I founded a hosting company 25 years ago when User-Mode Linux was the hot new virtualisation tech. We aspired to just replicate the dedicated server experience because that was obviously how you deploy services with the most flexibility, and UML made it so cheap! Through the 2010s I (extremely wrongly) assumed that being metered on each little part of their stack was not something most developers would choose, for the sake of a little convenience.

Does a regular 20-something software engineer still know how to turn some eBay servers & routers into a platform for hosting a high-traffic web application? Because that is still a thing you can do! (I've done it last year to make a 50PiB+ data store). I'm genuinely curious how popular it is for medium-to-big projects.

And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).

I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.

> And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).

Hetzner is an oldschool German company, it is not surprising to see them act this way. They are very profitable (165M Euro in 2024) and have very little debt. They also seem to be mostly bootstrapped and are not VC funded

https://www.northdata.com/Hetzner%20Online%20GmbH,%20Gunzenh...

> I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.

Managing servers is fine. Managing servers well is hard for the average person. Many hand-rolled hosting setups I've encountered includes fun gems such as:

- undocumented config drift.

- one unit of availability (downtime required for offline upgrades, resizing or maintenance)

- very out of date OS/libraries (usually due to the first two issues)

- generally awful security configurations. The easiest configuration being open ports for SSH and/or database connections, which probably have passwords (if they didn't you'd immediately be pwned)

Cloud architecture might be annoying and complex for many use-cases, but if you've ever been the person who had to pick up someone else's "pet" and start making changes or just maintaining it you'll know why the it can be nice to have cloud arch put some of their constraints on how infra is provisioned and be willing to pay for it.