This is great news for folks that use microVMs - "we only use AWS" has been an issue for our stuff (slicer services/sandboxes/actuated self-hosted GitHub runners)
If anyone here can't wait (as it looks like there's very little info on this at the moment..)
I wrote up detailed instructions for Ant Group's KVM-PVM patches. Performance is OK for background servers/tasks, but does take a hit up to 50% on complex builds like Kernels or Go with the K8s client.
I'll definitely be testing this and comparing as soon as it's available. Hopefully it'll be accelerated somewhat compared to the PVM approach. There's still no sign whether those patches will ever end up merged upstream in the Linux Kernel. If you know differently, I'd appreciate a link.
Azure, OCI, DigitalOcean, GCE all support nested virt as an option and do all take a bit of a hit, but it makes for very easy testing / exploration. Bare-metal on Hetzner now has a setup fee of up to 350 EUR.. you can find some stuff with 0 setup fee, but it's usually quite old kit.
Hetzner charges a fee for setting up your bare-metal machine. Often zero for their smaller machines and for those in auction. Probably they don't want someone to order a large fleet large of machines for one month and then cancel. They might not get another customer for those machines soon.
Good context. They're commenting only on why are they increasing some setup fees though, not justifying their existence. The Hetzner setup fees were in place already before the RAM price hike.
They used to charge a fair admin fee like 30-70 EUR for most bare-metal hosts.. now it's 99 EUR for the most basic/cheapest option.. up to 350 EUR for something modest like a 16 Core Ryzen.. monthly fees haven't changed much.
I've never used Hetzner because their terms of service didn't make any sense to me, but a 350 EUR fee for each setup? That almost seems like they don't want business. Every bare metal host I've used had a management interface I could submit a job to in order to reprovision my host at any time. Some even offer a recovery console through this. It takes 1-10 minutes but I'm assuming it was out of band management based, not human interaction.
Worst case I ever had a hard drive failed and I had to wait I think a week for OVH to physically replace it.
Hetzner offers uniquely cheap dedicated hosting, even beating OVH. Per their statement about the fees, they're having to do this because without the setup fees, recent hardware prices increases would otherwise raise the price of acquiring new hardware so high that they would essentially never make a profit on the hardware they would have to buy for new orders. They're also saying that their overall prices are going to have to increase if the hardware prices don't change soon. Thus they are charging more for setup while keeping their monthly prices low, or at least trying to for now: https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/statement-setup-fees-adjus...
Bare metal has never been a pay as you go model, its so much cheaper you usually over provision by a factor of 10-100, and still spend less than you would on the cloud if you have moderate needs. You are trading ops tax for money tax.
If anyone here can't wait (as it looks like there's very little info on this at the moment..)
I wrote up detailed instructions for Ant Group's KVM-PVM patches. Performance is OK for background servers/tasks, but does take a hit up to 50% on complex builds like Kernels or Go with the K8s client.
DIY/detailed option:
https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm...
Fully working, pre-built host and guest kernel and rootfs:
https://docs.slicervm.com/tasks/pvm/
I'll definitely be testing this and comparing as soon as it's available. Hopefully it'll be accelerated somewhat compared to the PVM approach. There's still no sign whether those patches will ever end up merged upstream in the Linux Kernel. If you know differently, I'd appreciate a link.
Azure, OCI, DigitalOcean, GCE all support nested virt as an option and do all take a bit of a hit, but it makes for very easy testing / exploration. Bare-metal on Hetzner now has a setup fee of up to 350 EUR.. you can find some stuff with 0 setup fee, but it's usually quite old kit.
Edit: this doesn't look quite as good as the headline.. Options for instances look a bit limited. Someone found some more info here: https://x.com/nanovms/status/2022141660143165598/photo/1