Migrating From AWS to Hetzner
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The post discusses migrating from AWS to Hetzner, highlighting cost savings and performance improvements, while the discussion revolves around the trade-offs and considerations involved in such a migration.
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Amazon gets far too greedy- particularly bad when you need egress.
Also an "amazon core" is like 1/8th of a physical cpu core.
Clearly when Amazon realised the enormous potential in AWS, they scrapped that principle. But the idea behind it - that an organisation used to fat margins will not be able to adapt in the face of a competitor built from the ground to live of razor thing margins - still applies.
AWS is ripe for the picking. They "can't" drop prices much, because their big competitors have similar margins, and a price war with them would devastate the earnings of all of them no matter how much extra market share they were to win.
The challenge is the enormous mindshare they have, and how many people are emotionally invested even in believing AWS is actually cost effective.
Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments.
To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost).
If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop their prices (or drop them by less relatively) the margins are growing.
If you're paying more than a few hundred k/year (worth starting to try below that; success rates will vary greatly) and are still paying the list prices, you might as well set fire to money.
In the end, Hetzner is a provider of "cheap but not 100% uptime" infrastructure, probably why it's so cheap in the first place.
As every other provider, if you want 100% uptime (or getting close to it), you really need at least N+1 instances of everything, as every hosting provider end up fucking something up, sooner or later.
Sure they’ll throw you some service credits. But it’ll always be magnitudes less than the cost of their disruption to you.
I've used Vultr for about the same amount of time, and I never got an email that some network switch had a hardware failure and it'll take a couple of hours to restore connectivity, but I've had that happen with Hetzner more than once, in the same time-span. And again, I say this as a Hetzner-lover, and someone who prefers Hetzner over Vultry any day of the week.
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10...
I legit cannot buy anything on Amazon. Reddit and Epic Games are also broken.
It's a rotten attitude, and judging a projects worth by an AWS bill is a very poor comparator. I could spin up a massive aws bill doing some pointless machine learning workloads, is that suddenly a valid project in your eyes?
Can you spin it on a AWS competitor for a fraction of a cost? Absolutely yes I would be interested in reading about it!
It's literally a agency doing professional development for others, among other services. Clearly not "toys".
HN dismissals are going down in quality, at least they used to be well researched some years ago. Now people just spew out the first thing that comes up in their mind, and zero validation before hitting that "reply" button.
When I've needed dedicated servers in the US I've used Vultr in the past, relatively nice pricing, only missing unmetered bandwidth for it to be my go-to. But all those US-specific cases been others paying for it, so hasn't bothered me, compared to personal/community stuff I host at Hetzner and pay for myself.
This wasn't a consideration a few years ago, but with how quickly things are devolving south of the border it's now much more of a risk. If I were operating a company in Canada, I would want to be able to assure my customers that their data won't get expropriated to the US without first going through Canadian courts.
OVH Canada now has two Canadian locations, by the way - the original location in Beauharnois and a new location in Cambridge, so you even can have two zones for redundancy.
For example, I got a dedicated server from Hetzner earlier this year with a consumer Ryzen CPU that had unstable SIMD (ZFS checksums would randomly fail, and mprime also reported errors). Opened a ticket about it and they basically told me it wasn't an issue because their diagnostics couldn't detect it.
And based on our different experiences, the quality of care you receive could differ too :)
To be fair, they probably would've done the same for me if I'd pushed the issue further, but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem with the hard drives (they said one of the drives was likely faulty and insisted on replacing it and having me resilver the zpool to see if it fixed the issue. spoiler: it didn't) I just gave up, disabled SIMD in ZFS and moved on.
That sucks big time :( In the most recent case I can recall, I successfully got access, noticed weirdness, gathered data and sent an email, and had a new instance within 2-3 hours.
Overall, based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven.
Can you name one tech company that's scaled passed the point where the founders are closely involved with support that has consistently good tech support? I think this is just really hard to get right, as many customers are not as knowledgeable as they think they are.
Probably the company most people have had any sort of consistency from would be Stripe I think. Of course, there are cases where they haven't been great, but if you ask me for a company with the best tech support, Stripe comes to mind first.
I'm not sure it's active anymore, but there used to be a somewhat hidden and unofficial support channel in #stripe@freenode back in the day, where a bunch of Stripe developers hanged out and helped users in an in-official capacity. That channel was a godsend more than once.
Too cool to not share, most of the providers listed there have dedicated servers too.
Edit: Ironically, that website doesn't have Hetzner in their index.
excellent website, thanks.
The article is worth the read.
https://dillonshook.com/postgres-cloud-benchmarks-for-indie-...
FWIW, Hetzner has two data centers in the US, in case you're just looking for "Hetzner quality but in the US", not for "American/Canadian companies similar to Hetzner".
In a thread two days ago https://ioflood.com/ was recommended as US-based alternative
https://www.hostpapa.ca/
https://www.cacloud.com/
https://www.keepsec.ca/
https://www.canspace.ca/
We are running modest operations on European VPS provider where I work and whenever we get a new hire (business or technical does not matter) it is like a Groundhog day - I have to explain — WE ALREADY ARE IN THE CLOUD, NO YOU WILL NOT START "MIGRATING TO CLOUD PROJECT" ON MY WATCH SO YOU CAN PAD YOUR CV AND MOVE TO ANOTHER COMPANY TO RUIN THEIR INFRA — or something along those lines but asking chatgpt to make it more friendly tone.
Google doesn't even deploy most of its own code to run on VMs. Containers yes but not VMs.
I have ran services on bare metal, and VPSs, and I always got far better performance than I can get from AWS or GCP for a small fraction of the cost. To me "cloud" means vendor lock-in, terrible performance, and wild costs.
People do not realize for that fancy infinite storage scaling, that it means that AWS etc run network based storage. And that, like on a DB, can be a 10x performance hit.
Hetzner, OVH, Leaseweb, and Scaleway (EU locations only).
I've used other providers as well, but I won't mention them because they were either too small or had issues.
Clouvider is available in alot of US DCs, 4GB ram/2cpu/80GB NVME and a 10Gb port for like $6 a month.
Years ago Broadberry has a similar thing with Supermicro, but not any more. You have to talk to a sales person about how they can rip you off. Then they don't give you what you specced anyway -- I spec 8x8G sticks of ram, they provide 2x32G etc.
In the best case scenario. In the worst, some cluster f-up will eat 10x that in engineering time.
The only benefit you get is reliability, temporary network issues on AWS are not a thing.
On DigitalOcean they are fairly bad (I lose thousands of requests almost every month and I get pennies in credit back when I complain - while my users churning cost way more), on Hetzner I've heard mixed reviews.
Some people complains, some say it's extremely reliable.
I'm looking forward to try Hetzner out!
Yeah, I remember when AWS first appeared, and the value proposition was basically "It's expensive but you can press a button and a minute later you have a new instance, so we can scale really quickly". For the companies that know more or less the workload they have during a week don't really get any benefits, just more expensive monthly bills.
But somewhere along the line, people started thinking it was easier to use AWS than the alternatives, and I even heard people saying it's cheaper...
The biggest innovation AWS delivered was to convince engineers they are cheap, while wresting control of provisioning away from the people with actual visibility into the costs.
But in general if you don't need to scale crazy Hetzner is amazing, we still have a lot of stuff running on Hetzner but fan out to other services when we need to scale.
My point of people moving to Hetzner for the dedicated instances rather than the cloud still remains though, at least in my bubble.
I'm not sure if this is a difference between other clouds, at least a few years ago this was a weekly or even daily problem in GCP; my experience is if you request hundreds of VMs rapidly during peak hours, all the clouds struggle.
At the scale of providers like AWS and even the smaller GCP, “hundreds of VMs” is not a large amount.
Now maybe after the AI demand and waves of purchases of systems appropriate for that things have improved, but it definitely wasn’t the case at the large scale employer I worked at in 2023 (my current employer is much smaller, so doesn’t have those needs, so I can’t comment)
So you have approx 1MM concurrent customers? That's a big number. You should definitely be able to get preferred pricing from AWS at that scale.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeroen-jacobs-8209391_somethi...
I didn't know AWS and GCP also did it. Not surprised.
The problem is that European regulators do nothing about such anti-competitive dirty tricks. The big clouds hide behind "lots of spam coming from them", which is not true.
On the other hand, someone linked a report from last year[0]:
> 72% of BEC attacks in Q2 2024 used free webmail domains; within those, 72.4% used Gmail. Roughly ~52% of all BEC messages were sent from Gmail accounts that quarter.
[0] https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2024.pdf
And just deleting it and starting again is just going to give you the exact same IP again!
I ended up having to buy a dozen or so IPs until I found one that wasn't blocked, and then I could delete all the blocked ones.
He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too.
--
[0] https://talkpython.fm/
[1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/
[2] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-p...
[3] https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production
Yeah, even when you move to "EC2 Dedicated Instances" you end up sharing the hardware with other instances, unless you go for "EC2 Dedicated Hosts", and even then the performance seems worse than other providers.
Not sure how they managed to do so for even the dedicated stuff, would require some dedicated effort.
A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.
The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.
So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.
[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...
When you pay 1/4 for 3X the performance you can duplicate your servers and then be paying 1/2 for 3X the performance.
I find baffling that people forget about how things were done before the cloud.
So they could have had 100% redundant systems at OVH and still be under half the cost of a traditional "cloud" provider?
I would look at architecture and operations first. Their "main" node went down, and they did not have a way they could just bring another instance of it online fast on a fresh OVH machine (typically provisioned in a few minutes, assuming they had no hot standby). If the same happened to their "main" VM at a "hyperscaler" , I would guess they also would have been up the same creek. It is not the difference between 120 and 600 seconds to provision a new machine that caused their 10 hrs downtime.
But I think "redundancy" is more like a spectrum, rather than a binary thing. You can be more or less redundant, even within the same VPS if you'd like, but that of course be less redundant than hosting things across multiple data centers.
While AWS is probably towards the safer end if you want to put all your eggs in one basket, people are still putting all their eggs in one basket if they have everything at AWS as well...
This is a myth, created so cloud providers can sell more, and so those who overpay can feel better. I've been using dedicated servers since 2005, so for 20 years across different providers. I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime.
You did not say what system you use on them, but don't you need to reboot them to apply kernel upgrades, for instance?
I run most of the workloads in containers, but there are also some VMs (mostly Windows) and some workloads use Firecracker micro vms in containers. A small number of machines are rebooted more often because they occasionally need new kernel features, and their workloads aren't VM friendly, so they run on bare metal.
I don't see how that follows? Could you please explain?
I run my stuff on Hetzner physical servers. It's deployed/managed through ansible. I can deploy the same configuration on another Hetzner cluster (say, in a different country, which I actually do use for my staging cluster). I can also terraform a fully virtual cloud configuration and run the same ansible setup on that. Given that user data gets backed up regularly across locations, I don't see the problem you are describing?
OVH offers a managed kubernetes solution which for a team experienced with Kubernetes and/or already using containers would be a fairly straightforward way to get a solid HA setup up and running. Kubernetes has its downsides and complexity but in general it does handle hardware failures very well.
Even hosting double of everything when you're doing dedicated servers will let you have cheaper monthly bills, compared to the same performance/$ you could get with AWS or whatever.
But Hetzner does seem a bit worse than other providers in that they have random failures in their own infrastructure, so you do need to take care if you wanna avoid downtime. I'm guessing that's how they can keep the prices so low.
> is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated
I think that's a problem in your design/architecture, if you don't have backups that live outside the actual servers you wanna migrate away from, or at least replicate the data to some network drive you can easily attach to a new instance in an instant.
We kept most smaller-scale, stateless services in AWS but migrated databases and high-scale / high-performance services to bare metal servers.
Backups are stored in S3 so we still benefit from their availability.
Performance is much higher thanks to physically attached SSDs and DDR5 on-die RAM.
Costs are drastically lower and for much larger server sizes which means we are no getting stressed about eventually needing to scale up our RDS / EC2 costs.
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