Hetzner has been known in Germany for quite a while now. They are a very cheap but reliable hosting provider, not really a cloud service. A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).
They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
The thing to remember with Hetzner is that they are cheap. Low prices and good infrastructure but you have to do quite a bit yourself and many features one expects from a cloud provider aren't available. Last time I checked they don't have an API to change DNS settings for your domains. You can write GPG signed emails to a bot but I don't know how well that works.
> A friend of mine used them over 10 years ago for some dedicated servers and got them to connect the servers to the same switch for sub-millisecond latency (try that with AWS...).
AWS offers that with placement groups for EC2 [1].
It's also probably worth mentioning the Dedicated Hosts [2] and Dedicated Instances [3] features of EC2 in this context which allow you to ensure that EC2 instances run on the same physical hardware.
> They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
I think this information is outdated - I just did a quick and dirty test and it took 8 seconds to have a new instance up and a second to shut it down.
They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
The thing to remember with Hetzner is that they are cheap. Low prices and good infrastructure but you have to do quite a bit yourself and many features one expects from a cloud provider aren't available. Last time I checked they don't have an API to change DNS settings for your domains. You can write GPG signed emails to a bot but I don't know how well that works.