core i9

Ranter

Aldar

1215

Comments

3

kolaente

3487

5y

Hetzner?
3

endor

5871

5y

@kolaente thought the same when I read Ger + Fin locations
0

xewl

4208

5y

@kolaente @endor I'd also think so
3

endor

5871

5y

Anyway, here's my shot at a decent response to @Aldar.

Root server: it means you get direct access to all the hardware in your machine, with no virtualization preconfigured by the host (but you can install it later if you need to). This gives you access to the full computational power of the cpu, since virtualization has small performance overhead.
This is opposite to a VPS, in which you already start within a virtualized container.

i9-9900K vs big server cpus: there are some types of numerical algorithms and applications (some databases, trading software, vanilla minecraft servers) that don't parallelize well due to their inherent nature. In those cases, if you want performance it's actually better to use fewer, faster cores - and a 9900K can be >50% faster than a large server cpu with many cores.
Same thing for ECC ram: it's good for large, stable, safety-critical machines, but it has worse speed/latency for performance-critical applications.
All those performance penalties add up.
3

endor

5871

5y

Enterprise SATA HDDs: while it is mostly marketing, it does tell you that they pick higher quality hardware rather than pick the cheapest crapware on the market, slap it in a raid, and call it a day.

100GB backup space: typically, that's just for the OS and the software and config stuff. Typically, the large datasets that you feed into the big HDDs are either expendable, or you keep them stored elsewhere and just copy them on the worker machine.
Also, that's just the "included in the package" space - you can always get more, but at extra cost.

Traffic unlimited: any hosting provider makes you pay for the outbound web traffic. Hetzner VPSs are nice, they have 20TB included monthly traffic per VPS (you only pay extra for the excess). Other providers are far less generous: on AWS you have 15 *GB* of free monthly traffic *per account*, and you pay (a lot) for any extra GB. Having unlimited traffic at gigabit speed for a flat fee is quite nice.
4

endor

5871

5y

Minimum contract vs setup fees: as you said, somebody has to actually physically build your machine and place it in their racks. This is a costly, time-consuming job, that requires actual people doing it. Therefore, a physical machine is not as easily "expendable" as a VPS, which you can create and delete as many times as you want with just a few clicks.
Also, when you decommission the machine, they have to figure out if they can resell it to someone else as-is (which they try to do in their "auctions" page), or if they have to send a person to disassemble it - again, multiple man-hours required.
Hence their offering: they don't force you to a minimum contract length (typically enough to recoup the hardware and man-hour costs), but you pay an extra setup fee at the start, to discourage people from buying machines they don't need and then getting rid of them immediately (which would make Hetzner lose money if that hardware went unused afterwards).
2

endor

5871

5y

Lastly, VAT pricing: for a bigger multinational company it's actually more convenient, since they can easily compare different VAT prices based on which country/region they're based in.
Also, when you log in with your account and pick a region, they give you the full price with VAT included.

I hope the explanation was clear and thorough enough! :)
3

Aldar

1215

5y

@endor Wow, okay, I did not expect someone to actually take the time and effort to explain all this to me, ++ for you for that good sir!

And, I guess I got a little ahead of myself, but I did cast judgment based on the company where I work at now (My first fulltime as an admin).

Never heard the term root server in this context, here, we call physical machines simply "dedicated server" or "managed" if the client pays for us to manage the system part and anything that needs root permissions for them.
1

endor

5871

5y

@Aldar you're welcome! And yeah, that's exactly what they mean by 'root server', no idea why they went for that name
3

Aldar

1215

5y

@endor As for the CPUs, I understand that there is software that's less thread-happy, but... Again, judging based on what I came to deal with so far, I'd dare to say that its a minority in the enterprise sphere - After all, it was an ad that striked me as aiming higher than for someone wanting to host a Minecraft server... But, I guess, even the large servers out there have to be hosted somewhere.

Backups - I also didn't think of it that way. Firstly, the system itself, unless heavily modified, does not need to be backed up at all. And as for the configuration... Sure, backing that up is very important, but can be done by using etckeeper for the global settings, and and it takes up little to no space, even deep into the past.

Traffic - Again, I judged based on where I work, we give our clients unlimited traffic, and only limit the bandwidth. Though not sure what the standard is. It sucks really hard when your app is traffic limited, I never thought any server hosting did that.
3

Aldar

1215

5y

@endor And all the rest, the fees and VAT, can be summed up as me not realizing those details, or deciding to overlook them. I just didn't like the part of ad where they print in big, bold letters the cost per month, and then, you have the smallprint mentioning its without VAT and setup fees.

And just to confirm, yes, it is Hetzner.
1

endor

5871

5y

@Aldar the Minecraft part was just me poking fun at how inefficient Minecraft is :P
Complex numerical simulation and financial trading software are very specific niche applications, and the companies/people who need then typically buy the machines for longer periods of time.
Hetzner's offer is as close as you can get to having your own dedicated machine without having to worry about buying and assembling the parts yourself (with all the related headaches). Basically colocation with hardware assembly on top.

As for the backups: yes, etckeeper can take care of most stuff, but when redeploying a machine you have to redo the whole deployment manually or develop a way to automate it, and if software changes in the meantime you will get many headaches.
Having a one-click image that you can redeploy on a moment's notice is a nice perk, and if people are willing to pay to be lazy, Hetzner's definitely not gonna say no to their money :P

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