We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

> Intelligent, robust design at one provider (like AWS) is way more resilient, and intra-zone transfer is cheaper than going out to the cloud ($0.02/GB vs $0.08/GB).

If traffic cost is relevant (which it is for a lot of use cases), Hetzner's price of $1.20/TB ($0.0012 / GB) for internet traffic [1] is an order of magnitude less than what AWS charges between AWS locations in the same metro. If you host only at providers with reasonable bandwidth charges, most likely all of your bandwidth will be billed at less than what AWS charges for inter-zone traffic. That's obscene. As far as I can tell, clouds are balancing their budgets on the back of traffic charges, but nothing else feels under cost either.

> For example, during the AWS outage, my company was in us-east-1, and we never had any issues, because we didn't depend on calling AWS APIs to continue operating. Things already running continue to run.

This doesn't always work out. During the GCP outage, my service was running fine, but other similar services were having trouble, so we attracted more usage, which we would have scaled up for, except that the GCP outage prevented that. Cloud makes it very expensive to run scaled beyond current needs and promises that scale out will be available to do just in time...

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

> You could cut your MongoDB costs by 100% by not using it ;)

I cut my Mongo DB costs by 100% by piping my data to /dev/null.

> you're going to have multiple outages us: 0, aws: 1. Looking good so far ;)

> AND incur more cross-internet costs hetzner have no bandwidth traffic limit (only speed) on the machine, we can go nuts.

I understand you point wrt the cloud, but I spend as much time debugging/building a cloud deployment (atlas :eyes: ) as I do a self-hosted solution. Aws gives you all the tools to build a super reliable data store, but many people just chuck something on us-east-1 and go. There's you single point of failure.

Given we're constructing a many-node decentralised system, self-hosted actually makes more sense for us because we've already had to become familiar enough to create a many-node system for our primary product.

When/if we have a situation where we need high data availability I would strongly consider the cloud, but in the situations where you can deal with a bit of downtime you're massively saving over cloud offerings.

We'll post a 6-month and 1-year follow-up to update the scoreboard above

> we never had any issues, because we didn't depend on calling AWS APIs to continue operating. Things already running continue to run.

I think it was just luck of the draw that the failure happened in this way and not some other way. Even if APIs falling over but EC2 instances remaining up is a slightly more likely failure mode, it means you can't run autoscaling, can't depend on spot instances which in an outage you can lose and can't replace.

> You're using a single server in a single datacenter.

This is a common problem with “bare metal saved us $000/mo” articles. Bare metal is cheaper than cloud by any measure, but the comparisons given tend to be misleadingly exaggerated as they don't compare like-for-like in terms of redundancy and support, and after considering those factors it can be a much closer result (sometimes down as far as familiarity and personal preference being more significant).

Of course unless you are paying extra for multi-region redundancy things like the recent us-east-1 outage will kill you, and that single point of failure might not really matter if there are several others throughout your systems anyway, as is sometimes the case.

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I think you're being overly dramatic. In practice I've seen complexity (which HA setups often introduce) causing downtimes far more often than a service being hosted only on a single instance.

agree on single instance, but for hetzner, I run 100+ large bare metal servers in hetzner, have for at least 5 years and there’s only been one significant outage they had, we do spread across all their datacenter zones and replicate, so it’s all been manageable. It’s worth it for us, very worth it.

We will be adding additional db servers and running our own replica set eventually. We're just not there yet. Thanks for reading!

Nice, thanks for the tip!

Atlas wasn't giving us any support for $3K per month. Hetzner at least have some channel to contact them, which is an improvement. That said, if their uptime is rubbish them we'll probably migrate again. Moving back to Atlas is not an option as we were getting hammered by the data transfer costs and this was only going to increase due to our architecture. Thanks for reading!

My Hetzner instances all have higher reliability and uptime than AWS deployments. For years now.

That was an interesting surprise.

Using hetzner since 5 years never had issues and only 1 downtime in one data center.

Most of the cost in their bill wasn't from MongoDB, it was cost passed on from AWS

There's other providers (OVH, etc) so I'm sure the price will remain competitive

Hopefully not. Their console is pretty bad so I reckon that will put a lot of people off.

EC2 is sort of a ceiling price.

We’re just going to end up with everyone moving from Amazon to Hetzner and the same issue will remain. High prices, lockin, etc will appear.

We need an American “get off American big tech” movement.

Differentiate people! Reading “we moved from X to Y” does not mean everyone move from X to Y, it means start considering the Y values and research other Y’s around you.

Any proof of that? I am a Hetzner customer and had never heard of this before. Would be good to know what I got into.

Good shout. I think we'll also run replicas on other providers. We've got some complex geo-fencing stuff to do with regards to data hence why we're just on Hetzner right now.