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Comment by jaflo | Hacker News Reader

On the page, one option advertised is for €23.53/month with an Intel Core i7-4770, 2 TB HDD, and 32 GB RAM. What’s the catch? How is it possible to rent such hardware for so cheap?

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There is actually a catch (besides very little customer service, which is par for the course with cloud stuff anyway), but it's not really their fault. Hetzner doesn't peer with a lot of bigger players, and therefore its datacenters can have really lousy / inconsistent bandwidth and latency for people outside a relatively small area in Europe (and can occasionally have bizarre outages that are presumably related to partitions). If that's not a dealbreaker for you, then they're one of the best deals out there if you don't want to manage your own hardware and don't need really efficient access to other cloud services like S3 (which obviously work much better within Amazon's datacenters).

No catch. Cloud services are extremely expensive when it comes to computing. If you need raw power, rent a dedicated server.

Edit: For a little more a month, you can get a Ryzen 3600, 64GB of RAM and much faster NVMe SSD: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax41-nvme

Ehh you can get cheaper compute in Fremont if you're willing to rent >=1 rack. I'm guessing you only think €23.53/mo is cheap because you've been getting reamed by AWS pricing :P

Can I have a link please? I'm a sucker for cheap dedicated servers :).

I use he.net/colocation

To be clear, I'm taking about racking your own servers, not cloud "dedicated servers"

I'm not sure what you imply with the quotes around dedicated servers - this is hardware for rent, not VMs (hetzner has VMs too, starting from about 5usd/month - but that's something else).

You do need to go a bit up in price for proper server hw - although there are a few aging xeon boxes with ecc ram on the low end now.

They are second hand servers - if you want brand new servers you pay a setup fee, and more pr month. Once you upgrade, or cancel, that (once new) server goes into the auction at a lower price.

Those are ancient servers, long since paid for, you're paying for 1.50 worth of bandwidth and basically some electricity and a little bit of "support"

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