Comment by Symbiote
19 hours ago
They are certain to run the machines at 100% continually, which will cost more than a typical customer who doesn't do this, and leave the old machines with less second-hand value for their auction thing afterwards.
19 hours ago
They are certain to run the machines at 100% continually, which will cost more than a typical customer who doesn't do this, and leave the old machines with less second-hand value for their auction thing afterwards.
I’d bet that main reason would be power. Running machines at 100% doesn’t subtract much extra , but a server running hard for 24 hours would use more power than a bursty workload.
(While we’re all speculating)
Also very subject to wildly unstable market dynamics. If it's profitable to mine, they'll want as much capacity as they can get, leading Hetzner to over provision. Then once it becomes unprofitable, they'll want to stop all mining, leaving a ton of idle, unpaid machines. Better to have stable customers that don't swing 0-100 utilization depending on ability to arbitrage compute costs.
I wouldn't be surprised if mining is also associated with fraud (e.g. using stolen credit cards to buy compute).