Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

I'm currently paying $800ish a month for digital ocean servers that I know would fit on a single hetzner machine :/

> The key: proxy_ssl_verify off — the new server’s SSL cert is valid for the domain, not for the IP address. Disabling verification here is fine because we control both ends.

Yeah - no, it's not. They made the MitM attack possible with this change. The exposure was limited to those 5 minutes, but it should have been a known risk.

Also not certain how they could check the apps on the new server with the read-only database, while it was a replica?

Still, nice to hear it succeeded, the reasons sound very familiar.

I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.

Is Hetzner as reliable as DO though?

Over the years I've heard plenty of horror stories from Hetzner customers.

is a pity that Hetzner does not have monitoring agent like DO. in DO you can set alerts and view all metrics. its this one thing that keeps me from migrating because i dont want to install custom monitoring solutions.

Most VPS hosting companies have cheap entrance VPS but then steep pricing. 8 vCPUs on DigitalOcean cost 96$ and ~11$ on Hetzner.

  > 30 MySQL databases (248 GB of data)
  > 34 Nginx virtual hosts across multiple domains
  > GitLab EE (42 GB backup)
  > Neo4J Graph DB (30 GB graph database)
  > Supervisor managing dozens of background workers
  > Gearman job queue
  > Several live mobile apps serving hundreds of thousands of users

I'm not against vertical scaling and stuff, but 30 db instances in one server is just crazy.

Super happy customer for about 5 years now..

And i say it every time they came up: Their cloud UX is brilliant and simple! Compared to the big ones out there.

I moved my VPS from Rackspace to Hertzner. From $120/mo to $35.

Moving away from the US also felt great.

Can someone tell me the AWS server cost with the same spec? Probably $5000 per month?

I use OVH btw.

I got blocked for non reason on DigitalOcean.

Hey, congrats! What city do you live in?

Just watch out Hetzner don’t fail to take a payment from you from their end then proceed to flag your account for non-payment all while communicating absolutely nothing about this to you arriving at the conclusion they will delete all your servers and ban your account and identity from ever using them again.

Happened to me.

I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.

I chose to ignore the cost savings and just enjoy the tale of migration. It’s a good one.

I had to ban the whole DigitalOcean AS.

Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.

It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.

Ah yes, create db replica, promote replica to primary. Seems so simple!

When I’ve seen this work well, it’s either built into the product as an established feature, or it’s a devops procedure that has a runbook and is done weekly.

Doing it with low level commands and without a lot of experience is pretty likely to have issues. And that’s what happened here.

Why did the title get editorialized from the original to omit key facts? That’s some sleazy modding HN.

Great article

And DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me in any other way. But worse, when they do that, they immediately destroy your data without any possibility to restore. Or at least that's what they told me with their bog standard, garbage support replies. I was a customer for nearly a decade. After it happened, I realized that never would have happened on GCP, AWS, etc. Because they take billing seriously with multiple contact info, a recovery period, etc. All the things a company would be expected to do to maintain good relationships with customers during a billing issue that lasts a few weeks. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they fixed some stuff. But the complete lack of support and unprofessional B2B practices was an eye opener.

DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.

Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?

100

Didn't Hetzner prices increase 30-40% recently? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145

As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.

The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.

Now consider that DO is reasonably priced compared to the big three cloud providers.

Cloud is ludicrously marked up.

I think Digital Ocean is not something where I would worry about costs. I would prefer server like Hetzner but I don't think DO is service where the costs are such that we need to do movement.

Plus, this is not what DHH was doing, he was not saving few bucks, but unlocking potential for his company to thrive.

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I always appreciate savings posts, but is $14k USD annual really make or break for a Turkish business? I would not know.

> Old server: CentOS 7 — long past its end-of-life, but still running in production. New server: AlmaLinux 9.7 — a RHEL 9 compatible distribution and the natural successor to CentOS.

So they did same mistake all over again. Debian or Ubuntu would just be upgrade-in-place and migrate