I can’t express how much I love hetzner doing this. There is a huge market for people who just need some instances and reliable/cheap object storage to run their apps.
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I’ve been using hetzner for more than 10 years now. Fun facts:
- They have an API to create infrastructure
- They have a terraform provider which can provide infra on hetzner.
- This storage addition is a very logical one, after loadbalancers, floating IP’s and so on. Very curious to know what will be next!
They have a long term vision and are very cost effective, while having good support.
Didn’t know about that actually. Very cool.
So I was looking at the way they’re doing pricing, and is it just me or did they go for the most complicated way possible to define usage?
I’ve been mostly using “discount” S3 providers for stuff/Cloudflare, but they look to have gone for the needs-a-maths-degree route which seems somewhat at odd with their usual billing practices.
It’s really not that complicated. At a high level:
- $5/mo for having the service turned on
- $5/mo for every TB storage above and beyond the first 1TB
- $1 for every TB of data transfer beyond the first 1TB in a month
And then divide those numbers because it’s actually billed by the hour
That makes a lot of sense, and I’m going to blame me coming off a flu and seeing a wall of math and my brain going ‘uh what’.
I do think the phrasing is complicated, IIRC Hetzner moved from monthly to hourly billing recently, so they probably had to have legally well-defined terms while also wanting to do a monthly-based system in hourly terms.
I wasn’t aware they had changed billing from monthly rates, which makes them doing all this hourly math stuff make a lot more sense.
The way they phrased the amount of data you get hourly that’s counted as free and then rated against a monthly rate threw me since it looked like they billed based on monthly AND then buckets, but the buckets had some portion of free data based on how long the bucket existed, and that transfer was based on the same metric.
Just a very excessively detailed and precise way to do it, but then again, being from Germany I suppose that should be expected.
Pricing seems to be a lot cheaper than from “the big three” (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), but similar to competitors like Backblaze or Wasabi.
Most of their other services are super attractive in terms of price (and also quality in my experience), this seems more like an “hey we have S3 too”.
Can anyone Eli 10 this for us non techies?
Just curious if its good bad or ugly and why it’s such one
Sometimes programmers wanna store one file and not care about the details related to what drive and computer it’s on. Sometimes in addition they want to make that file available to a limited number of other people or maybe make it broadly available on a private network or public on the internet.
Amazon’s cloud (AWS) offers a convenient service called Simple Storage Service (S3) to do that with a bunch of reliability and availability guarantees. Those guarantees add to the cost of the service, and not everyone needs them, so some programmers hope that competing discount cloud service providers (CSPs) will eventually offer a compatible service.
Hetzner is a discount CSP with lower guarantees, and that according to this post, released a compatible service.
Competition here is good. AWS is pretty dominant, number 1 worldwide with 33% of the CSP market and the company as a whole makes a lot of profit from being the internet’s corporate landlord.
5 euro/m for storage and 1 euro/TB for traffic, it appears. Fairly unattractive if that traffic change includes internal traffic. Their Storage Box and Storage Share products are much cheaper. And of course you can self-host S3 if you need lots of it.
What is the attraction of this product on a budget host like Hetzner? Is it a sign they are moving more upscale?
Presumably s3 will be highly available. Storage box is just a share on some server and has quite a lot of downtime. Okay for backups but not for your main data. We’ll see if their s3 is indeed better, but it should be, given that price difference.
The storage cost of their S3 doesn’t bother me that much. It’s the bandwidth cost that makes me cringe.
Storage Cloud is backed up nightly, though as you say it has occasional downtime. I have Storage Box which is not backed up, but it’s on raid 6, and so far I haven’t heard of data losses with it
I’m not saying you’re going to lose data or that it is a bad product. It’s for a different use case.
I have a cluster of servers where storage box has been used for passing data between serves for batch processing. Not a lot of data but if it is not available, the while system is down. I learned the hard way. Plus they sometimes change IP addresses which is bad of you have a strict firewall.
But for backing up postgres and some other files, Storage Box is great value and it’s not a problem at all if it’s down for a few hours.
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I could not have asked for a better explanation. Appreciate it
How cheap it is? I am confused on the pricing. I use Backblaze and iDrive already.
I also didn’t want to spend energy decoding the price model… I think it’s going to be cheaper than s3 though. Hetzner doesn’t charge for bandwidth for example.
They charge 1 euro/TB for bandwidth with this product. That really makes it near useless for various obvious applications. All their other server products have unlimited free bandwidth within the Hetzner network. For some reason, S3 providers like to charge for internal traffic and that means Hetzner’s other storage products look a lot better than S3.
There will also be an interesting incentive conflict if Nextcloud adds an S3 module sometime.
Hmm that’s not great. I really expected bandwidth to be free. But I understand hetzner wants to profit too, and I rather give it to them than to Amazon.
Oh, that’s neat. I just started moving things to Cloudflare, I’m curious how this compares in pricing mostly
Cloudfare s3 is expensive. Why did you decides going with them?
It is and it isn’t. It’s super dependant on use case. They bill on operations, not bandwidth. Obviously if you are hosting video/audio to be streamed, that could mean massive savings.
Inertia/convenience mostly. I needed a little bit of storage and already had ddos protection through them.
