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I had a dream one night (after re-watching the original Jurassic Park) of trying to get away from velociraptors in the DC. It was scary then, but looking back now, it's funny. --Katie
Let's ban big hosters from LET if they aren't providing 7$/year deals
Can you give me some links for videos he's already done? (I apologize that I'm not already familiar with them.) --Katie
This is the master piece.
I'm sorry that you think my answers are bullshit. So I will be direct here. I can't answer those questions for you now.
We as a business tend to hold our cards very close to our chest. We prefer to reveal things when they go live. We don't plan on changing that policy. If you need a company that publishes roadmaps of everything they are working on, we may not be the best choice for you.
When I first started at Hetzner, I didn't get this policy. But over time, I see the pros of it. One aspect that sticks out to me (which I learned about from a podcast I like called "Hidden Brain") is loss aversion.
Let's think of a completely theoretical situation -- do not read into this at all -- this is just a thought experiment!!. Let's imagine, like you say, that we change our policy and we announce that plan to open a DC in...say Australia in...say...Jan 2028. The crowds go wild! At first. But then, because of reasons beyond our control, the construction plans get delayed... and get delayed again... and again... the first time, it's a zoning issue, the next time there's sudden difficulty getting enough workers because we are off schedule, the next time, a supplier delivers far too late... and each time we push back the opening, first to March 2028, then to June 2028.. and then maybe even to Jan 2029. And then the data center is built, but our servers are stuck in customs, so it gets pushed back again to March 2029. With each of those delays, users would get more and more frustrated with us. And they might lose faith in us, or feel a "net loss", even after the DC successfully opens.
Now, in contrast, let's say that there is a sudden, out of the blue announcement in March 2029 that we had just opened a DC in Australia. The crowds go wild! And.. mostly everything generally works, so they stay happy. Yeah! Awesome!
Now, the CEOs have never told me, "Katie, we don't have company roadmaps because of loss aversion". That never happened. This is just one possible reason why roadmaps can have downsides. --Katie
@Calin - Is this the only video that you have, or are there more? --Katie
p.s. wrong country should come without quotes.
Calin has made several DC tour videos
https://streamable.com/5rmk48
https://streamable.com/xoo22h
I have them all, do you prefer something about DC build or adding RAM kingston SSD's to servers?
Not to be mean to @Calin, but we would be more interested in something that is at a higher production level, something closer to this from der8auer. --Katie
Can I just say that I tried hetzner the last few days. I needed a secure VPs to pull a large selection of iCloud Photos off the web gui to upload elsewhere. Well, xrdp is unusually hard to get working on your deb images. (And no I don’t want to use any other vnc as your documentation suggests).
Anyway, I went as far as to try it 3 times from scratch, replicated my steps to compare with Netcup or colocrossing (Netcup from iso). I got it fully working eventually (after removing hetzner repos and reinstalling xorg and stuff)but for €10 eur a month it’s slow as fuck ngl, even my colocrossing $20 a year handles the same set up better.
I know it’s not made for rdp these servers, but I always think rdp and gui is a great test to see the actual capabilities of a system and to put it bluntly I’m pretty disappointed and really don’t get why it was so damn hard to set up xrdp in the first place and then why was it SO SLOW
Hi there @eb1995 - If you think there is something off with the documentation, can you give me a direct link to the documentation that you think needs review? And I can ask someone to do it. (If so, please try to give me as much detail as possible.)
And if you think there is an issue on our end with our debian images, again, could you give me more details so that I can pass that onto the correct team?
Out of curiosity, did you try to contact our support team about the issue? (If so, please give me a support ticket.) --Katie
The documentation isn’t wrong, from what I could find at the time it was only one solution to set up rdp using x2go on Ubuntu. I couldn’t find anything about xrdp on Debian 12 or anything xrdp by hetzner.
Yes, I think it’s an issue with the image used. It’s all such a big blur to be honest now, so much happened, but I can tell you that I don’t think I could set it up in like 10 mins as I could anywhere else.
Oh man... you release a new feature, but can't give us a promo code for it?
It's reasonable, but what you don't take into account is that businesses rely on your services and have their own roadmap and plans. Let's continue your example that a business would like to expand to Australia, but it's not a high priority. Since they don't know about your plans they are looking for other providers and will move their workloads there. If they'd know you would launch a Region in Australia they would simply plan with it and wait until it's finished without moving to another provider. This is just your example, but every decision is being made like this, also for smaller features or for example your S3 offering. Many customers had to look for external solutions, because they didn't know it was coming, etc. etc.
It's a double edged sword, and I can see both perspectives.
If I am a customer wanting S3 storage, and I see that Hetzner announces it, then I'd wait. But let's say that there is some major logistical issue and then it's cancelled, well, I would be extremely disappointed. This approach also probably helps reduce the amount of tickets and requests asking for an exact ETA on when something might happen as well, because it would be a highly anticipated product. I mean, Hetzner also does not necessarily wait until the last minute for every product. For example, S3 was in beta for a while.
This is also kind of present in the video game industry. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed many times, and it disappointed many people every time.
But also, I do think that Hetzner might wait too long in some cases. Like when they launched Singapore, I think that they could've just been upfront that they're launching Singapore even if there wasn't an ETA given. There were some subtle hints, for example, I think they posted a photo of Singapore on their Instagram shortly before announcing it, but they could've been more direct.
Okay, but thanks for not reading my questions.
I'll ask the most important one again.
Will your other locations be seeing an increase in bandwidth caps under the cloud range? 1TB is absolutely nothing.
I'll answer it for you: Hopefully. Hetzner will never give you an answer, because why would they? Do you make them millions off you? Do you have a contract with them that forces them to tell you?
Am I not allowed to ask questions about this? It's not a hard question to ask. Especially honestly. Could have just said "we don't know but feedback has been passed on."
What's got your panties in a twist?
I think it's pretty easy to extract "we don't know" from the 6 paragraphs.
I feel like Katie, how nice she might be, has been instructed by management to not make any promises nor say anything about what is, and isn't going to happen. That makes sense. Stuff can't be predicted.
I like that despite all the hostility (forcing to offer something unsustainable) LE* community has (not specifically this forum), Hetzner is still present there
Don't forget how big their business is and that their priority is to actually make money. Being extremely recognizable, they don't need to do $7/year stuff for brand awareness or anything like that.
Yeah, that is what I mean when I say we have a general no roadmaps policy. Thanks for your understanding. --Katie
I think if someone know lowendtalk will probably know hetzner. so i'm not sure what is the need to spend your time @Hetzner_OL here
We understand that our no roadmaps policy makes it harder for our customers to make plans of their own, and for that we are sorry.
Let's stick with the Australia comparison. Let's say you ask me about a DC there, and I give you the "no roadmaps" answer, and so you go with another provider there because you don't want to wait. And then a year later, we open our own DC there. I think the way people might feel could be on a spectrum. It might be, "Oh, I wish I had known that last year. I could have waited." But it could also be, "I've got my setup in place already at provider X, so I will stay there for now, but I might keep an eye on this Hetzner location." Or it might be, "In the meantime I have been using X, but X are more expensive/less reliable, so I am happy Hetzner is here now."
Now let's imagine that we had announced the Australian site in advance, and your company relied on that information and set your on schedule based on that. And there were 4 separate delays. And 4 different times, you and your team had to re-plan everything... I imagine your level of disappointment in us would be greater. --Katie
Katie, is this you in the video?
https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/s/TchxIcsqkm
Oh man, this is awesome! When do pre-orders start?
But seriously, this is a real thing. I once worked for a company where we were doing a total re-design of the product. The product was a fairly substantial size and we'd worked out it'd take about 2 years of development time with 90% of developer resource, and we'd cycle people through support / emergency fixes for the old version with the other 10%.
The CEO ran a big customer support conference twice a year, and for some unfathomable reason decided to both announce this new version about 2 weeks into the 2 year development plan AND said it'd be ready in 3 months.
Immediately all the sales teams heard from their clients that they didn't want to renew their subscriptions on the old version, they'd just wait for the new version instead. We then had a panicked directive to ship anything we could for the new version within 6 months. We ended up shipping something that was a crazy bastardised hybrid where over 2/3 of the software was untouched, and the new software that was introduced produced data that didn't really mesh with that because the main driver for the rewrite was a paradigm shift in how the data was organised and collected.
Within a year, we'd lost about half our clients for good and the founding CEO had been replacement by someone from the VC board. I left another year later, and 10 years after I left, the company is still going, but I'm not sure if it's actually profitable yet. When I left, I forfeited my share options, and they launched on the UK small cap market at £1.00 per share. Last time I looked, they were trading about 1.5p per share.
Obviously, the main lesson here is don't lie to the customers, but also that it is far better to wait for something is ready, and then work out how to market that to your customers that make promises that you don't know yet can be achieved.
Nope. She's another hard-working Hetzner co-worker, though. --Katie
True, but some of the long-time users here at LET are also some of our long-time customers. It's good to get their insights and make it clear that we care about them. In addition, LET is famous for readers who want really affordable deals. And we strive to make our products affordable, especially over the long-term. So it is good for us to have a general idea of what our rep is here, especially when we make bigger changes. Also, I pick up some news about the industry here that I might not have seen elsewhere. --Katie
@Hetzner_OL The honest truth from my side is that the value of your offerings have diminished. I think the outlier is EX44, which still offers great value, but other than that it's very average.
As Cloud offerings came to be, hardware was modern and prices were low. Several increases later (I think, please correct me if I'm wrong) and still mostly the same (now) old hardware (again, feel free to correct me).
Server auctions have also gotten worse in a price/performance standpoint over the years. I've don't even think they beat the main offerings anymore unless you're after niche configurations.
Yet another example, S3 offerings, unstable from what I've heard and also, to be frank, not very cheap. I can have your new platform for 5.85 USD/mo (converted from EUR) or the trusted BackBlaze for 6 USD/mo, I know what I'm choosing.
And, add to that, the weird billing practices that plague German companies like a virus. I wouldn't ever touch your domain/DNS platform after reading this thread.
I mean no offense and I understand that these decisions are not up to you, but if you want honest feedback that's it. I've switched to OVH and I'm very impressed with them so far. Very generous on bandwidth usage as well. Unless things change drastically in the future, that's likely where I'll stay.
I hope higher up will listen the feedback from here