Up to 3 free cloud servers from Hetzner

The folks at Hetzner have recently launched their cloud platform and to test out the service and also to do a good impression they are giving out up to three free cloud servers per customer for a limited time, while the platform is still in beta.

They offer the possibility to deploy cloud servers in either of their datacenters:

And allow people to deploy one of the 4 main operating systems used on cloud servers:

And of course offer only two different plans for the time being:

The access to the servers can be both through SSH keys and root password and any cost for the usage is discounted throughout the beta service.

It should be well noted that the servers come with no guarantee as this is a test platform and any servers deployed must be used for testing purposes only, not for production:

During the beta:

    There is a limit of 3 servers per user
    All resources are free
    All prices shown are dummies, for testing purposes only
    No invoices will be generated
    Not suited for production - servers will be deleted after beta


Technical as well as optical issues can happen, but we will do our best to fix them as soon as possible.

I deployed two servers myself, one in each datacenter and ran a couple of tests to benchmark their performance, which is pretty much the expected one:

Falkenstein Speedtest:

Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Newone (Ilmenau) [120.64 km]: 12.851 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 473.69 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed....................................................................................................
Upload: 324.48 Mbit/s

Nuremberg Speedtest:

Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by IT Ohlendorf (Salzgitter) [111.93 km]: 14.502 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 320.87 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed....................................................................................................
Upload: 338.28 Mbit/s

Falkenstein Benchmark:

System Info
-----------
Processor       : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-26xx (Sandy Bridge)
CPU Cores       : 2
Frequency       : 2099.998 MHz
Memory          : 3859 MB
Swap            :  MB
Uptime          : 9 min,

OS              : Debian GNU/Linux 9
Arch            : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel          : 4.9.0-4-amd64
Hostname        : ping


Speedtest (IPv4 only)
---------------------

Location                Provider        Speed
CDN                     Cachefly        128MB/s

Atlanta, GA, US         Coloat          134KB/s
Dallas, TX, US          Softlayer       12.9MB/s
Seattle, WA, US         Softlayer       11.7MB/s
San Jose, CA, US        Softlayer       11.3MB/s
Washington, DC, US      Softlayer       1.12MB/s

Tokyo, Japan            Linode          7.82MB/s
Singapore               Softlayer       8.73MB/s

Rotterdam, Netherlands  id3.net         75.6MB/s
Haarlem, Netherlands    Leaseweb        191MB/s


Disk Speed
----------
I/O (1st run)   : 330 MB/s
I/O (2nd run)   : 334 MB/s
I/O (3rd run)   : 360 MB/s
Average I/O     : 341.333 MB/s

Nuremberg Benchmark:

System Info
-----------
Processor       : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-26xx (Sandy Bridge)
CPU Cores       : 2
Frequency       : 2099.998 MHz
Memory          : 3859 MB
Swap            :  MB
Uptime          : 6 min,

OS              : Debian GNU/Linux 9
Arch            : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel          : 4.9.0-4-amd64
Hostname        : morph


Speedtest (IPv4 only)
---------------------

Location                Provider        Speed
CDN                     Cachefly        122MB/s

Atlanta, GA, US         Coloat          1.20MB/s
Dallas, TX, US          Softlayer       13.8MB/s
Seattle, WA, US         Softlayer       12.2MB/s
San Jose, CA, US        Softlayer       11.5MB/s
Washington, DC, US      Softlayer       19.4MB/s

Tokyo, Japan            Linode          8.53MB/s
Singapore               Softlayer       10.0MB/s

Rotterdam, Netherlands  id3.net         88.2MB/s
Haarlem, Netherlands    Leaseweb        212MB/s


Disk Speed
----------
I/O (1st run)   : 370 MB/s
I/O (2nd run)   : 370 MB/s
I/O (3rd run)   : 364 MB/s
Average I/O     : 368 MB/s

As you can see from the tests conducted above Nuremberg performs a bit better both in terms of bandwidth and disk speed.

While they are still in beta they will probably add deployable images for existing apps and might just as well add some more stuff to the list of supported operating systems.