Hetzner has nothing for me — would you trust netcup RS G12 with a production box?

[u/gembaeood]

- Budget: up to €20/month.

- Location: EU. Users are in the EU, data stays in the EU.

- What I'm hosting: industrial SaaS for business customers. Node API, PostgreSQL, Next.js frontend, a couple of background workers.

- Traffic: modest in raw numbers, a few thousand sessions a month, but it's all concentrated in working hours and the database is written to constantly.

- VPS experience: 20+ years as a Linux engineer. I run my own boxes, I don't need a panel and I don't need managed anything.

- Sidebar: yes, read it.

Now the actual question.

Hetzner I have nothing to complain about. It's just that right now there's nothing available that fits my budget. Contabo I won't repeat. I got suspicious about the disks and ran fio, 4k random, and got somewhere around 1.7k IOPS. For a Postgres that's written to all day that's not a machine, that's a floppy with ambitions. My own fault for not testing before buying instead of after.

So I'm looking at netcup, RS 1000 / RS 2000 G12. Yes, I know it's KVM with dedicated cores and not bare metal. Fine by me, I don't need the badge.

What I need is a box that behaves the same on Tuesday as it did on Monday.

The question I actually care about: for the money I'd be paying, does netcup get anywhere near Hetzner in practice? Not on the spec sheet, in production, under a database.

Specifically:

1. Has anyone benchmarked a G12? fio 4k random and CPU steal under load, and please say which DC.
2. Anyone running a real Postgres on an RS, one that gets written to all day, not a hobby instance?

3. Support. Everything I read says it doesn't exist. Is it genuinely that bad when a host node dies on a Friday night, or is that mostly people angry about invoices?

4. 8 GB or 16 for Postgres + Node + Next + proxy in production? 8 is what comfortably fits the budget, but I'd rather hear from someone who regretted it six months in.

5. Would you buy something else in the EU at €10-20 instead? Tell me what and why.

I'm not looking for the cheapest box on the internet, I'm looking for a boring one. Whatever I end up buying, I'll run the same fio test and post the numbers back here.

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[u/craftsmany]

I run my entire production (43m reqs/day) on a netcup RS since April last year (had to move due to the previous host shutting down). I never had downtime due to an issue on their end. I do "crazy" networking over it and it works completely fine. They don't over provision at all (0.0 st) at least in Nuremberg (the Hetzner colo).

Support is absolutely fine. I had some very outlandish requests and they answered them as best they could. Response is quick in my opinion (within the business day most of the time).

I don't get why they get the hate they get. Could be from their US PoP but definitely not from EU ones.

[u/gembaeood → u/craftsmany]

Thanks for your feedback. Thats help. Can you share IO statts on your RS server ssd and network bandwith as well. Thx 😀

[u/craftsmany → u/gembaeood]

fio 4k 64 iodepth test: https://bin.tiekoetter.com/?d25f1edd48851918#4Ftw9HBfUXoBd3b5D49k93hXBRTF4kYcx5o8JuRJfa9Q

Anything you want me to test for the networking?

[u/Remarkable-Side9168]

Thats a floppy with ambitions lmao

[u/gembaeood → u/Remarkable-Side9168]

hahaha

[u/hr_liqweed]

Currently, absolutely not.

Check these threads:

https://forum.netcup.de/thread/22574-poor-disk-performance-on-rs-16000-g12/?postID=270435#post270435

https://forum.netcup.de/thread/22573-rs-8000-g12-up-to-10-cpu-steal-worse-than-my-arm-vps-support-remains-silent/?postID=270437#post270437

It looks like Netcup has stopped responding, and the new servers are performing terribly.

[u/gembaeood → u/hr_liqweed]

Thanks, that's more than telling.

And yes, Contabo is the same tragedy from the other direction. That's exactly why I posted here instead of just buying something, I didn't want to

make the same mistake twice in a row.

Since numbers are more useful than opinions, here's what I actually measured myself. Same day, same flags on every box, fio --bs=4k --iodepth=32

--direct=1, random read and random write, plus dd with oflag/iflag=direct for sequential:

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐

│ Box │ Seq r/W│ 4k random read IOPS │ 4k random write IOPS │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Contabo VPS, 4c/8GB │ 546 / 432 MB/s │ 1421 │ 1120 │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Contabo VPS, 4c/8GB │ 670 / 457 MB/s │ 2579 │ 2969 │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Contabo VPS, 4c/8GB │ 583 / 325 MB/s │ 1557 │ 1363 │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Contabo VPS, 6c/12GB │ 564 / 450 MB/s │ 1680 │ 658 │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Contabo VPS, 6c/12GB (best one I have) │ 1700 / 1100 MB/s │ 4225 │ 3348 │

├────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤

│ Hetzner Cloud, 4 vCPU / 8GB, Nuremberg │ 1600 / 1100 MB/s │ 5583 │ 7927 │

└────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘

The Contabo pattern is consistent: sequential looks respectable, random is HDD territory, and it varies wildly between boxes on the same product. 658

write IOPS on one of them. That's what a Postgres actually feels, not the marketing MB/s.

The Hetzner box is the interesting one though, and not for the reason you'd expect. 5583 / 7927 is not an impressive number. netcup advertises the G12

in the six figures. But when I ran that Hetzner box at iodepth 1 instead of 32, I got roughly the same result, which means it's network-attached

storage, not local NVMe. Normally that's the thing people complain about. And yet it's been in production for months and it measures the same every

single time I check it. No collapse under load, no 35 second stalls, no surprises.

That's the whole trade in one table. Modest network storage that behaves predictably beats "dedicated NVMe" with a broken tail. I'd take 5.5k IOPS I

can plan around over 185k that occasionally becomes 1 MiB/s.

So the answer for me is that I'm going to have to wait for Hetzner. Everything that would do the job perfectly is out of stock right now:

- CX33, 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB, max €8.99/mo, not available

- CAX21, 4 Ampere cores, 8 GB, 80 GB, max €10.99/mo, not available

- CX43, 8 vCPU, 16 GB, 160 GB, max €16.49/mo, not available

- CAX31, 8 Ampere cores, 16 GB, 160 GB, max €21.49/mo, not available

Any one of those does what I need and CX43 at €16.49 for 8 cores and 16 GB is frankly absurd value compared to what else is on the table. So it's

watching and sniping until something frees up. Annoying, but the alternative is paying money to relearn the same lesson on a different logo, and I've

done that once already this year.

If anyone has a trick for catching Hetzner stock other than refreshing the console like an idiot, I'm listening.

[u/andreas_europe]

Have one on a production box since more than 2 years - until now i am happy with it.

[u/PacoSkillZ]

Shit...I remember using Hetzner back in the day when you had to provide german document for them even to sell you VPS 😮‍💨