Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:

Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.

Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.

Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.

There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.

Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.

The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing

Also, don't underestimate the reliability of simplicity.

I was a Linux sysadmin for many years, and I have never seen as much downtime from simpler systems as I routinely see from the more complicated setups. Somewhere between theory and reality, simpler systems just comes out ahead most of the time.

Usually those articles describe two situations:

  - they were "on the cloud" for the wrong reasons and migrating to something more physical is the right approach
  - they were "on the cloud" for the right reasons and migrating to something more physical is going to be a disaster

If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.

Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.

If your scaling need is not that high, you can get very far with a single server

Not a bad tradeoff for 99.8% of shops out there.

I know people like FAANG LARPing. Not everyone has budget or need to run four nines with 24/7 and FAANG level traffic.

If you can tolerate few hours of downtime and some data rollback/loss, single server + robust backups can be viable strategy

Deploying a new docker instance or just restoring the app from a snapshot and restoring the latest db in most cases is enough.

How deep does this go?

What’s exciting is how simple cli tools can be so impactful to dev workflows

My entire stack is.. k8s, hosted Postgres, s3 type storage. I can always host my own Postgres. So really down to k8s and s3. I think hetzner has some kind of s3 storage but haven’t looked into, and I assume moving in 100 TB is a process….

Your post was reasonable until the spam tagline.

Not cool.

They didn't say that and the article didn't allude to that. 1 instance with 30 databases.

One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.

The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.

If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.

i hardly ever visit their website, everything from terminal.

You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.

Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.

https://docs.hetzner.cloud/

Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.

Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.

And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.

Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.

I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.

You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.

You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.

Recently, I did it in PostgreSQL using pg_auto_failover. I have 1 monitor node, 1 primary, and 1 replica.

Surprisingly, once you get the hang of PostgreSQL configuration and its gotchas, it’s also very easy to replicate.

I’m guessing MySQL is even easier than PostgreSQL for this.

I also achieved zero downtime migration.

Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.

A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.

I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.

- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD

- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service

- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too

- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites

I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.

I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.

Absolutely no to this - reason enough to go with AWS or alternatives. And why are ppl willingly giving it to hosting provider?

Unnecessarily exposing yourself to identity theft if they get compromised.

Not sure what differs in our cases, I'm based in EU.

Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month). Sure it was awesome and "proper". But crazy expensive.

I host it now (and 5 similar things) for free on Cloudflare.

But if you need what AWS provides, you'll get that. And that means sometimes it's not the most cost-effective place.

Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.

Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.

It's worse than Oracle and they don't even use lawyery contracts.

The technology itself is the tendrils.

So a near 44% price reduction for a 50% reduction in only one of the components. Looks like progression to me.

How much latency does this add?

I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.

Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.

One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.

With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.

And hopefully they also got some backup setup.

It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.

As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.

BUT

EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.

The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).

EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).

Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.

In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.

The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.

Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.

Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.

For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.

Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?

But it's indeed cheaper with high, sustained workloads.

> $1,432 to $233

a difference of 5/6 in price does not materially change the decision to move between providers, even with a 40% price increase

Not everyone likes wasting money.