Some questions about Hetzner

w1z4rd

w1z4rd

Karmic Sangoma
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So I am currently outgrowing my current datacenter and I am looking for a different datacenter with more flexibility.

My current issues I have with my datacenter:

1) Lack of flexibility. IE, (and this issue has sparked off our move). I wanted to upgrade to a bigger server but keep my existing IPs. They wont allow me to do this. I dont want to have to change IP`s every time there is hardware changes.

2) Slow support time. It often takes 30-40 minutes for a response from my current host. For normal hosting this is fine. For server hosting (where you can have thousands of users on one server)... this is not acceptable. If something goes down I need someone on it in minutes.

These might seem like minor issues, but theyre pretty important to me.

The only people I can find who have reasonably priced hardware like my current host is Hetzner:

http://www.hetzner.co.za/dedicated-servers/truserv/truserv-plus

Im looking at getting the Truserv Plus for around R1400.

I have a couple of questions on that product:

1) Is that bandwidth and server local? 4TB for R1400 seems very cheap for local.
2) What are their response times to support ticket (there seems to be no instant chat option)?
3) How flexible are they with moving IPs between servers?
4) Is their support competent?
5) What is their ddos protection like?


Lastly, are they the best option? Are there better options out there or better value for money? Im not against hosting abroad if the value is there. The min specs I require are those listed on the TruservPlus product.
 
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Hey Ghoti,
Hetzner by far out performs all the other datacenters in SA both with quality of support as well as quality of servers.
I have moved all my dedicated servers away from another so-called big server provider about six months ago when they started having all sorts of "network issues", I have not been sorry for a single minute since the move.
To date over the last 6 months I have had a total of 5 minutes downtime and that was late on a saturday night when they were doing some routine router maintenance.

I have a few Truserv Commerce servers with them and they are awesome.
You get full control as well as full KVM access which is a bonus as you do not have to rely on incompetent techs who are elusive at best to do a simple server reboot.
You can setup the servers EXACTLY how you want with whatever software you need to use.
Setting UP VPS masters and slaves is an absolute pleasure on the hetzner servers.

As for their Support, it is probably the best you are going to get in SA IMHO. You actually get to speak to actual server admins, unlike the other companies who have these strange weird "non-existant" admins or clueless call center agents, who are impossible to ever talk to.
Note: my requirements/need for support is quite low as I manage all my servers myself, so cannot comment on what their support is like for their managed servers or shared accounts, but if my experience with them is anything to go by then I reckon the rest of their support should be just as good.

I have spoken to actual server admins at hetzner after 12 at night on one occassion when I needed some reverse ptrs setup on new IP's, they sorted it out for me in less than 5 minutes, no tickets that dont get replied, no phones that dont work after 5pm. Absolute please dealing with their support teams.

I was almost tempted to get servers back in the states but was recommended to try them 1st. Been happy with Hetzner from day one.

And then to top it all off they came along and upped all their bandwidth - WOW!!! Unheard of limits for SA datacenter. I can now offer many of my clients "unlimited" bandwidth without needing to worry about hitting my limits and paying through my $%$ like with the other big providers. 6 terabytes per month per server is almost on par with many of the international providers.
Answering your question, yes its local bandwidth same as you would get at any provider, except LOTS of it :)

Their IPs are also Cheap and you get the actual IP blocks with broadcast address and all, not like the jumble of missmatched IPs some of the other local providers give.

All in all imo Hetzner is leading the pack as far as support and dedicated servers in SA goes. Everyone else have to play catchup....
 
ghoti said:
1) Is that bandwidth and server local? 4TB for R1400 seems very cheap for local.
2) What are their response times to support ticket (there seems to be no instant chat option)?
3) How flexible are they with moving IPs between servers?
4) Is their support competent?
5) What is their ddos protection like?


Lastly, are they the best option? Are there better options out there or better value for money? Im not against hosting abroad if the value is there. The min specs I require are those listed on the TruservPlus product.
Click to expand...

1 - Bandwidth - Yeah they are the cheapest and they measure their bandwidth correctly too

2 - Tickets are responded to usually within 30 minutes and also by someone who actually knows what they are doing
phone calls are answered quickly and you speak to a knowledgeable person who is eager to assist you resolve your issue.

3 - i have reassigned whole IP blocks to new servers without any issue. moving individual IPs i am not too sure about you would need to ask them about that, i have never really only moved single IPs between servers. If you have your own servers split into VPS' then you can reassign them yourself on individual basis on the same server without any issues and you would not even need hetzner to do it.

4 - Answered - Their Support Rocks - IMO

5 - If you running your own managed servers you can do your own low level ddos mitigation. If it is a more advance attack they will work with you to stop it at their gateway levels. A few weeks ago I had a large ddos against one of my client websites and they were very quick to assist and was sorted out in no time at their hardware firewalls upstream.

If you are looking to have servers in SA then you would be spending good money for good service with Hetzner.
 
Thanks for your response. I got the finance guys running numbers to see how many Hetzner servers we can get.
 
I can vouch for their support as well. , never waited for my calls to be answered , day or night . 1st tier guys can t sort it , they put through to senior guys with no hassle.
 
I have my personal dev box with them and they are by far the best. Shut it down at 1am 1 morning by accident and thought I wouldn't trouble their support as this isn't a production environment. 30 later I got a call asking why my main ip isn't responding to ping on their network. Top notch.

Their dedicated servers are a bit low speced for our production needs so I am eagerly awaiting their colocation packages.

edit: also stuffed up the network config on my server in the early hours of the morning during app testing. At the same time the KVM on my server failed, they had someone in the DC in under 30min to attach a hardware KVM device for me to access.

Finally something small but I thought is was quite cool: Ever tried attaching an external HDD to an Afrihost dedicated server? They bill you at their std hourly rate. Hetzner, no problem and no charge.
 
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ghoti, I don't know who your current provider is so I'm definitly not making excuses for them, but I wanted to point out that the IP move thing isn't surprising. Where I work we don't move the primary IP address either, for the simple reason, they're assinged in blocks to cabs or groups of cabs. While it's techinically possible to reroute a single IP to another location, it's not feasible at the scale we operate at. We do, however, assign additional IPs in blocks and can move those between servers.

What your provider might be able to offer to do is set up the new server with a new, temporary IP, let you migrate your stuff, and at a mutually agreed on time, swap the old server for the new (in the same cab location). That way you can assign the same IP to the server. Then again, if they're hosting environment is heavily automated, that might also not be possible.
 
koffiejunkie said:
ghoti, I don't know who your current provider is so I'm definitly not making excuses for them, but I wanted to point out that the IP move thing isn't surprising. Where I work we don't move the primary IP address either, for the simple reason, they're assinged in blocks to cabs or groups of cabs. While it's techinically possible to reroute a single IP to another location, it's not feasible at the scale we operate at. We do, however, assign additional IPs in blocks and can move those between servers.

What your provider might be able to offer to do is set up the new server with a new, temporary IP, let you migrate your stuff, and at a mutually agreed on time, swap the old server for the new (in the same cab location). That way you can assign the same IP to the server. Then again, if they're hosting environment is heavily automated, that might also not be possible.
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a legacy way of thinking towards network layout.

Why not assign each customer their own vlan and assign them ip's to the vlan, that way it doesn't matter what cabinet they in or even if they move cabinets as the ranges stay on the core/distribution layer and you simply just assign the vlan to new ports in each of the racks (stop using layer 3 switches in rack, its really not needed) This also allows the customer to manage his own IP addressing and move between old and new hardware freely.
 
koffiejunkie said:
ghoti, I don't know who your current provider is so I'm definitly not making excuses for them, but I wanted to point out that the IP move thing isn't surprising. Where I work we don't move the primary IP address either, for the simple reason, they're assinged in blocks to cabs or groups of cabs. While it's techinically possible to reroute a single IP to another location, it's not feasible at the scale we operate at. We do, however, assign additional IPs in blocks and can move those between servers.

What your provider might be able to offer to do is set up the new server with a new, temporary IP, let you migrate your stuff, and at a mutually agreed on time, swap the old server for the new (in the same cab location). That way you can assign the same IP to the server. Then again, if they're hosting environment is heavily automated, that might also not be possible.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they appear to be a heavily automated company. Well, it lost them a client. Ive had 4 servers with them for 4 years. Theyre going to lose it all :/ With Hetzner I get 11 Ips for only R49! :D
 
3 days to sign up as a client and get a server....

Thats a little ridiculous :/
 
Murmaider said:
That's a bit of a legacy way of thinking towards network layout.

Why not assign each customer their own vlan and assign them ip's to the vlan, that way it doesn't matter what cabinet they in or even if they move cabinets as the ranges stay on the core/distribution layer and you simply just assign the vlan to new ports in each of the racks (stop using layer 3 switches in rack, its really not needed) This also allows the customer to manage his own IP addressing and move between old and new hardware freely.
Click to expand...

You make a lot of assumptions. How many devices/IPs do you think that configuration is good for?
 
ghoti said:
3 days to sign up as a client and get a server....

Thats a little ridiculous :/
Click to expand...

That's to cover their asses in case they can't source the hardware fast enough, mine was provisioned within 24 hours. If it was a cloud server or something I'd have your reaction :) Big guys at Rackspace, as an example, take more or less the same time than they do.
 
envo said:
That's to cover their asses in case they can't source the hardware fast enough, mine was provisioned within 24 hours. If it was a cloud server or something I'd have your reaction :) Big guys at Rackspace, as an example, take more or less the same time than they do.
Click to expand...

Still waiting, but the bottleneck might be my accounts guy. He is doing a firearm license today and I think theyre are trying to phone him.

Im used to getting servers in an hour (real servers, not vps`s)... so this is a new experience (the waiting).
 
I think mine took over 2 days to provision. Worth it though...
 
ghoti said:
Still waiting, but the bottleneck might be my accounts guy. He is doing a firearm license today and I think theyre are trying to phone him.

Im used to getting servers in an hour (real servers, not vps`s)... so this is a new experience (the waiting).
Click to expand...

Oh ok, as far as I know hetzner doesn't install a ton of hardware that sits there unused until someone decides to buy one
 
Other than the long delay for hardware Im very happy. I cant believe the different in loads between the 4 core Xeon I have now and the 8 core AMD I was running. The Xeon runs circles around the AMD chip.

Sites now load very quickly. So far really happy with the move. Now I guess its just time to see how their support department is (when/if I need them) and to see how many times their datacenter goes down. Based on comments here I dont think either of these will be a problem.
 
ghoti said:
Other than the long delay for hardware Im very happy. I cant believe the different in loads between the 4 core Xeon I have now and the 8 core AMD I was running. The Xeon runs circles around the AMD chip.

Sites now load very quickly. So far really happy with the move. Now I guess its just time to see how their support department is (when/if I need them) and to see how many times their datacenter goes down. Based on comments here I dont think either of these will be a problem.
Click to expand...

Yip as expected :) The Hetzner machines work very well and handle complex sites quite well if your setup is all done nicely.
Wait till you try their support, you will be even more impressed :)
 
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