"One time setup fee" of the order ~ 100 EUR per server is enough to deter me from setting up and try out the servers/bandwidth/availability claims etc. on an immediate basis. This fee clearly separates these pretty good prices from Digital Oceans equally good server prices.
Thanks you.
Yours is pretty much the only useful and informative reply in a sea of responses designed to make me feel bad for questioning the magnitude of the setup fee.
What do you mean equally good? Hetzner seems to give you a much more resources for the same price.
Digital Ocean $80/month: 8 GB, 4 Cores, 80GB SSD, 5TB Transfer
Hetzner $77/month: 32 GB, 4 Cores Haswell, 2 x 240 GB SSD, 20 TB Transfer
I don't see those equally good.
And Hetzner gives you physical machine that you can virtualize by yourself, ie. buy one and install for example 4 virtual guests on one box. You could compare it to 4xDO = ~1 x Hetzner.
Maybe. And I'm curious to find out exactly how good the performance and connectivity of these boxes is compared to DO boxes, especially at these attractive prices. But these rather large per-box setup fees are a clear deterrent for a cash-strapped startup to even try things out.
I'm a customer of both and the author of two rubygems (one for the Hetzner API, one for the Digitial Ocean API). From my experience Hetzner is 10x faster, more reliable and more professional.
e.g. no changes to production APIs without notice, no radical product changes (as seen with NL based vservers at DO) and much more.
If you're looking for something in the US, you probably want to go with DO but for Europe only OVH can beat Hetzner (only sometimes). Both offer 1Gbit/s uplinks and direct connection to the largest and most important CIX in Europe (http://de-cix.net/)
Hetzner and OVH are no startups burning money anymore. They make huge profits and are in business for over a decade. They know how to build, operate and scale things efficiently. They will not be gone in a couple of years. They are not as fast in providing "new stuff" (think of OpenStack IaaS/a Cloud Platform like AWs) but I bet this will change, too.
They stopped provisioning some of them for a couple of weeks. no word on their status and/or offer page. API calls just failed. Turns out that they ran out of IPv4 space but were not able to communicate that to their customers in a professional manner.
No, the problem is I don't need decent response-time everywhere in the world. I need decent response time in California. That's where the majority of my visitors are from. Latency is the tradeoff you make when you buy overseas servers to save money.
Most startups choose AWS for their hosting, where they're paying a ~10x premium over dedicated boxes. Budget obviously isn't the deciding factor even for cash-strapped new tech companies, not when we're talking about just 100EUR.
Cash-strapped startups are not choosing DigitalOcean, they're choosing AWS. That's their point of comparison. Your assertion was that 100EUR would be a barrier to startups, not just to yourself.
Off-topic but do you get mistaken for the lecturer Dan Grossman? Especially around here since he did a coursera functional programming course earlier this year?
Maybe then don't want a lot of people trying out their service for a single month? A higher entry barrier means more predictable usage patterns.
A similar "machine" on DO, with 120GB less disk, costs more than 4x as much (245 EUR) and likely has poorer performance due to virtualization overhead.
Hetzner clearly seems to focus on long term relationships but without long contracts. The longer you're a happy customer the more profit they can make out of a one time hardware expense.
Hetzner pre-provisions systems. If you're a existing customer in good standing and don't have special wishes (e.g. you don't enter something in the "comment" field of the order) your system will be ready in ~5-10 minutes.
They build their own PXE setup and assemble the hardware themselves. iirc they have >100.000 physical servers on 2 locations. Each location consists of ~10 buildings like described here: http://www.datacenterpark.de/images/rz_modell.gif
In the hosting world, I see set-up fees as a sign of quality, i.e. a service that isn't aiming for the lowest common denominator with free trials and whatever else. They create a hefty barrier to discourage casual users and scammers.
