Set Up a $4/Mo Hetzner VM to Skip the Serverless Tax

The title is clickbait or maybe simply misguided in my opinion. A cheap VM and Serverless services are very different things and not directly comparable.

But I do sometimes get the impression that the simple approaches are discarded too easily today. You can rent a lot of hardware pretty cheap from Hetzner and the raw power you get is much higher than what you get with cloud services for the same amount of money. Of course the cloud also provides more stuff, but you really pay a hefty price for some of the things you get there (cough traffic).

The difference gets even larger when you look at the Hetzner root servers, that's a lot of CPU, RAM and storage for little money. And renting actual servers does seem to be overlooked a bit at times, often the comparison is between the cloud and actually buying servers and doing everything yourself.

I’m so disillusioned with cloud/serverless/Kubernetes these days. If I were building a startup I’d just build a monolithic service, plonk it on a Hetzner VM, boom done. You can start making money.

So many startups are bleeding cash because they’ve been convinced by AWS and others they need auto scaling and self healing from day one. Just build the thing, get it running, make it good later.

How does Hetzner compare to Digitalocean?

I always hear great things about Hetzner. I don't know if those comments are just patriotic Europeans or if Hetzner is really that much better than the alternatives.

Going with a title like “How to set up Hello World on a Hetzner VM” would be less misleading.

I would use Hetzner more but most of my user base is in the USA, and there is a lot of added latency to having your servers in Europe. I sort of think of Hetzner like a Costco for servers - does anyone know the closest equivalent in the USA?

Update: Hetzer does have USA servers, but apparently not dedicated bare metal servers in USA (only shared/VM).

What if I'm nervous about my SQL db? I pay 12$ onwards to RDS so I can do one click backups and restores to any point in time. With a VPS, I have to make a script to cron to generate backups and test that the VPS backup has backed up the file and the file is useful. Is there a "set and forget" solution?

Serverless is nice for running low traffic services for free. Azure Functions for example don't start charging until 1M+ executions IIRC.

Transitioning to micro services also makes serverless more appealing since you're getting a separate web server (resiliency) and scaling for free if you need it.

When he says "serverless tax," a term I haven't heard before, is he talking about the development overhead?

If so, the code/test/deploy loop is certainly much faster with this method than any serverless I've messed with.

This, sadly, stops right where it gets interesting. Setting up a VM/VServer with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt is pretty well-covered already.

Why not explain the "serverless" part a bit more? Say, automatically deploy on a new GitHub commit or something.

Coolify is really save my time

This is an insufficient replacement for serverless. No scaling capabilities.

That feels so wrong to me:

1st to install node, an arbitrary script is downloaded and executed without having a look into it. Could do anything with the system.

Then `sudo npm install -g pm2` is called. That means the stuff is installed as root "somewhere" in the system - bypassing debians package management.

Then a "process manager" is installed to start/stop/manage a service - on a system that already has systemd doing the same job.

Is that really the way things should be done? Waiting for the day when the tutorial starts with modifying grub.cfg to directly boot into node.

There are some things I host this way as well. On the other hand, I find that having autoscaling and automated deploys makes a big difference in speed I can iterate on some side projects.

what's the "serverless tax"?

Scaling/cold-boot time is the real concern IMO no the cost