Hetzner aka the mail server not hosting. Hetzner blocks mail server ports 24 and 465 incoming and outgoing but allows port 587. You could make a mail server work on Hetzner Cloud hosting.

Asked on reddit hetzner vs digital ocean in 2022.

Now on Digitalocean, looking for a cheaper option after they increased the prices.
Heard about Hetzner before but didn’t go with it.
It looked more like the old style of shared cpanel hosting.

Lowest Droplet vs Lowest Hetzner cloud?
Anyone made the move and is happy or not?
Hezner cloud means VPS yeah? Like a do droplet.

Thinking of relative performance overall, sites response time.

My concerns before moving

Can you fund your account with a set amount and then they lower the balance? Or you must pay hosting cost every month (manual or automatic). Turns out yes you can by bank transfer – old school.

Saw PayPal there but also a 20 EUR load amount to verify identity so didn’t touch that!

Cpx11 was looking good 2 vcpu, 2gb ram 40gb disk space. Nice.

Another concern

It’s a hassle to move but already did a migration from one do vps to another.

I’d like to think this time would be better.

Does Hetzner allow emails or to listen on any port? I know people hate that but it’s not for spam and mostly to send to our own email as alerts / notifications.

Answer is no, talk to support it’s fast.

Interesting, I bet it will take a week if I do it haha (will be months…if I stay).
Edit: I was hoping there is some kind of firewall settings but if it’s granted fast it should be ok.

Asked, they said no emails until 1 month or 1 invoice or something about building trust like they have to trust me not their devops infrastructure and security.

Cloud Protection

I’ve read if you get ddos’d they could actually kill your server and account.

Someone starting a DDOS would be so happy they caused their target’s termination.

Moving from Digital Ocean to Hetzner

So I migrated today, rushed but wanted it done.

Nice specs on 4.75 euro cpx11, 2gb ram, 2 vcpu but.

In reality, it’s the same performane (wordpress +db page speed) as digitalocean 1gb ram, 1 vcpu.
Strange, maybe under a stress load, there would be some difference.

Emails problem on Hetzner

I open a ticket to allow email ports, got rejected. Account too young and not 1 invoice paid yet…
Later i can request limits increase but they might still reject it.
I’ll see about emails maybe start tls instead of ssl would work. It didn’t for outbound emails.

Support

They are very fast to say no.

Server startup was fast no problems there.

Now my gmail keeps asking for credential because of Hetzners paranoid email port policy.

The biggest problem with Hetzner is speed

Made a backup after got it setup, ftp dowload to local pc, 10 mbps max 14 mbps. Digital ocean was reaching full speed of my home connection 100MBps.

This was more of a way to verify the migration scripts.

Btw, you can spinup 5 servers max and lookup the ipv4 they give you for spam db reports just in case.

Lots of their ips are listed allover spam databases anyway.

I chose the one with least reports.

Still looking for a good $5 hosting.

My Hetzner story

Update after migration, feeling the Hezner cpx11 server. Not bad but not great.

Other than the email SMTP blockage story with support messages not actually reading my message and replying with templates.
It’s a good service so far.

This website is at this time 12 July 2022 hosted on Hetzner coupled with Cloudflare CDN.

Got the low cost but juicy AMD Epyc cpx11 with 2vcpu and 2gb ram.
More resources for less money on paper. In practice it’s very similar for low volume traffic.

Websites use Cloudflare CDN so for me speed from Cloudflare to Hezner Ashburn, Virginia US is OK.

Website load time without Cloudflare CDN – DNS Pass-thru is actually the same as DigitalOcean $6 1vcpu 1gb ram so that’s strange but under stress it would show some difference hopefully.

it looks nice in htop, all migrated in 1 day.

Migration scripts improved so next time it’s easier.

I don’t need super good uptime but if the server is down and I see it down and it’s a whole day, I would move asap. For me no problems like this so far, all up and running.

Speaking of moving I don’t trust them. Even less than DigitalOcean. But I trust Hezner more than AWS to not sneak some funky extra charges.

All ok, nothing too crazy except a strange out bandwidth problem.
Copying a backup out from the server was going slow at 3mbps while DigitalOcean was full speed of my home ISP 100mbps.

The slow speed happens on regular Filezilla Client connecting to the server thru ssh on a custom ssh port 4 digits. It might aswell be that Hetzner is rate limiting custom ports? this would be the cherry on the Hezner Cloud hosting cake. No they say no port speed limiting.

Try it with your server. For me similar location is US, was full ISP speed, now it’s ADSL speed equivalent transfer.

If they can give good reasons for blocking smtp, rate limiting ports is another story. Unless it’s just their server network being slow, yesterday and today.

SSH transfer speed from Hetzner server

Hetzner network transter slow
Hetzner network transter slow

Dowload speed from the server to local Filezilla client won’t exceed 1.5 Mib/s now 1.6Mib/s

Hetzner network transfer rate limiting 1 6
Hetzner network transfer rate limiting 1.6 MiB/S

Transfer time approx. 5 minutes for a approx. 500 MB file.

Hetzner network transfer rate limiting
Is Hetzner network transfer rate limiting?

Fast.com speed test on home network.

fastdotcom speed test
fastdotcom speed test

What do you think?

Sent support question 12-07-2022

I download a tar.gz file from the server to my PC. 
Why is it so slow?
Filezilla connecting to SSH on custom port 2772.
Are you rate-limiting non-default ports?

DigitalOcean ssh speed on same setup, client and port was much much faster.
Why is this so slow?

12-07-2022, at least they do reply fast.

Support answer.

Dear client,

Thank you for your request.

We do not limit the bandwidth from our side. Your performance can vary according to the load on the host.

The host server has a 10 Gbit/s uplink. The bandwidth is shared and we do not offer a guaranteed bandwidth.

Experience shows that you can expect about 300 - 500 Mbit/s on average.

Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

I reply, trying to make sure they saw the actual speed.

Did you see the screenshots attached?
Between 600Kib/S and 1.6Mib/S
Is that acceptable?

Now it's 2.1 Mib/S
Is the host server I'm on overloaded?

Reply came fast again.

Can you try download this files to your server?
>>https://speed.hetzner.de/

What speeds are you getting?
Downloading to my PC from your link.
Speed about 1.7 MB/s
A bit better but still low.

Tests show similar slightly higher speeds but still low.

It’s probably the distance from them to me.

As long as Cloudflare can get the files much faster it’s no big deal just annoying when copying backups out from their server.

Went ahead and took a screenshot from the Hetzner Cloud Control Panel for our new Hezner server. Not even reached 3MBps during the transfer and you can see it’s fluctuating a lot?

Hetzner Control Panel shows maximum network transfer bellow 3MBps
Hetzner Control Panel shows maximum network transfer bellow 3MBps

If you want to try DigitalOcean try it with this link bellow to get $100 FREE credit for 60 days.
https://rex.red/do


You get $100 free credit for 60 days and you can try different droplets or managed stuff.

Hetzner offers you 20 EUR FREE credit with my referral link here https://rex.red/hetzner

After you use your free 20 EUR free credit if you pay at least 10 EUR I get 10 EUR free credit.

The Hetzner link I used to signup gave me 20 euro from 11 July 2022 but the credits expire on 01 September 2022.

Hmm. that’s a bit on the short end.

Looking forward to hear Cloudflare introduces it’s own hosting plans.

Any comments?

Please write bellow, I still believe Hetzner is great value for money after learning to live with their problems.

Conclusion

After using Hetzner for a while update on 16 July 2022.

The Hetzner cpx11 cloud server is indeed faster than a $6 DigitalOcean droplet. Really happy about that.

Realized, recently, Cloudflare has an Email service in Beta.

Already using free email forwarders from CloudFlare.

The only problem left is WordPress not sending email, that I plan to use with Google Could Gmail API.

Not the paid Google Workspaces (that’s super easy to setup) but by using the Gmail API to send SMTP emails thru Google Could Oauth client id and client secret.

If the Gmail SMTP works, there is no need for email on the Hetzner server anymore.

This would make the migration to another Hetzner cloud server or another cloud server provider in the future much easier with a backup and restore script.

By the way, for a while, since migrating away from Centos 7 (end of support drama with RedHat Centos 8 Stream), I can say that RockyLinux 8 (8.6) is the choice OS now for me.

Really like to see RockyLinux 8.6 being one of the easy cloud server spin-up options on Hetzner and DigitalOcean.

Update Hetzner vs Digital Ocean in 2023 and plans for 2024

Since my move back to Digital Ocean not much changed other than actively using Couldflare R2 storage for web workloads.

File storage in Cloudflare R2 is really easy and keeping up with the fees can be managed with billing alerts.

In general, I love Cloudflare CDN because it can make a slow website blazingly fast. This website hopefully was super fast to load thankfully there was a cache Hit and not a cache Miss in your response headers for this page.

I added a referral link to Hetzner to be fair. Anyone wanting to try one can try both like this

Digital Ocean https://rex.red/do

Hetzner https://rex.red/hetzner

Digital Ocean works fine for me so far no complains with the faster storage droplets versions.



Comments

6 responses to “Hetzner vs Digital Ocean in 2022”

  1. You still happy with Hetzner now in 2023?

    I’m interested in moving a dropplet out of DO, as I mainly use it for storing some data in Postgress and some simple Node servers.

    DO is charging me 6 for 1 vCPU and 25 GB SSD, while the same price on Hetzner would give me 2vCPUs and 40 GB SSD, which would buy me more time until I need to scale up and deal with migrating my data all over again.

    Also, separate question, why Rocky Linux as opposed to Ubuntu? I’ve always used Ubuntu, but I’m new to the server game (spent most of my career on native apps, and front-end web development more recently).

    Looking for wisdsom, thanks in advance!

    1. FYI: I moved from DO to Hetzner and not only saved money but got a much powerful server out of it. Amazing how competitive they are with pricing to performance.

    2. I moved back to do eventually.

      1. Why did you move back to DO?
        Anyway, do you write about migrating process?

  2. By the way I am using your referral code to hetzner. 🙂
    thank you

    1. Thanks for that haha!
      This reply is super late but how did you find Hetzner compared to do and aws?

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