It's just a single data point, but for me that's a pretty good record.
It's not because Hetzner is miraculously better at infrastructure, it's because physical servers are way simpler than the extremely complex software and networking systems that AWS provides.
Or, rather, it's your fault when the complex software and networking systems you deployed on top of those physical servers go wrong (:
This was extra painful, because I wasn't using one of the OS that is blessed by Hetzner, so it requires a remote install. Remote installs require a system that can run their Java web plugin, and that have a stable and fast enough connection to not time out. The only way I have reliably gotten them to work is by having an ancient Linux VM that was also running in Hetzner, and had the oldest Firefox version I could find that still supported Java in the browser.
My fault for trying to use what they provide in a way that is outside their intended use, and props to them for letting me do it anyway.
I learned a long time ago that servers should be an output of your declarative server management configuration, not something that is the source of any configuration state. In other words, you should have a system where you can recreate all your servers at any time.
In your case, I would indeed consider starting with one of the OS base installs that they provide. Much as I dislike the Linux distribution I'm using now, it is quite popular, so I can treat it as a common denominator that my ansible can start from.
Also sorts of monitoring gets flipped.
And no, there generally aren't brief outages in normal servers unless you did it.
I did have someone accidentally shut down one of the servers once though.
There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.
I'm not sure what feature they're really missing, but my favorite is the way they handle AWS Fargate. The other cloud providers have similar offerings but I find Fargate to have almost no limitations when compared to the others.
The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.
Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
Simultaneously too confused to be able to make their own UX choices, but smart enough to understand the backend of your infrastructure enough to know why it doesn't work and excuses you for it.
Unless you lose a significant amount of money per minute of downtime, there is no incentive to go multicloud.
And multicloud has its own issues.
In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage#Impact
Somewhat related tip of the day, don't host your status page as a subdomain off the main site. Ideally host it with a different provider entirely
This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist.
This is mainstream news.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet based cloud service connecting businesses to people using their apps or online platforms.”
Uh.. yeah.
Your margin is my opportunity indeed.
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.
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.
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.
Plenty of heavy traffic, high redundancy applications exist without the need for AWS (or any other cloud providers) overpriced "bespoke" systems.
You will in both cases need specialized people.
The key thing you should ask yourself: do you need DynamoDB or Lambda? Like "need need" or "my resume needs Lambda".
Maybe not click, but Scylla’s install script [0] doesn’t seem overly complicated.
0: https://docs.scylladb.com/manual/stable/getting-started/inst...
Sure, if you configure offsite backups you can guard against this stuff, but with anything in life, you get what you pay for.
One thing to note is that there are some scheduled maintenances were we needed to react.
That might be datacenter dependant of course, since our root servers and cloud services are all hosted in Europe, but I really never understood why Hetzner is said to be less reliable
> 99.99% uptime infra significantly cheaper than the cloud.
I guess that's another person that has never actually worked in the domain (SRE/admin) but still wants to talk with confidence on the topic.
Why do I say that? Because 99.99% is frickin easy
That's almost one full hour of complete downtime per year.
It only gets hard in the 99.9999+ range ... And you rarely meet that range with cloud providers either as requests still fail for some reason, like random 503 when a container is decommissioned or similar
Admittedly they're getting fewer and fewer, but they exist.
The same is also true in GCP, so as much as I prefer GCP from a technical standpoint: the truth is, if you can't see it, it doesn't mean it goes away.
(There may still be some core IAM dependencies in USE1, but I haven’t heard of any.)
That's not necessarily ironic. Seems like you are suffering from recency bias.
Going forward I expect American companies to follow this European vibe, it's like the opposite of enshitification.
Why do you expect American companies to follow it then? >:)
I could find one or two downvoted or heavily critisized comments, but I can find more people mentioning the opposite.
Aws/cloud has similar outages too, but more redundancy and automatic failover/migrations that are transparent to customers happen. You don't have to worry about DDOS and many other admin burdens either.
YMMV, I'm just saying sometimes Aws makes sense, other times Hetzner does.
As long as the illusion that AWS/clouds are the only way to do things continues, their investment will keep being valuable and they will keep getting paid for (over?)engineering solutions based on such technologies.
The second that illusion breaks down, they become no better than any typical Linux sysadmin, or teenager ricing their Archlinux setup in their homelab.
The truth is one under the age of 35 is able to configure a webserver any more, apparently. Especially now that static site generators are in vogue and you don't even need to worry about php-fpm.
In any case, in order for this to happen, someone would have to collect reliable data (not all big cloud providers like to publish precise data, usually they downlplay the outages and use weasel words like "some customers... in some regions... might have experienced" just not to admit they had an outage) and present stats comparing the availability of Heztner Cloud vs the big three.
