Hetzner to stop support for High-Availability Setups

[falko]

I've heard it several times from different people now, and I've just talked to Mr. Pirner from Hetzner myself: due to security reasons Hetzner ( www.hetzner.de ) will stop support for high-availability solutions (heartbeat/keepalived etc.) in the next weeks or months. If you have a subnet with multiple IP addresses, they will bind the IP addresses to a server so that it will not be possible to have a virtual or shared IP address (as shown in my HA tutorials, e.g. http://www.howtoforge.com/high-avail...at-debian-etch and http://www.howtoforge.com/haproxy_lo...er_debian_etch ).

They will send out an email to all their customers in the next days, and then it will take a few weeks or months until they make the switch. Until now, they don't offer an alternative solution for people that need HA (such as HowtoForge - HowtoForge runs on an HA cluster at Hetzner), but they told me that if enough people ask for such a solution they might come up with something.

So I'm asking everyone who currently has a HA setup at Hetzner or is interested in doing it to post here. If we are enough, hopefully we can urge Hetzner to change their minds.

[orcar]

I have a few customer who need the HA function and they all will ask for it.

[toodles]

I'm currently relying on a HA setup on 2 servers with Hetzner. I need a HA solution as the non-profit organization I represent has previously had to deal with downtime and has caused them considerable problems. HA solves and prevents these issues for them.

[edge]

Sorry to hear about this.
I'm not using Hetzner, but wish you all who do good luck!

[toodles]

Just to make people aware, this topic is also being discussed in the Hetzner forum in German at http://forum.hetzner.de/wbb2/thread.php?postid=99547

To view the forum, one must sign up. It is subject to manual verification though.

[falko]

I've just signed up to the Hetzner forum. Let's see...

[cgick]

hi folks,

we are located in rz 6 which still allows some subnets to be used by two machines on virtual interfaces. our latest subnet which we registered though doesn't route to both machines any more.

did you get any feedback from hetzner? the support simply told me via e-mail that ha-solutions aren't supported any more and theres no alternative.

i read that virtual mac-addresses could do the job? maybe we could even fake the mac by the active machine to bypass that check. did anyone of you guys get information obout alternatives?

best regards,
chris

[falko]

Haven't heard anything back from Hetzner. I'm really hoping they don't touch existing HA setups. If they do, we will leave...

[till]

Is this really a technical issue? Just a guess: If a customer runs a HA setup, the server will most likely have very much traffic. As all traffic is included in the price of the current servers, hetzner just might not want these high traffic customers or any new customers with high traffic anymore as the bandwith they consume are for sure above there mean price calculation...

[toodles]

Originally Posted by till

Is this really a technical issue? Just a guess: If a customer runs a HA setup, the server will most likely have very much traffic. As all traffic is included in the price of the current servers, hetzner just might not want these high traffic customers or any new customers with high traffic anymore as the bandwith they consume are for sure above there mean price calculation...

I agree, this is a very plausible explanation. After all, taking a look at the pricing:

DS3000 = 1000GB/Month = €49 = €0.049/GB

Everything that goes over the 1000GB/Month costs €0.09/GB, almost twice as expensive. Therefor it's cheaper to use a high-availability(HA) solution in terms of traffic, if you're using a lot of traffic. Of course, there's other ways to do this, but HA is of course nice to have... I mean, it IS highly available! :-P

toodles