I have been running my business on Hetzner bare-metal servers for the last 7 years. During that time there were several brief network outages, on the order of minutes. I think one network outage was 30 minutes. Other than that, no problems.
Given the price and performance difference between bare-metal and everything else, I am puzzled as to why small businesses that do not need scalability do not go with bare metal. And given the speeds of todays hardware, if you are not doing something stupid and you have a B2B SaaS, it's really difficult to need "scalability" beyond several bare-metal servers.
To be clear, I do not consider my bare-metal boxes "reliable", I have a multi-server setup managed by ansible, with a distributed database, and I can take a single-node failure without problems. I also have a staging setup that can be converted to production quickly, and a terraform setup that can quickly spin up a Digital Ocean cluster if needed.
Your box running your web server is far less complicated than using a CDN and worrying about countless additional points of failure. Network problems are only a minor risk.
My Internet goes down at least twice a year and my electricity goes down even more, specially in the winter. So no, this is not more reliable than cloudflare.
In a discussion about using a CDN, it's implicit that it represents an addition to "professional" hosting with servers in a well managed data center that has, at least, redundant high-bandwidth network connections, not to a domestic network connection.
Note that your home network could be good enough for a personal web site that nobody pays you to respect a SLA on.
No, we're talking about a colocation provider, or a leased dedicated server provider. I went with OVHcloud US for my latest deployment. HN is at m5hosting.com.
You seem to imply that the options are only cloudflare or your apartment. This simply isn't true: there are a plethora of companies that will lease you a dedicated box of some Us in one of their racks, as the sibling commenter replies. Alternatively, you can search for co-location services. Options range from 1U/2U co-location, to half rack units, to full racks, to dedicated areas of the datacentre ranging from cages to whole rooms (I've been in at least one datacentre where an entire room was under separate access control and leased to one customer only).
Usually datacentres are located quite strategically. For example the location of many datacentres in Zürich corresponds with two separate power supply grids that meet (so they can pull from both).
Some of the companies involved are resellers and don't actually operate the datacentres they use. Others actually do. Usually the service is more or less the same, from the point of view of renting a 1U, or co-locating one.
If you want reliability features of a datacentre, e.g. for your office services, but might move, you may find your local city surprising. In Manchester, UK, there's a large amount of dark fibre under the city (fibre that is laid, but not in use), owned by some of the DC companies. Sometimes you can connect your office to said datacentre via dedicated fibre.
We’ve been on Hetzner for several years now. So far the only outages we had were from us moving servers (yeah, we don’t have high availability or load balancing, just a single beefy dedicated server). So, yes?
Last company I worked for, we had many Hetzner servers. We had many drive failures and CPU fan failures. It's fine if you can deal with a relatively high chance of hardware failure.
Perhaps not, but those who want to avoid Cloudflare for technical or idealogical reasons won't realistically expect identical performance from smaller alternatives. Same as using Linux. People use it knowing fully well it may not support the latest & greatest consumer gadgets like Windows, but unless people use alternatives despite minor downsides, we shouldn't be distressed when we eventually reach a point of global near-monopoly.
