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.
Are you new to Earth?
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.
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.
The linked page is very unclear about this.
If you decide to stop completely with the server halfway through the month, you'll pay for the hours.
Of course, a shut down server that's yours is still yours and you'll be billed for it.
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.
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).
> How precisely does Hetzner calculate the hourly billing?
> The beginning of the hourly billing starts as soon as the product becomes available to you.
So for a dedicated server you start paying once the server has been commissioned to you. You stop paying once you return it.
If you turned on the server, it's being used.
> Do you bill servers that are off?
> Yes. Until you, the customer, delete your servers, we will bill you for them, regardless of their state.
Besides, for some reason I always thought they charge hourly but show pricing in monthly format for easier pricing.
and run MITM services*, yes.
> This structure will be similar to our Cloud billing.
It says it here, but I glanced over it :)
Just need to replace this one (the same bad story $$$ as Netlify recently): https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server
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.
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.
[0]: https://twitter.com/stolinski/status/1750226126499139665
Managed servers are something different entirely.
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 think for most people and organizations, auto-deletion of a server _is_ the surprise ;)
[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... [2] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my...
Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
Does anyone else have this issue?
Dear Mr David Allison
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.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
Can we get some context please, there must be a reason.
Were you able to backup first?
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.
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.
What they should have made more clear is, for existing customers - will this be cost neutral or cost more.
Ideally, this is cost neutral for existing customer and gives the flexibility of paying partial month for partial usage.
I'm shocked PE hasn't bought them yet and raised prices.
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.
If you are referring to the eth stuff, everything to do with crypto is banned on hetzner
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?
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.
I’m with a provider now who is phasing them out.
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.
> Which data centers does Hetzner operate?
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 know it's not a like-for-like comparison, I am particularly curious about the price differentials though, AWS is often a premium.
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.
You've pointed on very good point on scaling up/down vs cheap overprovisioning.
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.
