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.
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.
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.
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.
Surprised they didn’t have one until now
