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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, they produce their own hardware (including using consumer-grade components, if I'm not mistaken) and optimize every bit for efficiency. Managed services also come with an extra fee. From my experience, they're also more selective about clients.

They're also based in Germany, so they don't have to pay the hyper-inflated SV salaries and probably don't overhire, but I'm only speculating here.

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One thing that I like about working at Hetzner is that it is privately owned, so we don't have a bunch of investors expecting an ever-increasing return on their investments. We can re-invest profits in the company itself, in our infrastructure, and in our crew. --Katie

Consumer-grade is too expensive. Best price/performance with high utilization is Epyc 9654 based system. We build at roughly $7k/box for 96 cores, 768 GB RAM, 8 TiB of NVMe. You can't buy that yourself, though. You have to go through an integrator. We built our own because near 100% utilization on HFT sims and training.

Don’t AWS and GCP also produce some of their own chips and hardware?

But basically you’re saying, yes, AWS and GCP are making just as much, maybe more, margin as Hetzner?

AWS, Azure and GCP have much higher margins than Hetzner. So while I use these services when working for my employers because they pay me to do so, when I spend my own money on my startup I use Hetzner exclusively.

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