Hetzner increased dedicated server prices 3-4x

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.

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.

And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic.

I wish I could say I am disappointed.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

It’s also trivial to use now. With AI, there’s no meaningful additional work in using a VM.

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.

I have a Vultr account but it's very lightly used. Came recommended by Derek Sivers^1

1. https://sive.rs/ti

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.

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.

It's a bit higher than 4 now.

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

It's old servers they have already written off and would otherwise decommission. You're basically only paying for power and network traffic.

Seems the driver is DDR5 memory, DDR4 servers are not affected from my quick look.

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.

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.

Not reliable, from a buying/availability perspective.

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

Hetzner is actually somewhat reliable, and OVH is not.

OVH is more expensive

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

And yet the hardware cost increases caused by AI are not.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If there isn't a difference shouldn't my credit card be enough?

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.