Hetzner EX 4S Unixbench, dd and htparm results
In this technical retrospective (2012), @simon_kun shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
The price for Hetzner's EX 4S is 49.58 EUR for non-EU customers and 59 EUR per month VAT-included for most EU customers (EU corporations registered for VAT purposes need to apply the VAT specific to their own country).
An Amazon m2.4xlarge instance (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Reserved Instance) with Heavy Utilization on a 3-year commitment costs $9'660 for the 3y term and 3 * 365 * 24 * $0.454 = $11'931 in usage fees, which means a $21'591 total, $7'197 per year or $600 per month (EUR 458 per month at the current exchange rate).
458 EUR versus 49-60 EUR is 9x more expensive at full-time usage. (instance type and price data extracted from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ).
If you were to consider just the Amazon Heavy Utilization term commitment for 3 years, that's still $9'660 / 3 / 12 = $268 (EUR 205) each month.
You might also want to check out some benchmarks I ran a few weeks ago. It compares many types of EC2 instances: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-ripoff/
Apples / Oranges.
Quite apart from the ability to buy by the hour, the Hetzner offering really isn't suitable for processing any data you care about - it's not using ECC RAM, and the processor used doesn't support it.
Why is this company getting so much attention as of late? I've never heard of them until recently, and considering how crowded the whole VPS/dedicated server market is, what makes them stand out?
Related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3537513.
For those that are curious, the motherboard in these systems is a ASUSTeK P8H67-M PRO. Seems like it's a gaming board - understandable given it's an i7 platform.