without issue.
Apparently, this has been an on-going struggle for them. A few weeks ago they were even called out on an episode of the syntaxFM podcast for this behavior after one of the hosts had his account banned [0].
It's still a bit of a mystery to me honestly. Is their fraud detection so poor where they're forced to ban new sign-ups in this manner? How can Hetzner's competition tell that these accounts are legitimate (without ridiculous requirements such as passport) and Hetzner can't (even when provided with full home address, passport, etc)? I'm assuming Hetzner can't because they've seemingly developed a reputation for banning legitimate developers and the only reason I can think of where they'd be fine with that is if they actually have a very difficult time telling whether an account is legitimate or not.
They banned my prepaid account, I had few bucks on left on it to test and evaluate some selfhosting services. I didn't try to ask for my money back as I saw it like a pointless time waste trying to contact them.
They are like Ryanair and Lidl brands - you get a reasonable product super-cheap. Don't argue about the terms and conditions, just be happy to do business with us. If you don't buy, somebody else after you will. This is not classic VC-funded IT. It's mass-market, low margin, low risk consumer products. It's not Enterprise IT.
Can you elaborate? I have a VPS and a storage box on Hetzner and I'm so far satisfied with it, minus the sometimes confusing interface between their different products.
Because they are so cheap, they are often used by spammers or other shady entities. So occasionally they may ask for ID. For example, if you connect from one country, use an address from another country and use prepaid card from yet another country.
This is what happened to me basically, I was so happy I found a cheap provider, I got locked out I didn't even know what to do to unban my account. I will keep using my old provider ...
My credit is great (and currently locked), and is probably enough to get a car with a "$0 down" offer, although those often do require some payments at time of purchase. If you can answer the credit application questions and present ID with my name that looks good, you've created a big mess for me.
DigitalOcean, even before it had huge layoffs, blocked my new account and wouldn’t allow me to pay. There was absolutely no support whatsoever for that. Just a template email and no other way to escalate or write to a human. I can only imagine how much worse it would be now with reduced staff.
I've been a Hetzner customer for nearly 10 years now. I just checked – first invoice in June 2014. And during that period, Hetzner's support – which I needed maybe 3 times since things generally just work – has always been stellar.
I've used Linode too, and their support was comparable (=also great). But Hetzner wins on pricing, hands down.
I actually appreciate Hetzner hasn't join the BS enshittification gimmick train (yet). If that's your complaint.
Similar to the other commenters I much disagree - "but this ofc. rly depends on what you expect from them..."
If the thing has power, network, working hardware and is able to "boot into there rescue-system" that is all they care about.
And for that support has been stellar including preventive disk swaps, moving disk into new chassis and such with feedback and action within minutes basically 24/7.
But the software end is ofc. entirely on you,
down to the BIOS where they roll you a network-KVM-Cart to the box for some hours after requesting it with a click.
They wont fix your HTML errors, nor your php syntax errors, or explain how to setup SSL on your apache, nor will they help when you dont know how to operate ssh/putty ;)
and if "with such an issue" one bothers the 24/7-datacenter guys (and not just "8-16/5 normal customer support") I may even understand that it seems a little rude ;-)
I sttongly disagree based in my interaction with them. They were very rude. That said, their services are reasonably priced and they have been competent throughout my time with them.
Hetzner would be far more appealing if they ever decide to muzzle their rebid support team.
No, they were German. Knowledgeable and efficient, but they won't coddle you or pretend that their life depend on your miser account. If you have a problem that can not be solved by their standard process, they will rather drop you than try to accommodate you.
No, I'm afraid you're way off. Their response was far from efficient. I reported a fault in their interface and they wrote a whole peragraph demeaning me in a passive aggressive manner.
The workaround (to their subpar system) was a single line at the end. Very opposite from German efficiency if you ask me.
That said, I did switch newer deployments to another cloud provider who is more professional, so it really does seem that they do not care about my measly account :-)
> We will always use the hourly price when it saves you money, meaning when you have used a product for less than a month, and the total hourly price is less than the monthly price.
That’s nice, I guess.
> we have decided to no longer send invoices to all of our customers on the same day. Instead, we will spread them out throughout the month. You will always receive your invoice on the same day of the month. But this day will be different from customer to customer.
It’s not clear to me when the billing moth starts. Is it the day the invoice is sent or is it a regular calendar month? Either way it might be confusing.
>What is important after the changeover?
• We want to be able to offer you even better customer service in the future. For that reason, we want to change the date of your invoice. This will make it easier for us to quickly answer questions about your invoices. Starting in April, your new permanent billing day will be the 12. of the month.
I think they have just spread the billing day out across the month for all customers
I'd hope that it's based on calendar months. Wouldn't invoices that span multiple years make things a lot more complicated in terms of accounting in general?
It would be nice if cloud offerings like Hetzner would allow one to set the contract duration and pay in advance, for example, one year. And once that year passes, you could tell them to extend it for another year, or do nothing and get your server deleted. This way you have a control over your spending and avoid surprises. I guess some providers (OVH?) allow you to do that, but of course it requires that all costs be fixed and have no "extras" for bandwidth consumption or things like that.
You can buy credits using a bank transfer [1]. You can also set E-Mail alerts in case your monthly invoice is higher then expected (more traffic etc.) [2]. However, there is no auto-delete as far as I can tell.
Didn't know you could buy credits, but well, for me the key is that no debt is generated when your credit goes to zero. In this case, if you exhaust your credit but your server keeps running, Hetzner will not stop it and will send you the bill next month. Yes, you may have received an email warning but it does not give the same peace of mind.
I’ve been waiting for Hetzner to allow adding credits into one’s account using credit cards or debit cards (or other modes like PayPal). Being outside Germany (and the EU), a bank transfer is not possible or is difficult and prohibitively expensive.
Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
You can use a bank like Wise which lets you have accounts in many currencies for such bank transfers. Fees between their accounts are quite competitive (I used them many times in the past).
I agree it's not as bad as other companies (like the other day Netlify story) but Hetzner doesn't allow you to set limits either, so in theory you can still be charged without knowing how much it'll be in advance. You can also leave something on while thinking it's off and, yes, it's your fault too, but it wouldn't happen if it just consumed your credits and no more.
At least with the dedicated servers there are no surprises. Monthly cost is fixed, if you exceed the bandwidth limit you'll be throttled. Maybe their cloud offerings offer the same?
From what I can see in their webpage, they charge something like 1 eur for every extra TB but apparently there's no way to set a limit (so you can be protected in the event of a DDoS), only an alert.
If monthly price won't increase than this appears to be a good change. But their dedicated servers have an "installation fee", so it won't be cost-effective to rent them for short periods, and VMs are billed on hourly basis already, to my knowledge. Not sure which products this change covers.
I don't seem capable of actually setting up an account with Heztner and logging in. Their security is so tight, it seems to constantly lock me out. What if I were an actual customer? Yikes.
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Literally this. Their staff won't provide any details, nor even a route towards a solution. When I asked what they suggest doing in this situation, they simply stopped responding.
Of course they don't. If they tell you why they have banned you, if you were a scammer, you'd know how they caught you and what to do better next time.
That's why none of the fraud prevention systems, be they at a tech company or a bank, tell you exactly why you've been banned/denied.
Any somewhat decent company would have an alternative, more rigid verification process to rely on when the basic one is insufficient. It doesn't require telling which part their doubts lie with. They do sometimes ask for an official ID, but apart from that...?
Either way their reasoning is flawed. An actual fraudster will simply keep trying and find out themselves, because they have nothing to lose. Therefore it's security through obscurity at best. Meanwhile legitimate customers/prospects suffer.
Please note that Hetzner does this only in couple cases: a) fake account data ; b) previous strikes (unpaid invoices, abuse etc..) with them ; c) in some cases customer is from country they do not do business with. I bet gazzilion OP above is within a or b
Their ToS also classifies Crypto-Mining, farming or plotting (whatever that is) as grounds for cancellation.
Also everything forbidden by German law results in a cancellation. So if you would have for example posted something before 2017 about a state leader that might seem like an insult your server might be gone. ( https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/ger... )
Make sure you avoid p2p stuff that scans for other servers on the hetzner network, too, even if it's legitimate and not infringing on copyright. They won't ban you right away, but their systems will detect it and give you 24h to confirm you're not infected with malware before shutting down the server. For IPFS or Bittorrent, you should be able to use it for legitimate purposes after blocking the local IPs.
I'm awaiting donwvotes, but honestly, if they don't give you a reason, everything can be one, and refusing a service on arbitrary grounds seems illegal to me :D
Are you sure about that? I know of a precedent in Poland, where a company refused to service (print some kind of invitation cards) some LGBT people, and was punished for it.
I imagine the laws in Germany are similar to the laws in Poland in that regard, both countries being in the European Union.
In USA, I really doubt any company could refuse to serve black people. Or women.
I wonder if the downvoters of my previous message share your (I'd say quite wrong) opinion or there's another reason for the downvotes - I'm up for a discussion!
I don't know about the downvotes, and I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but there's a difference between a service to the public (e.g. a café or a restaurant) and a service such as Hetzner.
Maybe you personally had no data loss, but I believe that the question was the more general "could other users in this situation expect to be able to recover their data?".
I setup 5 x $220/month servers and I wanted to make sure my payment method worked, contacted support a couple of times, wanted to make a prepayment or something.
No dice, they didn't want to take my money until the billing period closed, luckily everything worked fine.
It wasn't their cloud offering though, it was for the dedicated servers (Hetzner Robot), I don't know if that makes a difference.
Yup, I bought a dedicated server because I needed a CPU with AVX2 and VT-x, and it went poof some days later.
They didn't even do me the courtesy of emailing me to tell me about it, I had to ask support:
> > When I try to log in to my account it tells me that my credentials are invalid, and when I use forgot password it tells me that my account is disabled?
>We recently did some routine reviews of our customer accounts. We noticed some suspicious information in your account.
>We have some concerns regarding this information and we have decided to close your account.
>We do not share details about why certain accounts appear suspicious. Publishing this information would make it easier for people to create fake accounts and abuse our services.
I even went through their live-video face verification and passport scan and they didn't budge on this.
Were you an 'uncomplicated' customer i.e. from a country not associated with tons of online fraud, connecting plainly from a 'normal' ISP account (not a VPN, not using a browser cranked to the gills with privacy plugins) and using a conventional payment method registered to you at your address in the same country you were connecting from etc?
the post says: "Just to make it clear, the montly price you will pay will NOT change, even if you see some short-term changes in monthly totals on your invoices during the transition period."
Maybe. But price is still one of the larger concerns for many people. When I checked this a couple of years ago, it seemed like Hetzner’s Storage Box (the one sorta competes with your rsync.net) had a much lower price, a much larger capacity per dollar/euro and more storage tiers.
They ask for a government ID in some cases. I was able to provide one with some details masked, and they wanted the name on my account to match the name on the government ID. This is a commercial transaction, not Facebook. So I was kinda ok with that. But it is weird and ridiculous.
Meh, ymmv. I migrated a bunch of stuff from OVH->Hetzner a few years ago and the support experience was absolutely, insanely, beyond-belief bad.
P1 call having to explain "what's an ip address" to their 'engineers'.
About 6 hours after we moved prod over, they brought down my EIPs for like 4 hours because of a route they didn't understand and flagged as spam, and in the end we rolled back the migration and cancelled the contracts.
Bummer for them; we ended up scaling out to several hundred thousand euro a year in OVH, which has been absolutely fucking exemplar.
So while some people really do rave about them, I was so annoyed by that experience that I will almost certainly never use them again.
Being a German myself, I'm 90% sure it's because the support is based in Germany, where technology goes to die.
South Africa sounds like a good compromise between Australia and South America :)
Wonder what's the shortest possible latency between those points?
Alternative, more interesting question: Assuming Hetzner have a data center in Germany and one in Finland, where should their next data center be in order to reduce latency as much as possible, in the most countries?
Same here. I provided an authentic US drivers license for their verification (which I normally wouldn't do) yet that didn't pass the verification, no reason given. Well, if they don't my money, fine, I'll do it elsewhere.
This overall sounds like it makes sense and brings their billing into line with other providers.
But it's super confusingly written and presented. Why is this an essay with CAPITAL LETTERS to try to simplify things. It looks like they put in a ton of effort to make sure people aren't confused, but this doesn't seem like the thing to give people to ensure that they aren't confused.
Huh, to me it feels they just tried to emphasize the most important things, like your bill never being higher than the monthly price would be. Like, the opposite of what tech companies usually do.
Their business was always a bit chaotic but the technical side of the organization was competent. We were colo'd in one of their datacenters so it was nice to be able to rent additional capacity in the same facility. Servers were manually provisioned, but manageable as you'd expect via online portal after provisioning was complete.
So... not a glowing recommendation I guess, given their corporate instability? But a recommendation nonetheless, the corporate instability never impacted our technical operations and the product was good.
OVH's Toronto datacentre is not operational yet. But you can pre-order.
It's going to be interesting to see what this does to pricing for the Toronto hosting and compute market, as that location has always been more expensive compared to other North American locations.
Right now it looks like OVH will not be offering their lower tier offers out of the Toronto DC.
Hydro power is not green. The benefit are it's cheap (in terms of cost to produce) and produces no CO2 emissions. The downside is it makes it harder to fish to travel from the ocean to their spawning sites. Like all power sources, it has benefits and drawbacks and it absolutely impacts the environment.
Hydro on the north of Quebec (most of % electricity produced) is not that a fish-reach area at all. But yes, on some areas in the world that's a concern.
Nice but illegal in some European countries. If you have a cost with a fixed deal (aka bare metal server per month) law has it that its upfront. If its a monthly cost it should be invoiced be the first 5 days of the following month.
I guess I can tell the IRS that Hetzner has a problem with their cron jobs or with the uniform distribution of their accounting people workload.
Yes, they state as much when you order anything and talked about it at length when they introduced the US offering.
They're shipping their specialized server systems to select providers for housing, essentially. Most maintenance is done remotely... aside from replacing faulty hardware etc
I helped some smaller companies move from AWS EC2 to Hetzner dedicated servers. One example: Biggest cost saving was in the bandwidth bills. They also realized they don't really need to be able to scale up/down in minutes or having 6 instances online, but having two beefy machines lead to better performance, less latency and cheaper monthly bills.
Originally they just went with AWS because the developer who did infrastructure stuff was most (only?) used to it and had some certification or similar, without really thinking about why AWS. Reached out to me when they started to wonder why things were so expensive for what they were doing.
around one year ago I've evaluated how much it will cost me to run DB (MYSQL) server on RDS, taking current server (one of) as example.
If my memory serves me well, for medium sized DB of 2TB/160GB RAM/20+ cores, it was something like 2000$/month on RDS and around 230$ on Hetzner (with AX161, actually having 2x3.5TB NVMe disks and high iops capacity and 32c/64t EPYC CPU).
That project was never been in AWS/"cloud" though, so savings are made in upfront.
I have not done any traffic calculations, though - I actually forgot that AWS can charge you for that as well.
With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank.
And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible.
[1] https://github.com/MathiasPius/hrobot-rs