Show HN: ScratchDB – Open-Source Snowflake on ClickHouse
&gt; The whole thing runs on regular servers. Hetzner has become our cloud of choice, along with Backblaze B2 and SQS. It is written in Go. From an architecture perspective I try to keep things simple - want folks to make economical use of their servers.<p>Cool, glad to see Hetzner, at least presumably for compute, rather than the almost routine, absurdly expensive, mega cloud providers.<p>I have a few questions if you&#x27;ve got time.<p>1. What made you pick Hetzner in particular, and did you evaluate any of their primary competitors? (e.g., OVH, etc)<p>2. In your $100&#x2F;month figure, did you decide to go with dedicated servers or the &quot;cloud&quot; VPS line? If the latter, was there any particular reason over going with the bare-metal offerings?<p>3. Are you making use of Hetzner&#x27;s U.S. servers as well or is everything currently in Europe (or vice-versa)?<p>4. Was there any particular reason for choosing B2 and SQS as opposed to self-hosting object-storage on the SX servers?<p>Normally, I wouldn&#x27;t even wonder why someone wouldn&#x27;t want the burden of more infrastructure. But given the choice of going with relatively unmanaged Hetzner servers, presumably self-hosting clickhouse, etc, and then with your compute provider also happening to offer fairly large storage servers on the cheap, I might&#x27;ve been tempted to cut out the additional providers and DIY it:<p>- less costly for large amounts of data<p>- zero lock-in [1]<p>- fewer companies to deal with<p><pre><code>  - likely better negotiating power with Hetzner when the time comes if a bigger percentage of your overhead is with them as opposed to spread out across three providers

  - fewer points of failure; if the Hetzner servers are down, I would assume you&#x27;re in trouble anyway, so perhaps keeping [most] of your eggs on the same network might not be as bad as it sounds

  - presumably better latency and bandwidth + the ability to communicate over a private network [2]
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5. I see the license is AGPL. But I don&#x27;t see the usual &quot;you must dual-license all contributions under MIT&#x2F;BSD&#x2F;ISC as well [so that only we can re-license the project]&quot; nor &quot;before contributing, sign this agreement transferring copyright [and your first born child]&quot;.<p>Was this just an oversight, or do you intend to be one of the few SaaS companies that really truly is open-source rather than <i>&quot;open-source&quot;</i> [until peopled are locked-in] and then going <i>&quot;open&quot;</i>-core? If the latter, then awesome -- cool to see.<p>6. Any regrets, disasters, or lessons learned so far? Usually, I find these stories the most interesting but unfortunately too few are willing to share.<p>---<p>[1]: I know B2 provides a relatively standard, at this point, S3-compatible API and everything as well. But I think there is also still something to be said about a somewhat Juche-esque approach to infrastructure, wherein should prices rise, contracts change, service degrades, or whatever else, you&#x27;d have the ability to almost immediately switch at a moment&#x27;s notice to literally anyone else who can lease you a box with some hard drives or any colo provider.<p>[2]: This goes out the window somewhat if you&#x27;re using the VPS line and American servers, though.