Hi @willie - Maybe these test files can give a small insight: http://hel.icmp.hetzner.com/ Or you might be able to find some users in Finland in our Forum and ask them. You can also test stuff for a few hours using one of the cloud servers in Finland and then delete it when you're done and only pay a few cents.
I'm sorry that none of the new EX/AX servers are a perfect fit for your use case. Maybe it would be worthwhile to add an additional 1TB disk to the entry level AX server...? That would increase the price a bit more, of course.
@hostarts - Should I add a +1 for you for AlmaLinux as standard image on our customer wish list? --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@Hetzner_OL said:
Hi @willie - Maybe these test files can give a small insight: http://hel.icmp.hetzner.com/ Or you might be able to find some users in Finland in our Forum and ask them. You can also test stuff for a few hours using one of the cloud servers in Finland and then delete it when you're done and only pay a few cents.
I'm sorry that none of the new EX/AX servers are a perfect fit for your use case. Maybe it would be worthwhile to add an additional 1TB disk to the entry level AX server...? That would increase the price a bit more, of course.
@hostarts - Should I add a +1 for you for AlmaLinux as standard image on our customer wish list? --Katie
@Hetzner_OL said: I'm sorry that none of the new EX/AX servers are a perfect fit for your use case. Maybe it would be worthwhile to add an additional 1TB disk to the entry level AX server...? That would increase the price a bit more, of course.
The EX is reasonably ok, I just wish it had ECC. The AX would need to have 2x1TB drives to be equal to my auction server in HDD space, but if I were to add drives I'd probably add something like 2x10TB. My first thought was 1x10TB with backup to a storage box but adding a 10TB drive costs half as much :O.
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@beagle - As far as I know, the demand for smaller increments for the Storage Boxes hasn't been so big. Customers who really tend to need this also tend to be more likely to be cloud customers, I believe, and they use the Volumes. And the Volumes come in some smaller sizes. But I can pass your feedback on here regardless. @mikho - Cool. Keep in mind that you need to manually upgrade on Robot. It's not automated. And if you want to switch from the BX10 that comes for free as backup space to a BX11, we'll ask you to pay for that. (Or you can keep the free BX10 as is.) --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@Hetzner_OL said: @mikho - Cool. Keep in mind that you need to manually upgrade on Robot. It's not automated. And if you want to switch from the BX10 that comes for free as backup space to a BX11, we'll ask you to pay for that. (Or you can keep the free BX10 as is.) --Katie
I have/had a couple of BX30/40/50 so this will save me some real money
@Hetzner_OL said: @beagle - As far as I know, the demand for smaller increments for the Storage Boxes hasn't been so big. Customers who really tend to need this also tend to be more likely to be cloud customers, I believe, and they use the Volumes. And the Volumes come in some smaller sizes. But I can pass your feedback on here regardless.
I understand 100GB increments may be too granular but I believe 1TB increments would be welcome. For instance, 1TB is too small for my needs and 5TB is too big. I'm currently using 3TB and looking to upgrade to 4TB but it's not worth it for me paying for a larger plan if I'm not using the resources.
This is great about the storage box (and nextcloud) refresh. This is the best combination so far of affordable storage and tons of cpu in the same place. I've been using an auction dedi primarily as a storage server for years, because I occasionally have to do a big computation with some of the data. But now I'm tempted to cancel the dedi and just use storage box, and spin up cloud instances when I want to compute. I guess it's fine that the old 100GB and 500GB plans are gone, since the 1TB is quite affordable while the old small plans were way less attractive in €/TB than the bigger ones. Idk if 1TB increments is really needed and/or would be so great on Hetzner's side, but it might be nice to have a 2TB or 3TB plan between the 1TB and the 5TB. Anyway, I will surely be using the product now, probably starting with a 5TB.
I notice that the nextcloud versions cost more than the plain storage box now, which makes sense. I wonder if there will be a performance difference, and also how performance of storagebox will hold up as more users migrate to it. We will see.
A refreshing change in the light of all the prices going drastically up over the past few years (industry-wide).
Existing storage boxes are remaining the same, or should I just give it some time?
(have a 500 MB box and it still says 500 GB in the robot control panel)
@bikegremlin said:
Existing storage boxes are remaining the same, or should I just give it some time?
(have a 500 MB box and it still says 500 GB in the robot control panel)
Works. Cool.
Choosing an existing box from the robot console, and clicking on "Change storage box" gets the "upgrade" done in a second after you've picked the option you want.
Thanks for all the feedback so far about the new generation of Storage Boxes and Storage Shares! @bikegremlin - Thanks for the quick guide on how to manually upgrade the Storages Boxes on Robot. If anyone already has existing Storage Shares on konsoleH, there is a similar process there. @willie - A few people have said that they will probably be able to replace an old Auction server with one of the new Storage Box. I'm that that might be an option for you, too.
By the way, if any of you want to share how you setup your Storage Boxes or Storage Shares, maybe you'd consider doing a tutorial on them. You can earn some credit for your account. We have some here, but it's always nice to have more: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@Hetzner_OL I haven't yet figured out a good way to set up a storage box for encrypted backup, other than just saving encrypted tar files to it by sshfs or sftp, in a manual and ad-hoc way. That will be good enough for my immediate cold backups but I would like to figure out something better. There is another thread about encrypting cloud storage and I may post something there. I will keep thinking about good options. I would add, when I used storage boxes in the past, I noticed that sftp transfer was noticeably faster than sshfs, and sshfs wasn't all that reliable (connections tended to crash now and then). So I'll try to stay with sftp if it can do what I need.
Added: I'm sure your devs are already working on it, but it will be great to have an S3 interface.
Is it possible to mount the storage box on a smaller VPS to use as storage for nextcloud? Or is it just worth it to go for the storage share for the convenience?
@Astro you can mount the storage box by sshfs but it relies on a tcp connection staying up, and they tend to drop every so often. I guess you could have a service restart it when that happens, but you are probably better off with storage share unless it's a very large, low-traffic instance.
@Astro said:
Is it possible to mount the storage box on a smaller VPS to use as storage for nextcloud? Or is it just worth it to go for the storage share for the convenience?
If you are going for NextCloud, the best option is to get one from Hetzner for reasons mentioned by @willie
Probably not the best way but here is a small script (stolen from somewhere and changed a bit to suit my needs at that time) on how to check if StorageBox is mounted and mount it if it's not. https://gist.github.com/mikho/b5a7946c80528d129bb0ca0086a9909a
Cron job every now and then or run it before trying to read/write from the mounted folder.
Storage share also looks pretty nice. It is actually backed up to another server daily, unlike storage box, besides being on a raid system (don't know if the raid settings are similar). It is around 3 euro/TB of user storage in the large plans, vs 2 euro/TB for storage box. But since storage share stores two copies of your data (because of backup), it's really more like 1.50/TB which is in "how can they do that" territory. It also allows file sharing by https, i.e. you could use it as a not-exactly cdn. No idea how performance is for that, but my usage would be very light in all likelihood. Anyway I might try it.
@Hetzner_OL one request for your team: storage box allows choosing between DE and FI locations, while storage share is DE only. In both cases it would be great if for DE, there was a way to choose between NBG and FLK. That would allow getting multiple plans that are geo separated while still living on the fast DE network. Otherwise the only way to do that is with dedicated servers, ouch.
Of course I hope storage comes to the US location! Do you have a sense that you can share with us, of how well the US location is working for you?
S3 support for Storage Box: That request has come up just a few times this week. I will pass on a +1 for you.
encrypted backups for Storage Box: This is where I get mad at myself for not having a stronger technical background. If you don't find any good suggestions here, maybe ask in our customer forum. There are some very avid Storage Box users there.
@Astro - Yes, to the best of my knowledge, you can mount the Storage Box to a VPS. But perhaps depending on your use case, maybe it is more convenient to use a Storage Share instead. Feel free to contact our team for advice.
more locations for Storage Shares for geo redundancy: I will definitely pass that on. You know our policies on roadmaps for new products/locations/features/etc. We share it usually only once it's ready to go live. That will likely be especially true for any news for the ASH location in the USA. --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@Astro said:
Is it possible to mount the storage box on a smaller VPS to use as storage for nextcloud? Or is it just worth it to go for the storage share for the convenience?
If you are going for NextCloud, the best option is to get one from Hetzner for reasons mentioned by @willie
Probably not the best way but here is a small script (stolen from somewhere and changed a bit to suit my needs at that time) on how to check if StorageBox is mounted and mount it if it's not. https://gist.github.com/mikho/b5a7946c80528d129bb0ca0086a9909a
Cron job every now and then or run it before trying to read/write from the mounted folder.
no script or cronjob needed, but autofs is what you are looking for. should be available in all major distros...
@Hetzner_OL said: more locations for Storage Shares for geo redundancy
I think strictly speaking, more locations aren't needed, just say where the existing DE locations are more precisely than "Germany". If they are in both NBG and FLK, let the user choose which they want. If they are all in (say) FLK, just specify that, so the user can get an NBG server and back it up to FLK, getting geo redundancy by separating the server from its backup.
Re encryption: there is another thread about cloud encryption here on LES, where people are making some good suggestions. It might be interesting to have something like Scaleway's old C14 product where the backup is encrypted automatically.
@Astro for live data I think you are better off with Storage Share because it is backed up automatically. That is part of why it costs more. Storage Box has less redundancy since it is intended to itself be a backup rather than a primary.
@Hetzner_OL thinking a little more, if S3 is offered it might be better to just have it for storage share and not storage box. S3 will get used as a public-facing service which is more in the spirit of storage share, which has proper backups and (as the name says) is intended for sharing. It's the cheapskate in me speaking but I'd prefer that storage box stay fairly minimalistic, as low cost backup storage. I'd even be ok with something like C14 or Glacier, though it would have to be even cheaper than storage box.
The current versions of storage box and storage share are very competitive for regular products from a big provider, so congrats on releasing them.
I always liked the "Storage Box" offering and also have to say, that the "Storage Share" product works quite well.
Maybe another thing in terms of feature requests: I tend to sync my borg repos from time to time to Backblaze B2, which also in this case would be a nice thing to have, considering the underlying storage architecture. So I would vote +1 for the availability of i.e. rclone to be able to do something like this, without including another server as a middleman.
Forgot to add a question: which borg version is currently running on the service and can it be individually selected?
Comments
Hi @willie - Maybe these test files can give a small insight: http://hel.icmp.hetzner.com/ Or you might be able to find some users in Finland in our Forum and ask them. You can also test stuff for a few hours using one of the cloud servers in Finland and then delete it when you're done and only pay a few cents.
I'm sorry that none of the new EX/AX servers are a perfect fit for your use case. Maybe it would be worthwhile to add an additional 1TB disk to the entry level AX server...? That would increase the price a bit more, of course.
@hostarts - Should I add a +1 for you for AlmaLinux as standard image on our customer wish list? --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
+1 For almalinux defenitely
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The EX is reasonably ok, I just wish it had ECC. The AX would need to have 2x1TB drives to be equal to my auction server in HDD space, but if I were to add drives I'd probably add something like 2x10TB. My first thought was 1x10TB with backup to a storage box but adding a 10TB drive costs half as much :O.
Hey yall -- We've got some news to make your Monday a bit brighter. We've upped the resources/lowered the prices on our Storage Boxes. --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
Katie, I was wondering if anyone has already suggested more granular plans?
Ideally it would be great to be able to increase your plan in 100GB increments but 1TB increments would be a great improvement.
Thank you.
This will save me a couple USD/month from now.
https://clients.mrvm.net
@beagle - As far as I know, the demand for smaller increments for the Storage Boxes hasn't been so big. Customers who really tend to need this also tend to be more likely to be cloud customers, I believe, and they use the Volumes. And the Volumes come in some smaller sizes. But I can pass your feedback on here regardless.
Keep in mind that you need to manually upgrade on Robot. It's not automated. And if you want to switch from the BX10 that comes for free as backup space to a BX11, we'll ask you to pay for that. (Or you can keep the free BX10 as is.) --Katie
@mikho - Cool.
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
I have/had a couple of BX30/40/50 so this will save me some real money
https://clients.mrvm.net
from now on I'll bite those coins i get from you
@Hetzner_OL the 1TB backup price is great.
I get one per backup customer I have.
https://clients.mrvm.net
I understand 100GB increments may be too granular but I believe 1TB increments would be welcome. For instance, 1TB is too small for my needs and 5TB is too big. I'm currently using 3TB and looking to upgrade to 4TB but it's not worth it for me paying for a larger plan if I'm not using the resources.
This is great about the storage box (and nextcloud) refresh. This is the best combination so far of affordable storage and tons of cpu in the same place. I've been using an auction dedi primarily as a storage server for years, because I occasionally have to do a big computation with some of the data. But now I'm tempted to cancel the dedi and just use storage box, and spin up cloud instances when I want to compute. I guess it's fine that the old 100GB and 500GB plans are gone, since the 1TB is quite affordable while the old small plans were way less attractive in €/TB than the bigger ones. Idk if 1TB increments is really needed and/or would be so great on Hetzner's side, but it might be nice to have a 2TB or 3TB plan between the 1TB and the 5TB. Anyway, I will surely be using the product now, probably starting with a 5TB.
I notice that the nextcloud versions cost more than the plain storage box now, which makes sense. I wonder if there will be a performance difference, and also how performance of storagebox will hold up as more users migrate to it. We will see.
Anyway, thanks!
This is awesome! I just upgraded my Nextcloud/Storage Share instance.
A refreshing change in the light of all the prices going drastically up over the past few years (industry-wide).
Existing storage boxes are remaining the same, or should I just give it some time?
(have a 500 MB box and it still says 500 GB in the robot control panel)
BikeGremlin I/O
Mostly WordPress ™
Works. Cool.
Choosing an existing box from the robot console, and clicking on "Change storage box" gets the "upgrade" done in a second after you've picked the option you want.
BikeGremlin I/O
Mostly WordPress ™
Thanks for all the feedback so far about the new generation of Storage Boxes and Storage Shares!
@bikegremlin - Thanks for the quick guide on how to manually upgrade the Storages Boxes on Robot. If anyone already has existing Storage Shares on konsoleH, there is a similar process there.
@willie - A few people have said that they will probably be able to replace an old Auction server with one of the new Storage Box. I'm that that might be an option for you, too.
By the way, if any of you want to share how you setup your Storage Boxes or Storage Shares, maybe you'd consider doing a tutorial on them. You can earn some credit for your account. We have some here, but it's always nice to have more: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
@Hetzner_OL I haven't yet figured out a good way to set up a storage box for encrypted backup, other than just saving encrypted tar files to it by sshfs or sftp, in a manual and ad-hoc way. That will be good enough for my immediate cold backups but I would like to figure out something better. There is another thread about encrypting cloud storage and I may post something there. I will keep thinking about good options. I would add, when I used storage boxes in the past, I noticed that sftp transfer was noticeably faster than sshfs, and sshfs wasn't all that reliable (connections tended to crash now and then). So I'll try to stay with sftp if it can do what I need.
Added: I'm sure your devs are already working on it, but it will be great to have an S3 interface.
Is it possible to mount the storage box on a smaller VPS to use as storage for nextcloud? Or is it just worth it to go for the storage share for the convenience?
Team push-ups!
@Astro you can mount the storage box by sshfs but it relies on a tcp connection staying up, and they tend to drop every so often. I guess you could have a service restart it when that happens, but you are probably better off with storage share unless it's a very large, low-traffic instance.
If you are going for NextCloud, the best option is to get one from Hetzner for reasons mentioned by @willie
Probably not the best way but here is a small script (stolen from somewhere and changed a bit to suit my needs at that time) on how to check if StorageBox is mounted and mount it if it's not.
https://gist.github.com/mikho/b5a7946c80528d129bb0ca0086a9909a
Cron job every now and then or run it before trying to read/write from the mounted folder.
https://clients.mrvm.net
Storage share also looks pretty nice. It is actually backed up to another server daily, unlike storage box, besides being on a raid system (don't know if the raid settings are similar). It is around 3 euro/TB of user storage in the large plans, vs 2 euro/TB for storage box. But since storage share stores two copies of your data (because of backup), it's really more like 1.50/TB which is in "how can they do that" territory. It also allows file sharing by https, i.e. you could use it as a not-exactly cdn. No idea how performance is for that, but my usage would be very light in all likelihood. Anyway I might try it.
@Hetzner_OL one request for your team: storage box allows choosing between DE and FI locations, while storage share is DE only. In both cases it would be great if for DE, there was a way to choose between NBG and FLK. That would allow getting multiple plans that are geo separated while still living on the fast DE network. Otherwise the only way to do that is with dedicated servers, ouch.
Of course I hope storage comes to the US location! Do you have a sense that you can share with us, of how well the US location is working for you?
S3 support for Storage Box: That request has come up just a few times this week.
I will pass on a +1 for you.
encrypted backups for Storage Box: This is where I get mad at myself for not having a stronger technical background. If you don't find any good suggestions here, maybe ask in our customer forum. There are some very avid Storage Box users there.
@Astro - Yes, to the best of my knowledge, you can mount the Storage Box to a VPS. But perhaps depending on your use case, maybe it is more convenient to use a Storage Share instead. Feel free to contact our team for advice.
@mikho - Thanks for sharing the script.
more locations for Storage Shares for geo redundancy: I will definitely pass that on. You know our policies on roadmaps for new products/locations/features/etc. We share it usually only once it's ready to go live. That will likely be especially true for any news for the ASH location in the USA. --Katie
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.
no script or cronjob needed, but autofs is what you are looking for. should be available in all major distros...
I think strictly speaking, more locations aren't needed, just say where the existing DE locations are more precisely than "Germany". If they are in both NBG and FLK, let the user choose which they want. If they are all in (say) FLK, just specify that, so the user can get an NBG server and back it up to FLK, getting geo redundancy by separating the server from its backup.
Re encryption: there is another thread about cloud encryption here on LES, where people are making some good suggestions. It might be interesting to have something like Scaleway's old C14 product where the backup is encrypted automatically.
@Astro for live data I think you are better off with Storage Share because it is backed up automatically. That is part of why it costs more. Storage Box has less redundancy since it is intended to itself be a backup rather than a primary.
Can storage boxes be upgraded easily or is it a matter of moving things over to a new server?
You can upgrade and downgrade them through the web console, it's trivial.
@Hetzner_OL thinking a little more, if S3 is offered it might be better to just have it for storage share and not storage box. S3 will get used as a public-facing service which is more in the spirit of storage share, which has proper backups and (as the name says) is intended for sharing. It's the cheapskate in me speaking but I'd prefer that storage box stay fairly minimalistic, as low cost backup storage. I'd even be ok with something like C14 or Glacier, though it would have to be even cheaper than storage box.
The current versions of storage box and storage share are very competitive for regular products from a big provider, so congrats on releasing them.
I always liked the "Storage Box" offering and also have to say, that the "Storage Share" product works quite well.
Maybe another thing in terms of feature requests: I tend to sync my borg repos from time to time to Backblaze B2, which also in this case would be a nice thing to have, considering the underlying storage architecture. So I would vote +1 for the availability of i.e. rclone to be able to do something like this, without including another server as a middleman.
Forgot to add a question: which borg version is currently running on the service and can it be individually selected?
Pretty sure S3 can be configured as authenticated only...which would strongly discourage use as a public facing hosting bucket