Moving From Linode to Hetzner
I’ve been a happy Linode customer for years, but they experienced an outage Sunday morning that took my Cloudron server offline, impacting my Mastodon and Pixelfed instances. As of this writing they’re still offline and I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss.
I didn’t get a warning about data loss. This outage did wreck a sizable part of my Sunday, which was already stressful for unrelated reasons. And worse, it affected my customers’ weekends. I try to be patient with hosting providers because I’m one too, and I know how frustrating and unproductive it can be to feel piled on with complaints. But this outage was likely the most significant I’ve seen in the 10+ years I’ve been using Linode.
These events are a time to revisit past decisions. I was already feeling that I was overpaying for Linode. With a bunch of servers and databases, it’s a lot of money for a tiny company like Micro.blog, money that I could use to pay myself more or hire someone.
This year we’ve expanded to servers in Europe, hosted by Hetzner. I’m also now consolidating more of our S3-like storage to actually use AWS.
Some of Unread’s functionality requires server infrastructure. I run servers to support both Unread Cloud and Unread’s webpage text functionality.
Linode was my hosting provider of choice for a long time, but I recently moved these systems to Hetzner. I wanted to write a bit about how Linode and Hetzner compare.
These are all much less expensive than DreamHost (after its introductory period).
Much of Unread’s server work consists of accessing feeds and webpages from websites. Hetzner’s instances at the pricing above are available in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki — all of which are in the European Union. Some websites outside the EU that do not have international audiences block access to clients in the EU, presumably because those websites do not want to comply with EU privacy laws.
[…]
My solution for Unread’s servers was to host a proxy in a United States data center. When Unread’s feed retrieval system or webpage retrieval system get a forbidden response, they retry the request using the proxy server hosted in the United States.
Previously:
- Pair Networks Price Increase
- Linode Price Increases
- Akamai Kills Linode Brand
- Pair Networks and Linode Acquired
- 17 Services for Hosting and Business
Update (2025-12-11): Marco Arment:
I didn’t realize that Hetzner had expanded to the US. And their prices are WAAAAYYY cheaper than Linode’s now.
(Turns out that charging 20% higher prices for the same resources over ~5 years in the web-hosting business makes you pretty easy to beat.)
Seriously looking at Hetzner now. Any experiences running medium-scale applications there, like maybe 20 server instances with ~a terabyte of databases?
Long-term reliability?
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I might just bite the bullet and move to Amazon Lightsail. Or maybe even EC2 reserved instances. At least you know exactly where you are with those, especially if you're sending email.
Wasn’t Digital Ocean supposed to be the more-polished alternative to Linode? And Vultr for tinkerers. But Hetzner has taken Linode’s mindshare since they were acquired by Akamai.
I switched to Hetzner back when Linode got aquired, and have been happy ever since. I just run one single server, hosting a couple of small sites. But it just runs, and runs. I could now even switch to an ARM server if I wanted, and get more power for less money.
But the best part with Hetzner is that my server is located in Finland…the one of the bestest neighbors in the world :)
