Hetzner Price Adjustment
docs.hetzner.comhttps://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/standardization-and-price-... So the AI boom is resulting in a) fewer jobs, b) massive increases in hardware, and c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?). When exactly are the upsides going to hit? The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality Do you know how many jobs there will be on Mars? Go west young man... Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons? The next great American novels. you know how many r are in strawberry You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha). I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump). It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*. The unfortunate reality is:
Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier.
Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?). Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living. So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income? I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often. Still a win but not as big as many are selling it. Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now. It's all a matter of perspective. 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger. Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer. The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up. Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI. Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference. The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours. The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story) You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries. There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three. No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people. Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread. People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway. It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend. It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie. It is not. Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time. So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time. Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans. We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity). It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that. All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class. What's the point of all that, to me? It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself. The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort. > It's easier to enter the owner class. Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand. This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing. If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation. >Based on what? Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door. I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference. Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things. Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important. I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past. > Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week. Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those. Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor. AI is far cheaper to fire than a person. "Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us. Somebody will eventually know the difference. And then you’re fired. > I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference. They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement. This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely. Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually. Key factors for me: Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference. Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told. The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend. Not that I disagree otherwise though. > When exactly are the upsides going to hit? Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers. This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds. This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on. > This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works. > Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases. For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine. For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different. Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years. When the market's so hot I don't see why anyone would give them a particularly big discount. And they would have been getting a discount before, so they probably end up seeing a larger percentage spike in what they have to pay. Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem. I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads. I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days. > I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days. I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent. I have a similar rig, but a 10th gen i7, 128GB of DDR4, 2TB NVMe, and dual RTX 3090s. Built it in 2021 for crypto mining, it ended up paying itself off just before Eth went PoW. I kept it mining even after profitability, because it ran warm enough to heat my apartment leaving my HVAC on fan-only to circulate the heat around. After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine. It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free". You might sell it for more but buying a replacement costs even more so you’re losing money either way. The only way is to sell and never look back. I did exactly this and suggest it. Used Dell Latitude (the one I got is one from 2019 - model 5300). I put Linux Mint Debian Edition (https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php) on it. Works absolutely great. Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers. I got an old hp elitedesk off of eBay, I don’t remember the cpu but it has 8 gig of ram and an ssd. Ubuntu+dokku and it runs all my self hosted stuff. If the hyperscalers demand is persistent, more hardware players will notice and will want a piece of the pie. You already see non traditional players entering. But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s? This is a market shock. The reason it doesn't alleviate sooner is the chip manufacturers are very wary of investing billions on capacity that won't come online until after the shock is over and subsequently going bankrupt. Because that's happened before. IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase. But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak. > the free investor money does run out I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no? The money always runs out. The dot com bust (Nina Brink forever!) and more recently "let's give a homeless man a 250k mortgage" 2008 bust. And then? There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next? Then it's not their problem and the company can fail. If you owe 1M USD, you have a problem. If you owe 100B USD, they have a problem. More government money to fund the ever elusive doomsday AI. And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic. I wish I could say I am disappointed. What they conveniently leave out is that it sometimes takes over a decade for a correction The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply. I can't wait for a scrappy startup to spend a couple billion dollars and several years setting up a new fab for chips so we can see the prices go down! Good luck getting the hardware for that eh? That's the rub. There is no such thing as "anyone that can supply hardware cheaply" Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap. I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go! It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online. SK Hynix just said they want to double wafer production by 2031. By 2031 the best employer in Europe will be the water gangs. I mean, I want to double the the number of billions of dollars I have by 2031, doesn't mean I will. (actually I have 0 billion and double 0 billion is still 0 billion, so unlike them I'll accomplish that goal). They already ordered Hanmi equipment and started construction at Yongin Mega Fab. Sounds pretty serious to me. Doesn’t this presume that chip fabs are betting that the AI boom is a bubble that’s going to pop? Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no? No. It doesn't have to be a bubble at all. It just has to be a cycle of rapid capital equipment build-out that returns to more normal levels in a few years. Hard to believe that an industry making money hand over fist are reluctant to spend tens of billions expanding capacity that won't come online for years? There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust) You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop. Idealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that. Because, oddly enough, there are a lot more things going on. Government incentives, companies trying to stranglehold markets, FOMO-fueled massive investiment into the current fad, etc. Just to name a few. I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate? “Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?” Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal Capitalism isn't a magical instant fix. In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production. We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes. But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success. If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous. If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating. (Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.) Only children believe in magic. You should done work and come to an understanding, then you wouldn't believe naive things. Sadly this is not a joke nor some doomsday thinking. Google recently repurposed thousands of phones for server needs. Why? Well guess why… to teach everyone tis coming. To clarify: UC San Diego is planning to build a cluster of 2000 Pixel phones for computer science class use and Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones. Goodness. Thank you for the clarification as this is leagues different than what I originally thought I was reading from the other comment. Or they did it for positive PR. To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers. And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale. It’s not just the hyperscalers, it’s also the boom in personal projects being launched. AI has massively decreased the bar to entry, and a lot more people need servers compared to before True but this is probably because now they have much more demand as other competitors got to expensive and now people are going for the smaller ones even with low service levels It’s also trivial to use now. With AI, there’s no meaningful additional work in using a VM. Right, instead of using a managed serverless platform where you pay a premium for proprietary cloud provided services to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers, you can… pay a premium for proprietary cloud-hosted AI engines to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers. I don't think any VPS provider has come close to raising their prices this much. There's absolutely not enough people flocking to Hetzner to justify this. But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up. If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware. Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does. > But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either. That's all true, but this seems disproportionate even to the hardware market. They already raised their prices recently as hardware got more expensive, and now they are quadrupled. Maybe I am just misreading the hardware market right now. If you see photos/videos of Hetzner datacenters, their servers are essentially plain, low-end motherboards (1G network, few slots) sitting on shelves (don't mean that as derogatory, it's an efficient design). What it does mean is that their per-server costs are absolutely dominated by the very components that are exploding in cost right now: RAM, SSDs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs. OVH just raised their VPS prices by about 30%. They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices. Crazy stuff OVH still seems cheaper here for smallest VPS (what's needed to host a personal website), especially when you consider that you have to pay your IPv4 1.7 € with Hetzner. For the exact same specs (CX23 vs VPS-1 2027), price is 6 vs 4.5 € and you can get a 15% discount on OVH if you order a full year. Been wondering the same. GCP recently increased their egress pricing, and was expecting AWS to follow. So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability. We increased our prices - for the first time in 21 years - last week. The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices. Egress pricing? That's one of their highest margin products! Compute is the one that's being squeezed! It's almost 100% profit actually, because ISPs are willing to pay to be connected to Google network Graviton 5 is 9% more expensive than previous generation https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/06/11/gravito... which isnt strictly an increase but shows direction. Graviton has had a price increase nearly every generation. So not really related. A ton of cloud workloads are still running on old Haswell-era CPUs with RAM that was bought a decade+ ago. Probably the costs will be made up with new VM shapes. AWS now has unmetered egress, but it's pretty expensive. A 10G port is $8k a month. > GCP recently increased their egress pricing The peering announcement or did I miss something? I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering). Inching closer to Vultr prices. There are some Rails projects I might have later this year, and I had already been thinking of putting them onto Vultr via Hatchbox since Vultr offered a managed db. Maybe for some stuff that I can run a Rails 8 Solid Stack app with just sqlite, I'd use Hetzner. I tested both with Hatchbox but have nothing in production on either yet and generally use Heroku and Render still. Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box. We use Vultr, DigitalOcean and Hetzner for global coverage. Vultr is by far the worst - some DC like Australia are pretty bad, lots of connectivity issues, some are OK. Their forte is that they offer a lot of DCs. We are migrating some workloads back to DO, where things are usually way smoother. Hetzner is our core, but does not offer DCs in Asia, Africa or Latam. When I used them the main issue was latency spikes due to their IP ranges getting DDoSd. They host a lot of shady/spam sites. Oh, didn't realize that. Any recommendation for mitigating that if deployed there? Had thought about putting something on Vultr in a few months. Also open to any other good recommendations for providers that have a managed Postgres. Haven't used either but have heard good things about PlanetScale and NeonDB. Neon has a free tier I have a Vultr account but it's very lightly used. Came recommended by Derek Sivers^1 I spend about $100/month with Vultr. The uptime in the datacenters my VMs are hosted in is extremely good. I use it as a hosting target for automated deployment tooling we wrote. Tools were originally Digitalocean-only and I wondered if LLMs could add support for a second provider, so asked Claude to add Vultr which it did very nicely. But other than run the automated tests (which create VMs, DNS entries, check validity and tear down) and pay the monthly bill, we haven't yet used them for production deployments. Or their margins were/are large enough that they are less hurt, and are instead attempting to weather the storm without touching pricing. The hyperscalers are the ones buying up all the memory and storage hardware in the first place. They aren't affected by the problem, they are the source of the problem. What happens to these platforms when there's nothing left to access them? That's where we're headed. Why would their keep their costs down. Get business hooked on their product and then ramp up the price. It seems like what's missing here is lower cost plans, because the existing plans had been fairly affordable, but now they're basically triple. The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price? It's wild how much more expensive they are in the US compared to Europe. Salaries My recollection is that Hetzner own all they DC in .de, self built, land incl. however .us and .sg are standard DC colo/rack New prices: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi... Old prices: https://web.archive.org/web/20260513201413/https://docs.hetz... They are on the linked page? It really is an absolute massive jump. Have no clue what's going on in the back to warrant a 3x increase... 25-50%, sure.. but 3x is wild. They might have had delivery contracts from before the prices increased, so they didn't have to pass them to customers. Maybe the last servers from those contracts got delivered already and any new orders need to be bought at much higher prices. Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes. I’m not a business person, but they’re already at the “hundreds of thousands of servers” scale, what about the 41st data center be organizationally far more expensive than the first 40? Simple example: Pizza delivery service. The company runs very well, customers are happy, demand increases. At some point the demand gets so high, that they need to buy a second car for deliveries and a second pizza oven. They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the prices, lower demand and make even more money without additional risk. > Have no clue what's going on in the back Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized. The AI bubble has increased the prices of nand and ram by a factor of 4, so a 3x increase seems reasonable. Companies that are not big enough to have long term contracts with ram/nand vendors have been hit really, really hard by this. These prices have absolute nothing to do anymore with memory prices. Do not forget that Hetzner already increased the setup fees by a factor of 4x before to compensate for the price. And also servers getting price increases. It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this... AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro. Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner. This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware. The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers. They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already. Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers. If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise. The big increases here are for their cloud product, which is hourly billing with no setup. In that context it seems more reasonable. I guess we need to remember that hourly billing and flexible prices cut both ways, eh? Also, a price increase like this can be used to address over-subscription/under-utilization .. there will be a lot of dormant chaff blown off by this, or in other words the provisioning demand will also be adjusted by this aggressive price change, imho. > It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. Monthly costs have gone up as well. Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, construction has exploded far beyond inflation and, most importantly, electricity prices are still ridiculous due to merit-order and the refusal of splitting up Germany into multiple power pricing regions. I remember the price increase that Hetzner did during 2022 because of the invasion in Ukraine. The said they will adjust the prices down when the electricity price reduced. Guess what? I am paying as a consumer about the same price as before 2022. Did Hetzner change their price down? Remember, the industrial price also dropped (and they also build out a large solar plant). No ... Ok, inflation? But those price increases already covered part of that... Just saying, its not been the first price increase that happened. There have been multiple ones that Hetzner did over the years. Some flew under people radars. > Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, Yea, we have seen nothing of that increase... O, wait, they reduce our income because the social security increase their costs. Yay .. Since I started using Hetzner in 2020 they have increased prices 4 or 5 times and I am now paying 50% more than I started, but my grocery bill also went up 50% and my rent went up 50%, so that's just matching inflation (even though the government said inflation was 5%). Now they're doing a 300% increase (not for me) all at once. The reasons really doesn't matter. As long as they are in top of price/performance/quality nobody will switch. Once they stop to be then people will think about it. Its not only RAM. I have seen people who are vibe coding their app and instead of choosing Vercel as default they are learning about dedicated server hosting, docker etc and moving to providers like Hetzner. This is why whenever someone says - with AI everyone is going to write their own SaaS, I am always like - and what happens to hosting? Even Vercel might increase their costs if that comes to pass. It's a bit higher than 4 now. They probably also have to factor in the pricing trajectory to avoid changing their pricing too often. There is no AI bubble There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production? Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao >billion dollar companies can't ramp up production? you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are: A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity B) raise prices by 100% I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future. As I understand it ramping up a new fab takes a couple of years and several billion dollars. The last time they ramped up production prices had crashed back down by the the time the new fab was fully up and running, so this time they're betting that the scarcity will resolve itself like it did last time. They are scaling up, but most will only come online in end 2027-2028 time frame. And Memory, as in what we use in PCs is easier to manufacture then HBM memory. But all the money is in HBM ... So for every ~4GB of memory that you can produce in normal DDR5, you can only make 1GB of HBM. But you make multiple times the revenue. The demand for HBM memory is not going to go away. LLMs are memory bandwidth hungry, and we are going to see production going to AI. But also to "lower end" like B200's. That means, they are producing multiple times less memory (if we look for the normal market demand), but still need to produce more for the memory bandwidth hungry market. We are seeing more products entering the "prosumer/business" market that are also memory bandwidth hungry. This demand will not go away. It will actually increase as companies move to more localized workloads. There is is a issue with data privacy that a lot of companies legally deal with. The lacking ramp up is not a sign of them being scared of over production, its a realization that 3 companies hold the market in a strangle hold, and "slow" scale. If everybody plays friendly, they can milk this for years. China is a solution but China does not have the HBM production levels, and will take years to scale and put a dent in the market. And China is ... allocating a lot to domestic production of AI > HBM ... The reality is, that unless competition ( as in China ) does not start scaling beyond the expected levels, the big 3 have no reason to scale too fast. And money is not the issue ... have you seen their revenue (and net profit!! ) numbers. A few billions is peanuts for them at this point. They simply do not want to scale too fast because that means less milking ... Memory demand is not going to away. When people talk about the AI bubble popping, its more in terms of the stock market. The product is here and not going away. This does suggest a path to improvement, though. A significant factor in the demand for HBM is how expensive the actual GPU chips are, making you want to use the absolute best memory to support them. When there's more competition in GPUs and the memory is actually a lot of the total price, you see things like Apple silicon with LPDDR5 being very popular. You can get a lot of bandwidth out of normal memory if you put in 256 or 512 bit bus. If we can get more midrange competition, we can focus more manufacturing capacity back on some form of DDR, and lessen the squeeze. until china reveals a fab opening up next week. They are not ramping up. Because they think it may be a bubble. If it's not, no harm done to the hardware manufacturers, they just make more money per unit, but if it is a bubble, they don't want to be stranded with excess capacity. There is potential harm if it’s not a bubble and their competitors scale and capture more of the market and they don’t. That’s why CXMT is a real wildcard - they could use this situation to become a big player. I'm trying to understand the intent of your comment. The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly. There can only be so many "I saved 10x by moving to Hetzner" posts before they pick up the value they were leaving on the table... Just wait for the hyperscalers to follow suit It was never the same quality though. A VM at AWS or GCP is not even remotely comparable to a VPS at some low-end provider. Things like RAID, network/powersupply redundancy, internal privacy controls (nothing stopping a VPS provider from snooping in your filesystem), software patch quality, noisy neighbor mitigation, bandwidth quality, SLAs etc. Then all the value-added stuff like Terraform support, logging, monitoring, IAM roles, instant scalability etc. Not to mention the benefits if you use the same cloud's managed services like databases. If I can get a same-spec EC2 instance at AWS for just 2x the price of a Hetzner box, I would never consider Hetzner. It had to be a "10x savings". I moved to Scaleway one or two price upgrades ago. Be ready to see the same, but with OVH or Scaleway instead. Problem with Scaleway (for me) is physics. I get 200ms (at minimum) roundtrip latency to any of their EU servers (and for their dedicated offerings that can boot custom Linux distros that's pretty much all I have access to). didn't Scaleway also increase prices 1st of this month? Which plan? Because even with this hetzner price increase it's still 2-3x cheaper than scaleway. The bare metal dediboxes have better value I believe now. The same will happen with the other providers. Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware. This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase. But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too I use to be a huge Hetzner fan but it doesn't appear they have launch any new hardware in the past 3-years. One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile. (Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well) EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line Is there a lot of new enterprise server hardware coming out lately? Consumer stuff has been stagnant with all the ram cost issues so I could see servers running into similar issues. Proliant G12 was introduced end of 2024, and based on their previous lifecycle I guess they will at least last 3-5 years before a new line comes. Hetzner is almost exclusively offering consumer-grade hardware. They are attempting to refresh it now, it's just the worst possible time to do it. Prices are at a peak (hopefully). it's not that bad, EX63 dedicated servers were a great deal until this week (especially with 192 GB ECC RAM upgrade) and it has a 2025 CPU, for example The new prices are here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi... (However, Hetzner did an earlier price increase 38 days ago. HN's submission logic sends posting the url to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066) The price of server auctions seem pretty much the same as before: https://www.hetzner.com/sb so if you don't need the latest hardware, Hetzner is still and outstanding deal. They price hiked my existing CCX13 from 16€ to 43€ - that is a 2.6x price increase (!). Technically they didn't increase it yet, for as long as I don't order a new one or rescale (up/down) they let me use the old price. This is insane (it is a cloud server, with 2 dedicated cores and 8 GB RAM). Yeah, I host three small-scale game servers for an indie-game, all out of pocket. 50-80 players hop on every day and the community is super nice. Its been possible because the price has been €16 per instance, but with these new prices, it will absolutely not be possible anymore. I imagine a lot of small game server communities will meet the same fate now, since Hetzner has been the go-to for this kind of stuff. There's always lowendbox.com but Hetzner was more reliable than most of those vendors. "Fun" times for services selling micro-VMs running on top of Hetzner bare metal machines for a small margin. 3x increase in input pricing with essentially no notice (there was a 2 weeks notice of "we will change pricing" but no details. People assumed a max of 50% increase, I guess, not 3x) Don't forget these price increases are only for new purchases. Old rentals keep their price. You knew when they didn't include actual details at the time that something huge was coming Well crap, I was planning on doing this. Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine... If you personally need it there is still time to get cheaper ones off auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#ram_from=256 Yeah mostly old CPUs, but considering RAM shortages gonna be much cheaper than colocation. PS: link contains 256GB RAM filter since I guess OP need RAM. how's that work? do they operate them on the buyer's behalf? It's old servers they have already written off and would otherwise decommission. You're basically only paying for power and network traffic. i'm looking at the site and it seems they don't have this in US Hetzner doesn't offer dedicated servers in the US. They operate two of their own data centers in Germany and one in Finland. In the US and Singapore they offer only cloud servers, running on hardware in others' datacenters. I built a new computer with lots of RAM and a nice NVMe drive about a year ago, and I feel like I hit the jackpot with timing. But just like a low-interest rate mortgage, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for a long time, it seems. As a long term metal customer, I understood the need to raise prices for energy usage.... but for disk/ram I'm struggling to be sympathetic. The hardware I am using is already procured by them, and until such time there is a hardware failure I cannot support a price rise, because were is their justification for existing hardware? An ongoing business that intends to remain ongoing has to charge current customers based on the replacement cost of consumable items used to service those customers. That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while. Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is. Because in a free market, making rational choices about pricing in line with the industry allows you to build capital to further expand, which coincidentally also lets you buy more RAM. They will need to buy new hardware too I guess… They are not raising prices for existing contracts, only new ones. Seems like it doesn't apply to older machines, I have AX41-NVMe, it's not on the list, I also didn't get any notification from them (and they usually send some) - no need to panic if you're longterm customer. I hope it stays like that for a while, but I suspect it won't. Advertised prices for my setup are now roughly 2x what I'm currently paying. Seems the driver is DDR5 memory, DDR4 servers are not affected from my quick look. That'd be nice. The only server I can't host at home is basically just ferrying bytes to and fro, to have the right IP address for email deliverability. I'd buy DDR0.5 and a Pentium 2 if they'd offer it The last price increase was 5-10%. This one is a 150% increase. Goodbye Hetzner. The old version of you will be missed. Where are you moving to? There are large (x2, x3) price rises for US based servers but the German / Sweedish ones show much more reasonable increases ~30% Getting close to losing any point of them existing. They were the cheap one. You take that away and their unique offering vanishes and makes them pretty pointless to even consider as a provider. Really hope they can sort out something for their hardware sourcing as this isn't sustainable. The above assumes that other providers will not do their own adjustments. This is Hetzner's third increase this year. Not seeing any sort of similar levels of recurring price hikes from the other big vps providers. Hetzner dramatically increased prices for new and rescaled instances starting 15th of June, 2026; 8 AM CEST. For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply. This continuing trend is going to do a fantastic job of ensuring fewer and fewer individuals can launch casual projects and gating (non-VC) startups to those who already have the means. I just used Claude to convert my app to a serverless architecture and migrated to Cloudflare and their generous tiers. Not every app fits that model, but it's more than you'd think. Now I only pay when the app is used, not a penny more. Similar providers (heroku, aws) haven't increased their compute/ram/ec2/dyno prices recently; why is Hetzner's increase so massive (> 3-4x) - wouldn't increased hardware costs affect everyone else too? For the record, those providers already charged a significant premium for the equivalent compute you could get at Hetzner and OVH. The margins have decreased but they've had a profit margin on compute for a long time. Yes, and they will to preserve margins at some point. They're just doing a huge Mexican standoff, waiting for others to move. All smaller clouds have raised some prices already. They'll probably wait for summer, the world cup finals, or whatever's last big US government thing is so it flies under the radar. Step change makes sense for a smaller provider. You bait people to build on top of you with the best prices, then rug pull and hope the switching costs and economic frictions delay the attrition. Because heroku and aws were 10x previous hetzner price idk if you're comparing like-for-like here. I think on EC2, other customers can balloon up to fill your idle time because they're running on the same physical hardware. What this is talking about is renting hardware that is exclusively earmarked for your usage, so your compute is not fungible with other customers. It's more correctly priced against buying your own hardware and maintaining it yourself. They've tripled on "cloud servers" (shared hardware) as well. Contabo, an even cheaper alternative to Hetz, raised prices this month as well by 30-35% as well. Just noting it here because i couldn’t any info elsewhere. Interesting, but still very good pricing compared to the enormous increases we now see at Hetzner (plus the increase before that one). I'm wondering if they have more hardware on stock and/or better means of hardware supply. I have a few more or less idle VMs running at different providers, and keeping an eye on the european VPS market it seems that many struggled, while contabo is relatively stable. E.g. ovh at times limited the buying process to 1 instance (now it is at 5, not sure what was the default before) and also available locations were limited at one point a few weeks back. Hetzner has long been affordable due to its subpar latency and protection, making this price increase very questionable. No one has real reason to choose hetzner if it is not affordable. OVH ends it, one Romanian provider as well. Can you tell more about their subpar latency? I've been using Hetzner for many years, both personally and for business use, and I've not seen any noticeable issues regarding the latency. Granted, my use cases are webapps/backends that are not particularly latency sensitive, and are primarily used from a few European countries. For what's worth, I've seen cases where download speeds from Hetzner are considerably higher than from AWS eu-central-1. Little bit of number crunching shows that the median increase is 112%, so a 2.12x increase. Median for GER/FIN region is 120%, USA region is 157%, and Singapore is 71%.
Worst of all increases is the Euro pricing for USA plan CPX41 with a 209% increase, or 3.09x. Raw number comparison for those interested:
Tried to format it to be readable but its
[Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change] Wow. This is crazy. And not only much more expensive but the standardization means you have to buy more disk if you e.g. just need more RAM or similar. And does the standardization mean that I can no longer buy extra hardware? https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/dedicated-se... It had already been announced end of May that there would be a change: https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/standardization-and-price-... They are also becoming greedy. I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee. Whereas it was something like 60 euros a year ago. We (company) do the same. Though in our case the setup cost was 80 Euros (I think), less than a year ago. As the GPU proved not really suitable for any serious server workloads (it's a workstation class card), we'll soon be ditching that machine anyways (now for sure). Maybe our other inventory at Hetzner too. Not even because of the price increases themselves, but rather because the way in which they've communicated those. Personally, I've been a loyal customer and avid advocate for Hetzner, for well over a decade. They sure knew how to nuke that in record time. They can spin their story any way they like, but I'd say their board better consider sending most of their management packing, without bonuses or severance pay. Interesting over the price increase rollover now the setup fee is around 110 euros. The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models. If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s) > I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234. Buried multiple links and scrolling deep, but looks like they're tripling prices for cloud servers in the US. What's the next best option now? I understand this is ultimately due to AI boom. A couple of naive questions: 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity? 2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted. 1. Factory limits basically. There's a limit to the amount of fabrication lines that can create ram. Combined with the market incentives right now to make high bandwidth memory (HBM) over server memory (DRAM)... HBM starts as DRAM dies, so it competes with normal DRAM for wafer starts / cleanroom fab capacity. 2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online. The entire capacity of RAM production is basically booked out, for at least the next year. All fabs have sold their allocations already, and it takes years to build a new one. As a result, no it will likely not ease up if demand continues like this, again for at least a year. Also worth noting: They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality. > 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity? For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices. The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a year ago. Meet the new memory cartel, it's just like the old memory cartel but with CXMT being priced a tiny tad below. Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism. I say hello to every happy HN and twitter post “we moved to hetzner and saved 10X”. I told ya about silent happiness… You are saying that like it's some kind of rag pull. This is situation of the market. The people who moved still saved the money and are still saving money because Hetzner is still cheaper and they are also paying the old prices. It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp. they still save 3-5x Anyone know why? Some of the tiers more than doubled in price, that's pretty insane. Hardware prices, especially RAM, have skyrocketed. Priced out new baremetal servers recently and prices were 3-6x what we paid 4 years ago for the newer equivalents. RAM prices, surely? Was looking into a ram upgrade and the kit is 4x what it was even a year ago. I'm with you on this one For EU-based ops I moved to UpCloud, they have top customer service and their offerings are far more complete than Hetzner... Plus, they have more zones. Is there anything to suggest these increases are not reflecting the increased baseline price of RAM, GPUs, etc? If not then it is only a matter of time before other providers are forced into similar price hikes. Is there anything to suggest these increases are reflecting the increased baseline price of RAM, GPUs, etc? I mean don't get me wrong, this for sure is a factor but like others said, other services don't see such drastic price hikes. I was shopping for this past weekend. I found a 16core 128gb-ram(1!) unit for 110€/month with a competitor. Crazy deal. I suspected it to be a mistake, but after 24 hours it actually came online. Runs very smooth. Where?? Previously discussed 18 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066 I believe the price changes themselves were not publicly announced by Hetzner back then. Just their intent to increase them once again. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307959 For example, their 'Regular Performance' cloud server tier has seen a 173% price increase. AI seems to be ruining every single major thing that drove economic growth for the past 4 decades. PCs, the Web, software in general, high-capacity servers, Raspberry Pis and so on. The next thing to be affected will probably be smartphones. All of these things are foundations of profitable businesses right now and we are destroying them on the mere promise to get to some idiotic utopia in the future. It's been a struggle to allocate cost-optimized VPS at them for months now (in some regions), they were very often out-of-stock. I faintly seem to remember that Netcup is using Hetzner hardware at lower prices. "applies to new orders" big sigh of relief So glad I got all I needed recently. Looks like my AX162 isn't being retired anytime soon... AX162 (256GB) went from €274 -> €844 Was this announced beforehand? How do you double prices for customers so abruptly with no transition period? They announced it a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145 There are actually two separate pricing increases. One was introduced about 1-2 months ago. The one from today was announced at the end of May, without actually revealing new pricing then. The new levels were made public today or yesterday, I believe. And they are much bigger than before, some hikes are well above 200%. I'll happily pay the new prices, if they actually have the servers available. Cheap pricing is nice, but not that useful when in practice you can't actually buy most of the time. And the worst for my setup, there is no more ECC RAM available in their offers. At least not unless you pay an insane amount of cash.. Server auction still features cheap servers with ECC: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#ecc=true Not reliable, from a buying/availability perspective. Is ECC RAM that much valuable in day to day for non-critical usages? Short: Yes, but of course it depends.
Long: I am dealing with a huge amount of fitness related health data which gets aggregated into metrics. If those metrics are wrong, for whatever reason, this is not great. If you just run some blogs, of course, this is not important. The risk of bit flips is a percentage. The more RAM you have, the greater the likelihood. I have experienced heisenbugs on my 64 GB desktop that I bet were because of random bit flips I’ve had it catch a bunch of errors on borderline memory at home. (Despite the memory passing memtests). Just to throw it out there, surely we've ruled out ECC RAM gets away with worse modules because the checking bit will catch it? Because I actually tried to generate bit flips for a project once and we got nothing. Also a relatively high traffic site, registering a few bit flip variants (so like example.com -> fxample.com) got no hits whatsoever across a year. I keep seeing reports from people with ECC or people who found an available bit flip variant of a top X website, but it never happens to me on normal RAM. I can't imagine that ECC vendors are selling worse RAM with a check bit, but the more I read the more I wonder if maybe we should check just to be sure I’m running a cheap VPS on hetzner. Wanted to bump up my plan but they are out of capacity for some of their plans. Demand is brutal. I hope this doesn't hit the other servers, did they announce anything on why this increase happened? I would hate to need to move elsewhere This is such disappointing news. I was planning on migrating some of our workloads to hetzner specifically to take advantage of the AX162 pricing which was incredibly competitive. Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers? From memory, OVH and Scaleway are similar to Hetzner Hetzner is actually somewhat reliable, and OVH is not. I know that they had a huge oopsie with their wooden datacenter burning down but apart from that I didn't notice any problems recently. OVH is more expensive And tells you in an FAQ to go to a competitor if you want to send emails (personal or commercial does not matter). Various bugs in the ordering systems too. Domain names run smoothly (fast and cheap) once you got the payment systems dealt with but for servers it doesn't seem great Are they though? They have their KS, SYS and RISE lines with slightly older hardware. The prices are not too bad, I think. https://www.kimsufi.com/en/ >Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers They are quite good at costs remaining predictable. However, a few years back they cut the low-end hosts 1Gbps unlimited data transfer down to a 20GiB/month cap, and wanted everyone to go full cloud/retard to fully leverage the hardware infrastructure. If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not worth the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3 > If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not work the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3 Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly) I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing. Have you looked at used servers from eBay / bargain hardware / ETB tech etc? I have but it seems to me that the stuff that's actually particularly well priced is really old (2016-2018ish). Even a single DIMM of used 32G DDR4 from ETB is now > 250GBP. The used market is also blown to pieces because of the price pressure. Yeah it doesn't look good. Idk your requirements but this is one of the better deals I could find https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126986603191 . For used eBay servers it's always worth making an offer rather than Buy it Now. >but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing. Indeed, never buy equipment unless all other choices were explored. Note, we may be waiting till 2029 for GPU/ddr7/flash prices to fully normalize. =3 I see that (new) EX44 servers are now 50% more expensive than before, ouch. Although there's none available anyway. I tried to sign up to Hetzner services once. They wanted photo of my government ID, and almost all my personal data, full dossier. So I abstained. None of OVH, GCP, AWS, Azure wanted so much data about me, and I run my services in all of them successfully. Not in Hetzner. Sorry Hetzner, you're too data-hungry. Nothing you say justifies that. Wow this is a brutal price increase for a lot of plans, at least it appears old user instance prices are grandfathered unless you rescale them. I wonder how this will affect their demand considering most people use them because they’re low cost Well we are officially fucked. That's some increase, not angry against hetzner they might have been forced, but man is this sad. I built a homelab before the crisis started which might allow me to survive this for the next few years. But man am I sad about folks trying to build new projects. I've only been using this a lot for a few months now. I'm sorry to see this. Correct me if I am wrong, but AI made software development and operations more expensive than before. Yes, it is faster too, but the question: is it worth the price? Can the users consume new features in that pace? I start to think that AI might be a net negative on the economy. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, just to keep doing what we did before. Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end. AI is great, but I think it got too big. Just my thoughts, not backed by any data. I'm not even sure I'm right. > I start to think that AI might be a net negative on the economy. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, just to keep doing what we did before Outside of HN, this is all people are seeing. Gamers in particular aren't seeing a benefit. They are being priced out of their hobby. The recent DDLS 5 meme is what people think of when they hear AI. Even inside the software bubble it's debatable if there is a significant benefit on productivity (judged by total cost). But even pure software companies are hit by higher hardware prices. Their customers need to buy expensive hardware and have less budget left to spend on software. It will clearer soon after the api pricing model enforced on enterprise accounts. I suspect this will soon follow and no fixed subscription model, which will enforce companies/developers to be moderate and thoughtful when using AI. Also I think Microsoft will do the same for copilot Maybe AI could now optimize all the server software made when RAM was cheap. I think we are also going to see a lot of new software that is less hungry on compute and RAM than before. Probably first with games not requiring new hardware anymore. Because the consumers won't upgrade to new hardware as fast as before. People who buy their first gaming PC in 2027 might even get a lower spec in average than people who bought in 2025. So new games might require even lower hardware specs than before, to sell enough copies. This is a wishful fantasy. Vibe coded applications like ChatGPT desktop and Claude Code routinely take 1~2GB of RAM to display <1kb of text. There is zero initiative to make better software, the software industry is just saying "fuck you" to the rest of the world until the bubble pops. Sure, that's why I think it will start with games. You don't buy a game if you can't (properly) play it. Either you get a new gaming PC, or stop buying new games and keep playing old ones. AI investors bet on the high return in the next 10-15 years, they have no reasons to care if everything which require semiconductors will become much more expensive in the process. The use of AI is still optional. Yes but paying massively inflated prices for compute are not anymore. Even for consumer gear I am being quoted prices that are more than 2x what they were only a year ago (and availability is hard). But its impact on new hardware costs and replacement costs is not. A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long. I think it is worse for Hetzner. The secret is out. Their prices have attracted a lot of demand, and they need to buy equipment to satisfy that demand. The last Hetzner box I leased I had to poll for availability as if I was Ebay auction sniping. It took me 2 days to acquire it. Absolutely. Replacement is one thing, but there is also the need for new hardware to meet growing demand. And yet the hardware cost increases caused by AI are not. > is faster too, but the question: is it worth the price? Those aren't the only metrics, quality and efficiency is also important. AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average. > AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average. Is it? If by higher quality, you mean commenting properly, sticking to naming conventions etc. I can agree. But to me, AIslop looks like it lacks "intentionality" of code written by devs, no matter how bad they are at naming things and sticking to conventions. i.e. people who are adequately good at their jobs usually do things for a reason, and they can explain it. Even if you don't find it agreeable, it usually is consistent. Is it AI that lacks intentionality or your prompts? Just remember we are comparing slops. If you care about your code it really doesn't matter if you write it manually or with the help of a glorified typewriter. > AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average. How did you come to that conclusion? That goes against everything I've heard from people who understand development. Every resource I can find about AI vs non-AI development comes to the exact opposite conclusion you did. Devslop is spaghetti code that grows organically. AIslop is overly complicated code that someone neglected to read. I just distrust the former more than the latter. Prices aren't high for the current capabilities or demand. It is all a bet on the future. AI could theoretically also be used to optimize existing code instead of producing new features, allowing existing tech to run on lighter hardware. Rent me an rpi if the software is fast. Thanks for the laugh. When has optimization ever been a priority over delivering new features? AI is going to make this problem far worse. Raspberry Pis are also quite expensive now. Not really. You can still not use AI. The solid data is that RAM is more expensive than before… so there’s a small case to be made there because of you need a new computer you can’t avoid that. > Can the users consume new features in that pace? It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Given coding is only a small part of the developer's job, there's just nothing new to consume. The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases. Prices have increased for literally nothing. > The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases. Not fully true. AI is now often used to fix a lot of bugs in old and badly maintained software. The quality of big and popular software probably decreased a bit, but the quality of niche products probably improved. > It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread. The only thing that is clear is that measuring programming is just as impossible as it has always been. In all my years of projects they've either been resounding successes or gone down in flames. The difference between good and bad is a difference in kind. Most of the bad ones didn't even know what the hell they were building and built the wrong thing. Like, the entire idea that some omniscient manager is looking at a thousand timelines and pondering over whether to pick the $11.5M successful one or the $9.5M successful one is literally laughable. Half of them are going to make the Hindenburg look like a bit of a whoopsie and the other half you would lock in sight unseen without a second thought. > Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread. Sorry, I meant 10-15% at most. If it was by more than that then we'd see the effects in an obvious way. Since we don't those 15% are already generous. It is sucking away electricity from cities, making hardware costly for common user, pumping heat into global atmosphere, taking away jobs, creating massive amount of slop, killing human motivation for creativity, making academics and exams harder, creating fakes that are undetectable, filling internet with plastic content, pumping tons of unmaintainable code, wrecking websites ... Still - AI is a great achievement? Yeah. The two are not mutually exclusive. Things do tend to end up being a net positive or negative, though. Even if both aspects are present, it doesn't seem far-fetched that someone with hindsight in the future would conclude that it was overall a bad thing in the middle of an energy/heating crisis. That would imo preclude the label 'great achievement', but time will have to tell (or we adjust how we use it before history decides on a judgement) Most people IN TECH still don't realize how much hardware prices are going to continue to increase, much less the 95% of the population that's completely unplugged from what's going on with AI-driven hardware demand. All of these price increases are going to get passed down to consumers eventually via increased prices. Why wouldn't production increase to offset this? what's a good hetzner alternative for US? i'm currently using their hillsboro instances. i'm not going to pay 3-4x more. > i'm currently using their hillsboro instances. existing VPS will have the old price. It get increased only if it is rescaled and for new VPSs. We can't factor out greed from this increase. Vote with your wallet! Please. "First you corner the market, then you raise the prices" - Walter White Everything is getting stupider by the day. Tech is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts. Then we'll be in a decade of drought again like 2001 It's kinda awesome, the DDR prices will go extremely down (lower than before the bubble), and it will be spring time for self-hosted opensource models, cause people will be able to afford the hardware. We just need to wait for the peak. > the DDR prices will go extremely down (lower than before the bubble) Why? From what I understand, Ram production is not ramping up. Even if a bubble does pop, I don't think it's even guaranteed to drop to where it was. 2005 - 2015'ish the DDR prices were artificially inflated by factory fires and such in asia. hope it's not going to repeat, need to have some excuse to drive the prices up.. What do you mean by "decade of drought"? In most accounts the 2000s were the absolute best years for rapidly emerging and fun tech. Just like the energy industry is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts again. Can't wait till oil / solar prices implode and there's a decade of drought where no one users energy for a long time. The solution I think is to tell all of them starting with clouds to go fuck themselves (where possible of course) and start self hosting. I do this for years and am totally happy. I was also hosting on Hetzner and was thinking to do it again for some (not all) services but not with this new wonderful deal. Where do you send emails from? Other than the price increases, any issues with Hetzner? Any alternatives you would recommend? Pricing was the "selling" point. People chose Hetzner for their affordable prices compared to anybody else. But when Hetzner is priced like everyone else, it makes it harder to pick them over the giant AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean etc. AWS does not give "bare metal" and the equivalent is still way more expensive. However Hetzner was much preferrable to let's say OVH who also "deals" bare metal but not anymore. So yes Hetzner has lost what I consider was their only advantage. Ok I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service. At that same time, I was reading about this story about WireCard. It was like Stripe for Europe and worth billions. Turns out it was run by a Russian spy network and was all a sham. That video alleged Germany’s bureaucracy is filled with Russian agents and this can be traced back to the East/West Berlin days. To save a few bucks a month over DO didn’t seem worth it to me to send my passport to a foreign country. Yup, I signed last weekend, they asked me for a passport and I deleted the account immediately. Scaleway also asks for ID. I am gonna try OVH next. I actually sent them a picture of my passport, and they still denied my account. Hetzner was widely recommended and I was more than happy to pay a premium for their supposedly-excellent service, but I guess they didn't want my money. Oh well. Went with OVH instead, and haven't had any issues since. Same exact story here, they denied my account despite me sending them everything they requested, no explanation given. Went with OVH and had zero issues. I mean it's not great that Hetzner require this but it's a bit of a jump to assume that means they have links to Russian intelligence. This kind of thing is pretty common in Germany; not every private company is captured by Russian intelligence Yes, no connection to WireCard but reading about that situation made me pause about giving my passport. At that point, I was like I’m trying to save a few bucks a month and risk is not worth it. Now if you’re buying their huge servers and are saving thousands, I can see why someone would do it. They also don’t ask every person for the passport picture so maybe me using a custom DNS and VPN might’ve triggered something on their end. > I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service. I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference? Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, with some legal safeguards for recovery, and the ability to get a replacement card with a different number. Passport carries an open long-term risk of impersonation and you can't just get a new passport because some company has a copy. Just the financial side of that risk can have much greater impact. Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Even with payment processors, most they ask for is SSN and business EIN. When I read about the WireCard scandal, the KYC stuff sent to them over the years is probably in the hands of foreign intelligence already. That’s what gave me pause. > Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag. Germany also has legal KYC requirements for web hosting and most other things relating to telecommunications. And if those requirements include the need to supply passport information, that's a reason not to host in Germany. When many sites are collecting these photos, it increases possibility of them leaking. Since these are also used for KYC process in crypto sites etc, this in turn increases risk of identity theft. I'm a Hetzner user in the US, but I pay for it with PayPal and was never asked to give my passport or identity. Americans are very rarely asked for these documents online, and even then it's typically only for government or financial services. It's also drilled into us that this info can be used for identity theft, so it's only natural to be wary of any non-government entity asking for them. FWIW, if Hetzner had asked for my passport when I signed up, I would not have given it either. If there isn't a difference shouldn't my credit card be enough? If they are spies, they are taking their time to use the data for sure. I run servers with them since 2009 or so. That's 17 years. I feel like the whole password thing was meant as a protection against SPAM or using servers for nefarious purposes as they know who's really behind every server. Although, I can also see how real criminals would work around that easily by supplying fake identities. Sounds like one of those "why we can't have nice things". Well, at least the password I gave them 17 years ago has expired since. I was doing the same here, trying to set up a Hertzner account. Getting away from US companies and buying European and all that. But after I had made the account (and wasting a lot of time on back and forth with their buggy sign-up flow), I got told that I needed to upload a picture of my passport to do anything. Fuck no. I too decided to stick with DO. Nice work from DO marketing team! Prices are completely not comparable and Hetzner was fighting scammers and kiddies, because low prices worked like a magnet for those. Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport. Look I'm just a dude who happened to land on DO a decade ago due to podcast ads and now wants to move away from it. Not due to prices but because I would prefer a European alternative. I didn't bring up Russian spies and I don't know if there's any validity to that story, I just don't want to upload passport pictures to random services. Their competitors don't require it. I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time. I encourage you to read about WireCard. It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding. I’m trying to dig up the video also I can link it. There is no connection between WireCard and Hetzner outside of both being German companies. And they're not just hiding, Jan Marsalek is allegedly actively managing FSB operations against European states. Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both. I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate. "And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator. And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today. Everybody has their own data center. And that's not gonna last. It makes no sense. You're gonna buy compute off the grid. That's AWS." - Jeff Bezos There are just 3 or 4 DDRAM manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron). They fully intend to make it impractical to purchase a server outside of the hyperscalers.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target. - Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
Germany (FSN/NBG) / Finland (HEL) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CAX11 0.0072 0.0096 33.33% 4.49 5.99 33.41%
CAX21 0.0128 0.0168 31.25% 7.99 10.49 31.29%
CAX31 0.0256 0.0336 31.25% 15.99 20.99 31.27%
CAX41 0.0505 0.0657 30.10% 31.49 40.99 30.17%
CCX13 0.0256 0.0689 169.14% 15.99 42.99 168.86%
CCX23 0.0505 0.1378 172.87% 31.49 85.99 173.07%
CCX33 0.1001 0.2219 121.68% 62.49 138.49 121.62%
CCX43 0.2003 0.4423 120.82% 124.99 275.99 120.81%
CCX53 0.4006 0.855 113.43% 249.99 533.49 113.40%
CCX63 0.6001 1.3678 127.93% 374.49 853.49 127.91%
CPX22 0.0128 0.0312 143.75% 7.99 19.49 143.93%
CPX32 0.0224 0.0569 154.02% 13.99 35.49 153.68%
CPX42 0.0408 0.1114 173.04% 25.49 69.49 172.62%
CPX52 0.0585 0.161 175.21% 36.49 100.49 175.39%
CPX62 0.0809 0.2083 157.48% 50.49 129.99 157.46%
CX23 0.0064 0.0088 37.50% 3.99 5.49 37.59%
CX33 0.0104 0.0136 30.77% 6.49 8.49 30.82%
CX43 0.0192 0.0256 33.33% 11.99 15.99 33.36%
CX53 0.036 0.0473 31.39% 22.49 29.49 31.12%
Germany (FSN/NBG) / Finland (HEL) Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CAX11 0.0088 0.0112 27.27% 5.49 6.99 27.32%
CAX21 0.0152 0.02 31.58% 9.49 12.49 31.61%
CAX31 0.0296 0.04 35.14% 18.49 24.99 35.15%
CAX41 0.0593 0.0777 31.03% 36.99 48.49 31.09%
CCX13 0.0296 0.0809 173.31% 18.49 50.49 173.07%
CCX23 0.0593 0.1626 174.20% 36.99 101.49 174.37%
CCX33 0.1186 0.2612 120.24% 73.99 162.99 120.29%
CCX43 0.2364 0.5216 120.64% 147.49 325.49 120.69%
CCX53 0.4727 1.0088 113.41% 294.99 629.49 113.39%
CCX63 0.7083 1.6138 127.84% 441.99 1006.99 127.83%
CPX22 0.0152 0.0368 142.11% 9.49 22.99 142.26%
CPX32 0.0256 0.0673 162.89% 15.99 41.99 162.60%
CPX42 0.0481 0.1314 173.18% 29.99 81.99 173.39%
CPX52 0.0689 0.1907 176.78% 42.99 118.99 176.79%
CPX62 0.0953 0.2452 157.29% 59.49 152.99 157.17%
CX23 0.008 0.0104 30.00% 4.99 6.49 30.06%
CX33 0.0128 0.016 25.00% 7.99 9.99 25.03%
CX43 0.0224 0.0296 32.14% 13.99 18.49 32.17%
CX53 0.0425 0.0561 32.00% 26.49 34.99 32.09%
USA (ASH/HIL) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0272 0.0697 156.25% 16.99 43.49 155.97%
CCX23 0.0545 0.1402 157.25% 33.99 87.49 157.40%
CCX33 0.1042 0.2259 116.79% 64.99 140.99 116.94%
CCX43 0.2083 0.4479 115.03% 129.99 279.49 115.01%
CCX53 0.4167 0.863 107.10% 259.99 538.49 107.12%
CCX63 0.625 1.3782 120.51% 389.99 853.49 118.85%
CPX11 0.0096 0.028 191.67% 5.99 17.49 191.99%
CPX21 0.0192 0.0513 167.19% 11.99 31.99 166.81%
CPX31 0.0336 0.1001 197.92% 20.99 62.49 197.71%
CPX41 0.0625 0.1931 208.96% 38.99 120.49 209.03%
CPX51 0.125 0.3814 205.12% 77.99 237.99 205.15%
USA (ASH/HIL)Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.032 0.0817 155.31% 19.99 50.99 155.08%
CCX23 0.0641 0.165 157.41% 39.99 102.99 157.54%
CCX33 0.1234 0.266 115.56% 76.99 165.99 115.60%
CCX43 0.246 0.528 114.63% 153.49 329.49 114.67%
CCX53 0.492 1.0184 106.99% 306.99 635.49 107.01%
CCX63 0.738 1.642 122.49% 460.49 1014.49 120.31%
CPX11 0.0112 0.0328 192.86% 6.99 20.49 193.13%
CPX21 0.0224 0.0601 168.30% 13.99 37.49 167.98%
CPX31 0.04 0.1178 194.50% 24.99 73.49 194.08%
CPX41 0.0745 0.2267 204.30% 46.49 141.49 204.35%
CPX51 0.1482 0.4479 202.23% 92.49 279.49 202.18%
Singapore (SIN) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0441 0.0865 96.15% 27.49 53.99 96.40%
CCX23 0.0825 0.1739 110.79% 51.49 108.49 110.70%
CCX33 0.1554 0.2796 79.92% 96.99 174.49 79.91%
CCX43 0.286 0.5465 91.08% 178.49 340.99 91.04%
CCX53 0.613 1.0449 70.46% 382.49 651.99 70.46%
CCX63 1.0048 1.661 65.31% 626.99 1,036.49 65.31%
CPX12 0.0128 0.0248 93.75% 7.99 15.49 93.87%
CPX22 0.0256 0.0425 66.02% 15.99 26.49 65.67%
CPX32 0.0521 0.0785 50.67% 32.49 48.99 50.78%
CPX42 0.0897 0.1498 67.00% 55.99 93.49 66.98%
CPX52 0.125 0.2155 72.40% 77.99 134.49 72.45%
CPX62 0.161 0.2756 58.42% 100.49 171.99 58.43%
Singapore (SIN) Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0521 0.1017 95.20% 32.49 63.49 95.41%
CCX23 0.0969 0.2051 111.66% 60.49 127.99 111.59%
CCX33 0.1835 0.3301 79.89% 114.49 205.99 79.92%
CCX43 0.3373 0.6442 90.99% 210.49 401.99 90.98%
CCX53 0.7235 1.2332 70.45% 451.49 769.49 70.43%
CCX63 1.1851 1.9607 65.45% 739.49 1,223.49 65.45%
CPX12 0.0152 0.0288 89.47% 9.49 17.99 89.57%
CPX22 0.0296 0.0497 67.91% 18.49 30.99 67.60%
CPX32 0.0617 0.0929 50.57% 38.49 57.99 50.66%
CPX42 0.1058 0.1763 66.64% 65.99 109.99 66.68%
CPX52 0.1482 0.254 71.39% 92.49 158.49 71.36%
CPX62 0.1899 0.3253 71.30% 118.49 202.99 71.31%