That's hardly a fair comparison. Last time I checked Hetzner doesn't offer auto scaling, "elastic" load balancing, or any of the countless other features that EC2 offers. Actually, forget auto-scaling: what if you want to bring up another bunch of instances manually to deal with a spike in demand?

The EX 4S looks like a very compelling alternative for many use cases but saying that its 9x cheaper is comparing apples to oranges.

The only problem with your comparison is that you forgot to include the 149 Euro setup fee for the Hetzner server. I don't think this makes a material difference however over three years.

Some would say this isn't fair because you're not including elastic scaling which AWS supports, however you can't elastically scale with a 3 year commitment. Further its hard to estimate how much scaling you'll need because that's a highly variable figure.

But you can say that you will need to keep some number of servers up and running 24/7 for your service.

I think it would be a more perfect comparison to compare AWS's on-demand price to Hetzner with the built in higher performance of the 4S considered as a hot standby for scaling. (I don't know how long it takes Hetzner to provision extras, though I hear its relatively fast.) Since servers are cheap (at Hetzner, at least) it seems reasonable to have 1 or 2 extra spun up if you really have spiky traffic.

Since I'm planning to get a cluster of Hetzner boxes to support a Riak distributed cluster, and each Hetzner box is over provisioned for my needs (if I get a 4S I think they will be way over-provisioned, leaving a lot of headroom for this "elastic scaling" issue)... I think I'll compare the price of the same number of each boxes. (The AWS box has less performance, but I can elastically scale if I need to, and I'll just give the cost of those short term scale-ups to Amazon for free in this example.) The results may not be a perfect example for whatever others are considering, but it is a reasonable comparison for my purposes. (my service is a big data service, involving a lot of map reduce, requiring a cluster for operational simplicity and reliability as well as the ability to scale to millions of customers. I don't know if we'll get millions of customers, but one of our closest competitors had millions of customers within a few weeks.)

Amortizing the 4@ m2.4xlarge = 4* $600/month = $2,400 (using the $600 for the reserved instance costs from vladd's example.)

4@ Hetzner 4S = $149 Euro setup fee, amortized over 3 years = 4.14 Euro/month Add the 49.58 Euros in hosting = 53.71 euros x 4 servers = 214.87 euros or $282.50 a month.

So, for my cluster, AWS is 8.5 times as expensive.

I think that $282 per month is a lot easier for a scrappy startup to handle than $2,400 as well. This brings "big data" within the realm of undefended mortals.

Many people use AWS for all the extra services that AWS offers. The value of these services is, of course, subjective, as some startups will need them and others won't. But they all are based on a custom Amazon API which means if you build your architecture across many servers at Amazon you've got a fair amount of lock-in.

For me, I'll take the 8.5X reduction in costs, over lock in anyway. If Hetzner starts performing poorly, I can migrate without too much difficulty, and without having to re-architect my service.

Why is this being downvoted? The processor used (i-7 2600) does not support ECC RAM, and this platform does not include it. A server platform without ECC RAM is a pretty big disadvantage for several reasons, to most compelling being the high real-world rate of memory errors in real systems. Memory errors in non-ECC systems can be extremely difficult and expensive to track down, and can cause data corruption or loss if the machine is used in the data pipeline.

In one study (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ebianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf), strong correlations were found between age, usage and error rate. Before using a server without ECC RAM, it's worth doing a quick estimate of the amount of data you intend to move around, and whether it's worth it to you (and, more importantly, your customers) to save a little money going with a non-ECC platform.

If you're using an AWS m2.4xlarge (score: 1511) then you pay $2.00 per hour. If you're using this Hetzner (score: 1729) you pay less than $0.09 per hour. You'd have to use very few hours indeed for AWS to be cheaper. That's not even factoring in traffic. You get 10TB per month with Hetzner which would cost you an additional $1200/month (!) with Amazon. AFAICT Amazon doesn't use ECC ram either; at least I don't see it mentioned anywhere. Hetzner does have competitively priced servers with ECC ram.

you could use the ex6:

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6

a little more expensive (69 EUR) and less RAM (16 GB) but using ECC.

Do you have a link to where Amazon says EC2 uses ECC RAM? I can't seem to find one.

You can get the one with ECC (EX 6) it's just 10euro extra / per month... which is still away cheeper than AWS.

That number for AWS is based on running the benchmark in May 2010 [1].

[1] http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

They are well known in Germany, they've been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, provider of VPS and colo services over here since the mid 90s.

The recent buzz is the first time I see them mentioned on US-centric sites though, if memory serves.

As for your question, it appears that many people find the price/performance ratio of the EX 4S compelling.

I've used them for a few years now. I think they used to be very much German-language focused, but over the past couple of years they have become more and more international. They give good support and the servers I have with them have been rock solid

Because their prices are amazing.

As said other places, they have ECC servers to: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6