> Kind of crazy and insanely trusting.

The reverse is always surprising to me: as if blocking a credit card constitutes the ending of a contract.

In Europe, a contract isn't entered or broken by making or blocking payment. Companies will very succesfully have their contracts enforced, with any extra costs billed to you. Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.

Same here, I initially got an Epyc 1st generation server with 256gb and was happy for a while, until I figured out single core performance was important for my workflows (web development). Then I got a a 7950x3d and i'm now super happy.

On most servers there's a setup fee so people are not very likely to run without paying. (I know it doesn't exist in auction and they do have no-fee specials sometimes)

It's the same with AWS and GCP and Digital Ocean isn't it? An active card check is performed but that's about it, you PAYG and get billed at the end of the month.

It was like this for me for years until a month I got double invoice and now it's seemingly paid in advance. It might depend on the pricing bracket (I jumped from a 40EUR dedicated to 180EUR with extra hardware around that time, too).

Their special deals are generally better than the Auction, depending on what they're offering at the time.

I've got a couple AX101s with 4TB drives at around the price for the current AX102s that only have 2tb drives.

> adding additional IPv4s is very cheap

How do you feel the pricing with Hetzner compares to others?

https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/ipv4-pricing/

EX101 package is a bit high-end for running those server you mentioned.

They used to require sending a copy of an ID card as proof that you are who you say you are. I guess gdpr put an end to that.

I think the return window is 14 days, not the whole month. And I also think they will block you if you do it repeatedly.

Digital Ocean seem to do this too. At least at my tiny spend level.

yes. especially their storage servers are great - https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx - i'm at a small startup and we don't need 100% uptime or georeplication and other cloud features but we have ton's of 3d data to store - price per TB is pretty good with these machines and you can upgrade to a 10Gbit port for additional 50€/month - or order multiple of these in the same rack with internal 10GbE with a switch to have a ceph cluster there. Their enterprise phone sales support is also top-notch in my experience.

Sure, but mostly they won't accept you if you are from a developing country trying to break in to the tech world. Its a catch 22 situation - they offer cheaper prices only to those who can afford expensive servers.

I know it's because of spam - but it is what it is.

Small correction: 7950X3D is Zen 4, not Zen 5

Some little known fact because they don't advertise the feature: You can re-scale your cloud vps servers up and down (and even switch from shared-core to dedicated cores) and pay by the hour, as long as you don't tick the "rescale storage space" option. I.e. you can start with a shared-cpu VPS for as little as 5€ that has 20 GB storage, and flexible scale it to an 48-core EPYC for just a couple of hours, and after you are done scale it down. If you are okay with slower storage, you can get separate storage from them and and mount via network. You do need to reboot between scaling, though.

I use that for development - I use VSCode with remote extension so the building, running and code indexing happens on the cloud server. Most of the time a small instance is enough, if I need more power I scale it up within seconds, and at the end of the work day (or week) back to a small instance (or shut off).

Have you looked at Scaleway Elastic Metal? It's a little but more expensive (~ x1,5) but part of their "cloud environment", so "scriptable" via API, CLI, etc.

Because other providers use server hardware and better networking.

Do not host anything of importance on Hetzner. They'll gladly blackhole your server with zero recourse.

You get what you pay for though.

Thanks very much for the pointer to [2], that's just saved me a heap of time and effort!

For OpenBSD on a server in particular, many useful tools (web server, mail server, pf...) are developed by the same team and better integrated in the base system. This means consistent documentation, behavior and syntax (e.g. for configuration).

In contrast, Linux distributions are a collection of software taken from different sources, with all the quirks that may derive from this.

(I don't want to imply that the BSDs have only advantages over Linux and not the other way round, but the OP asked specifically why _BSD over Linux_).

Linux user for 25+ years here. (When did kernel 0.9 come out?)

I learned how to perform basic admin tasks for Linux and OpenBSD in the 1990s.

I relearned how to do all those things under Linux at least five times since then, and am facing yet another round of "why the fuck is everything broken (regressed back to worse than 1998 levels of stability) and different again this year?" with my Linux machines.

I recently installed OpenBSD and FreeBSD in VirtualBox VMs and am doing a bake off for my next desktop OS.

FreeBSD is slightly ahead from the "annoyingly terrible stuff works in a pinch" perspective, since I have some windows game getting to a splash screen via LLVMPipe under Steam. (It runs out of DRAM, and needs a GPU that doesn't exist, so I'm counting this as working.)

OpenBSD is ahead from the "if its available at all, then it is solid" perspective.

Both of them are more familiar to me than the Linux desktop that's hosting the Virtual Box VMs.

Also, I'm increasingly concerned about the ethics of the upstream Linux development community. Red Hat's new business model is based on violating the GPL (maybe they are not technically breaking it, though I think they are), and they have enough weight to force the ecosystem to do whatever they want.

They've rammed all sorts of user-hostile crap (most of those regressions, for example) on to my (ubuntu, arch, etc) machines, so it's not just a theoretical concern.

Go ahead and find a guide showing you how to do a thing that Just Works regardless of the flavor of Linux distro. You can't, because they're gratuitously different for the sake of differentiating themselves. You can't even use one guide to cover multiple versions of Ubuntu.

Now find a guide showing you how to do a thing for any of the BSDs. That guide is more usable on one of the other BSDs than any Linux guide is usable on a different distro.

That's one reason. Others include the ability to keep track of what's on a system, since the BSDs don't include the kitchen sink and have good package management, the fact that they're lighter weight than most Linux distros (in some cases significantly), that they're more consistent and more deterministic, the fact that you can literally rebuild the whole kernel and OS trivially, and so on.

There are many reasons, but for me, the one thing that really stands out is cleanliness.

I think you're right in saying that it's not as versatile than Linux, but if your needs are focused, then it's actually a feature. For example, for small web servers: an OpenBSD base install comes with httpd(8), relayd(8), sshd(8), pf(4), etc.: tweak a few configuration files and drop a cross-compiled single-binary Go and you're all set.

OTOH, if you want to toy around with "edgy" open-source software, I would expect Linux to provide a better experience.

Crippled in what way?

Others point out Homebrew, but I still prefer MacPorts for command line tools. It feels more “BSD” to me, while Homebrew reminds me of some tools a Node developer would write (cheeky terminology, overuse of emoji, cleverness over correctness, etc.).

At home I just use macOS and FreeBSD and many of my personal projects typically build on both. The base userland tools are mostly the same, but the non-POSIX stuff diverges heavily (file system control, process isolation, configuration, etc.)

For me, they've been easier to administer and more reliable. I've had some running for years with minimal maintenance and they just keep chugging along with no security issues and all of the utilities I need out of the box.

Because not everything needs to be linux. In fact, this modern trend of running linux everywhere from critical infrastructure to IoT devices is worrying as it feels like a monoculture is starting to rise its ugly head once again.

If you're missing some CLI tooling on MacOS, it's worth checking out the Homebrew repositories to see if you can find what you're looking for. I use several up-to-date GNU versions of utilities instead of the older BSD-flavoured versions that shipped with MacOS.

For OpenBSD in particular, security baked into the core.

I started with Linux back in the 90s then changed to OpenBSD in 1997, then FreeBSD in 1998. Ran it for many years. Eagerly awaited MacOS X as it was called back then, and I was not disappointed.

In my opinion, macOS is the supreme UNIX™ workstation still, although there are things you need to work around or disable like SIP in rare cases. It definitely has BSD heritage, and Homebrew is pretty mature at this point, which wasn't always the case.

For servers though I tend to just stick to Linux these days, mostly out of practicality. I miss the days of easily recompiling the BSD kernel by just editing a single file.

You don’t need to pay for more than one CPU core if you run OpenBSD, because you can’t utilize them anyway. ;)

if you need managed k8s on german or other european servers without us companies involved there is OVH.

Yeah agreed, should change the link to the actual original source rather than an aggregation/summary.

Look for Ampere-based systems: https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

They also do it when their system incorrectly flags traffic. They're the Paypal of web hosting. Stay far, far away.

There are none unfortunately. I've found Vultr to be good value if you really need dedicated servers, OVH probably as well. However, a Hetzner VPS with dedicated CPUs in the US is still less expensive than the equivalent dedicated server at those providers.

Hetzner does now have US based locations. However, as far I can tell, they are restricted to their cloud products and not their line of dedicated servers

OVH has a location in Canada (east coast), not quite as cheap as Hetzner though

Any recommendation on where to buy clean IPs (ASN) from?

And I don’t mean huge ranges either.

Like /24 (256 IPs) or less

If you don't want to get super techie you will get less headaches with Intel or AMD today. Deciding between those two is not a big deal compared to other things, like the code you're running and the server setup, unless you have decent scale.