Ask HN: Does anything beat Hetzner Storage Boxes for the price?
The lowest end BX11 has 1TB storage, free bandwidth, for €3.80 a month with VAT or $4.40. Object storage is a tad more and egress is billed, but you may setup Garage for your own S3 on any cloud.
In this technical retrospective (2025), @opengrass shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 8 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
I've heard they are very slow. So then it makes more sense to use object storage instead. Like Wasabi, Backblaze or iDrive.