"For better understanding, I would like to provide some additional notes: Hetzner Online's pricing strategy has remained unchanged for many years. Our prices are based on the respective purchasing conditions as well as internal operating costs. The key pricing factors — for example, depreciation periods and profit margins — have remained constant over many years and will continue to do so.
The past nine months were an exception. During this period, we have increasingly subsidized new server hardware and passed on the increased purchasing costs to our customers only with significant delay. We are currently observing a similar development at numerous other data center operators as well.
The increased purchasing prices will likely lead to a new market level. However, our established price-performance ratio will change as a result only temporarily — if at all — until the market has adjusted to the new conditions. Hetzner Online has always stood for an outstanding price-performance ratio, and that will not change in the future either.
I am convinced that the current hardware crisis will neither sustainably improve nor worsen our competitive position. Rather, I expect that our relative position in the market will hardly change even within the new pricing structure. In the short term, shifts may indeed occur, since the individual market participants make their price adjustments at different points in time. In the medium and long term, however, I do not expect any significant changes to the competitive landscape."
Thank you for sharing this statement. In other words, we now experience the secondary costs of the AI boom (and supply chain pressure). It won't get cheaper. I fully understand the decision of Hetzner. And even though I like low prices, the prices are still fair imo.
I'm happy they increase prices if it helps them to stay sustainable and independent. Companies spend millions on US cloud providers and AI subscriptions, but suddenly one of the best hosting options in Europe is not worth 30% more. Especially with regards to the overall cost increases.
Several random anti-Hetzner hate threads have popped up on social media and to me it shows that Hetzner is doing something right.
Nobody wants Hetzner to be bought by Oracle or Amazon.
afaik prices for the big cloud providers haven't changed this much. Their instance prices are already inflated and they're probably willing to eat into their own margins to keep prices stable and just wait out the capex increase (also probably a drop in the bucket next to the hyperscale rollout).
People love to say how great it is for these alt clouds to have lower prices, until they're exposed to market forces with a company unable or unwilling to eat their profit margins.
There is not a snowballs chance in hell that MS or Amazon isn't charging you at your absolute pain tolerance. As that tolerance goes up because the baseline of the market raises prices, the "hyperscalers" will too, but tenfold.
I think you're making a false comparison. Big cloud providers have many more hidden config settings they can tune to save costs, they are not offering dedicated server with specific hardware. Hetzner's dedicated servers have a specific hardware configuration that you are contractually obligated to.
It's interesting because there are still smaller providers who are offering slightly better prices than hetzner and large hyperscalers are keeping costs static.
Hardware costs are insane, no doubting it but it's more important than ever to be looking at the servers you're buying. For example a stick of 32GB DDR5 6400 ECC is about 1050 vs 16GB DDR5 6400 ECC is only 280 (pounds in this case), so if you can cope with say 192GB of ram in a 12 slot server, it's almost cheaper to buy two 192GB RAM servers than one 384GB one.
Hah..... we recently had to buy a couple hundred 16GB DDR5 RDIMM for a few new servers and i wish it was only 280 pounds.... Double it and you are close....
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.
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.
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.
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
> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing.
This.
People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.
> 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.
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
doesn't this imply that they buy massive hardware and thus replace their hardware constantly? At what rate? It seems the rate is massive. I'd gladly use a 4year old server for the old price.
> The price adjustment applies to new orders and cloud instance rescales starting from 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST.
> For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I am surely/definitely happy that the price doesn't increase for me. If it increased for everyone, I'd expect a much smaller jump. Also I'm not sure how much flexibility they have to increase the price for everyone without notice, given that they are in EU.
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.
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 seems to be 2-tier pricing. You can pay 4x for guaranteed delivery... they may have excess capacity at some point (-LTD SKUs) and then you can pay 1.1x while stocks last.
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.
Just out of curiosity, which parts of AWS were you using? EC2 and something else?
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
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).
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
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".
Yes, but Hetzner is not "some low-end provider". They have proper, high-quality datacenters with all the redundancy you want, excellent connectivity, great service, and much better privacy controls than any American company would be legally able to provide. Hetzner also offers instant scalability and has Terraform and Ansible support for infrastructure automation.
We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).
The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.
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.
I run a few stats site for a video game, and the overall hosting right now is ~€220 on Hetzner for a AX51-NVMe + AX61-NVMe + some extra SSDs + HDDs --- so that's the same price as just a AX42-1 in the new pricing model which is insane. If one of the servers goes down I'd need to likely shut down one of the projects or massively change the architecture.
I was interested in Netcup for their dedicated-core vservers (they call them "root servers" although it is a kvm instance on bare metal - probably overprovisioned so also not really dedicated cores). What is your overall experience with them?
Which package is your 9€ one? The root server start at 13€ - maybe they price hiked already? Netcups vServers aren't really comparable to the CCX13 of Hetzner, as they have no guaranteed resources - those will be the root server on Netcups side.
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?
US customers have much higher budgets (startup funding) and create much more hassle (wars, tariffs, overall humiliation) than European customers. It's a bold decision but they are apparently seeing a lot of demand and I'd say let the American customers pay for the costs they are causing. Call it symbolic "freedom fee" and they're happy about it.
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.
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
"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)
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.
They do, as long as possible and for free. Some comments said if they can't source replacement parts they may force you to change server. I wonder if they'll still grandfather your discount in that case.
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.
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.
I use a cheapo VPS there to host some git repositories. It's going from $6.99/mo to $20.49. Who in their right mind would pay that for a 2 core/2 GB VPS? It makes me wonder if they are trying to shed some unwanted customers.
That's good to know. Still, I'm stuck on that little instance. Scaling it means an exorbitant price increase. I would just leave for another provider at that point - and maybe that's what they're going for. They're not kicking people out immediately but making it uncomfortable to stay.
I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.
Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.
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.
Are more plants coming? I think I heard it won't be many of them, because it's risky.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
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.
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.
I heard a long time stock market analyst saying the semiconductor industry always has boom and bust cycles. This is a boom (for the semiconductor industry) and it will be followed by a bust as demand rapidly drops off, just like every other time.
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.
Contabo is still notably cheaper than it was 2 years ago. I just shut down a 2 year old VPS and made a new one because it was ~20% cheaper than it was two years ago, and I also get more CPU and more RAM
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.
Also they're mostly a VPS provider with some "dedicated servers" available after you talk to sales.
Hetzner is great because you can build from dedicated servers your own infra and not suffer the multi tenant issues on virtualized servers. (IOPS exhaustion for example)
I am no environmental activist, but Hetzner's carbon footprint is so much worse than the rest that it's hard to ignore. I've always avoided them as a matter of principle.
Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas.
As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).
Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.
Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.
Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.
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?
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.
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.
Hetzner could win back some of that love if they release the long-rumoured managed Postgres offering at a price that undercuts most of the competition.
I'd prefer that they concentrate on the "cloud servers" (better networking, more availability, BOYIP via BGP). You can always just host Postgres yourself on one of those servers.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Poor companies missing out on consumer money.
It’s funny to think about. One might lose their apartment because they can’t pay rent. Then they’re homeless. What does that mean? As long as they are eating, at least some moeny is circulating. Maybe not as much because of dumpster diving and things like that. Meanwhile what was lost? One less family to pay for rent. Which means that an apartment is vacant. And rent is mostly not productive. It is mostly rent on estate ownership.
The first level of destituness (for renters at least) might not lead to less productive money circulating. But less rent money. Then when that happens to enough people you simply have more vacant apartments. Okay, a little loss of productive circulation since no one is wearing out the floors etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle cut their Always Free ARM offering in half CPU & memory-wise, Hetzner is increasing prices by up to 300%. I think that this is going to push even more people to pick up a mini PC and forward ports to it on their LAN.
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.
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.
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
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.
> 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.
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.
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
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
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
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?).
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
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.
Time to optimize your software stack. Stop using slow interpreted languages & bloated "scaling" setups in favour of tightly integrated natively compiled systems.
AI is no different from machine doing what took people earlier. In fact on the scale of many other things (spinning Jenny that could replace dozens, for one) this is probably benign. Because it also multiplies costs. Earlier innovations not only did it faster with less manpower, they did it cheaper too!
We are still around, enjoying fairly decent lifestyles for the most part, if you take away effect of politics, governance etc.
"Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers, as well as the future products that we will introduct using the new product structure."
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.
I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but, at some point it'll be worth looking at getting a static IP address and using Cloudflare tunnels to serve toyish projects from your home netwerk. Just need to work out how to firewall it properly from the rest of the home network.
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.
1. Inelastic supply. It takes quite a while to increase production.
2. Volatility creates uncertainty, which always increases cost. And we've seen extreme volatility in energy prices and tariffs under the current US administration.
Damn. I set up a 2vCPU 4GB RAM VPS on Linode for my web app (Linode 4GB). Was ready to move there. Then I found Hetzner has servers in the US and I could get more for my budget (~30$/month). Not anymore!
CPX22 (2vCPU 4GB) seems to be the exact same price as Linode 4GB (24$/month).
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%.
Just throwing it out there I've got an AX162-R (48c EPYC) with 128GB additional memory (384GB DDR5 total) that's been running a side project of mine for a year or so... I could be talked into moving that project if someone had a need for the hardware.
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.
im moving my stuff as we speak,
if those were just vms for services, no biggie
but if you run business thats tied to repackaging compute - well, yeah there are better options
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.
That's the difference between European and US companies and that's exemplification of the problem that Europe has. A big problem.
Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.
Having said that...
They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.
As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.
So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.
Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?
Do you want hetzner identity management? Why? Xkcd standards situation? They host servers, that is what they do, I buy groceries from Walmart and I don't complain Walmart doesn't support Azure Entra ID.
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.
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.
AI is a nothingburger, it's just the latest capital flight. Undeployed capital needs to go somewhere and this time it's AI, last time cryptocurrency, before that metaverse. One might reasonably ask why these bubbles keep getting bigger and bigger and the answer to that is almost entirely USA government policy which is to squeeze labor and expand capital at every opportunity.
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
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.
Agreed. We enjoyed a decade or more or cheap surplus hardware sitting in data centres, after the dot com crash. Rinse and repeat after the AI bubble bursts in x time from now (my forecast is x = 2-3 years).
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.
Not ragebait, actual question. Isn't this kind of scenario exactly the kind of thing where capitalism is supposed to generate a lot of competition that makes everything higher quality and cheaper for the end consumer?
There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?
The shortage is currently caused by the big players refusing to up their output because it seems likely the current increased demand is only a spike which will flatten out again in a year or two. I imagine that's the same reason it isn't appealing for new players as, indeed, by the time they get over the humps of "sheer expertise, capital, and time" etc. the bubble might have burst.
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?
>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.
Summary: everything is 3 to 5 times more expensive. Existing plans grandfathered in. Existing servers will come back into circulation at their previous prices as they get canceled. Don't buy.
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 ...
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)
I’m so tired of this timeline. Rich people pillaging everything, governments happily allowing it, cost of living rising everywhere, a lot of environmental improvements have been put on pause (to prioritize profits for the aforementioned people)
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]
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Hetzner Founder and CEO Martin Hetzner shared a response to the critics in the Hetzner Forum (user benji) over here: https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/32635-standardisi...
Translated from German via Claude:
"For better understanding, I would like to provide some additional notes: Hetzner Online's pricing strategy has remained unchanged for many years. Our prices are based on the respective purchasing conditions as well as internal operating costs. The key pricing factors — for example, depreciation periods and profit margins — have remained constant over many years and will continue to do so. The past nine months were an exception. During this period, we have increasingly subsidized new server hardware and passed on the increased purchasing costs to our customers only with significant delay. We are currently observing a similar development at numerous other data center operators as well. The increased purchasing prices will likely lead to a new market level. However, our established price-performance ratio will change as a result only temporarily — if at all — until the market has adjusted to the new conditions. Hetzner Online has always stood for an outstanding price-performance ratio, and that will not change in the future either. I am convinced that the current hardware crisis will neither sustainably improve nor worsen our competitive position. Rather, I expect that our relative position in the market will hardly change even within the new pricing structure. In the short term, shifts may indeed occur, since the individual market participants make their price adjustments at different points in time. In the medium and long term, however, I do not expect any significant changes to the competitive landscape."
Thank you for sharing this statement. In other words, we now experience the secondary costs of the AI boom (and supply chain pressure). It won't get cheaper. I fully understand the decision of Hetzner. And even though I like low prices, the prices are still fair imo.
I'm happy they increase prices if it helps them to stay sustainable and independent. Companies spend millions on US cloud providers and AI subscriptions, but suddenly one of the best hosting options in Europe is not worth 30% more. Especially with regards to the overall cost increases.
Several random anti-Hetzner hate threads have popped up on social media and to me it shows that Hetzner is doing something right.
Nobody wants Hetzner to be bought by Oracle or Amazon.
afaik prices for the big cloud providers haven't changed this much. Their instance prices are already inflated and they're probably willing to eat into their own margins to keep prices stable and just wait out the capex increase (also probably a drop in the bucket next to the hyperscale rollout).
People love to say how great it is for these alt clouds to have lower prices, until they're exposed to market forces with a company unable or unwilling to eat their profit margins.
People love to say how great these big clouds are, until they discover they've been paying ten times the market price outside of crises.
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There is not a snowballs chance in hell that MS or Amazon isn't charging you at your absolute pain tolerance. As that tolerance goes up because the baseline of the market raises prices, the "hyperscalers" will too, but tenfold.
There is no price stability to be found with MS.
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I think you're making a false comparison. Big cloud providers have many more hidden config settings they can tune to save costs, they are not offering dedicated server with specific hardware. Hetzner's dedicated servers have a specific hardware configuration that you are contractually obligated to.
It's interesting because there are still smaller providers who are offering slightly better prices than hetzner and large hyperscalers are keeping costs static.
Hardware costs are insane, no doubting it but it's more important than ever to be looking at the servers you're buying. For example a stick of 32GB DDR5 6400 ECC is about 1050 vs 16GB DDR5 6400 ECC is only 280 (pounds in this case), so if you can cope with say 192GB of ram in a 12 slot server, it's almost cheaper to buy two 192GB RAM servers than one 384GB one.
Hah..... we recently had to buy a couple hundred 16GB DDR5 RDIMM for a few new servers and i wish it was only 280 pounds.... Double it and you are close....
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.
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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.
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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.
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Is everyone forgetting that even hyper scaler hardware has a finite service life that isn't that long as hardware continues to rapidly improve?
In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
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
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> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing.
This.
People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.
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> 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.
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s?
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And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic.
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
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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.
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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
Do you believe there are many enough of these at scale to make any meaningful impact?
The vast majority of personal projects are not built by those receiving FAANG salaries.
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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
I wonder what the effect of "move services to Europe ASAP" is on this.
It’s also trivial to use now. With AI, there’s no meaningful additional work in using a VM.
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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.
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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.
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Egress pricing? That's one of their highest margin products! Compute is the one that's being squeezed!
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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).
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.
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AWS now has unmetered egress, but it's pretty expensive. A 10G port is $8k a month.
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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.
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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.
I spend about $100/month with Vultr. The uptime in the datacenters my VMs are hosted in is extremely good.
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.
Microsoft can't supply sufficient compute capacity to itself; they're in the news today for considering AWS for capacity.
Well, that's really the final humiliation for Azure, isn't it.
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Or their margins were/are large enough that they are less hurt, and are instead attempting to weather the storm without touching pricing.
What happens to these platforms when there's nothing left to access them? That's where we're headed.
They sell it to us.
Why would their keep their costs down. Get business hooked on their product and then ramp up the price.
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?
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> 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.
doesn't this imply that they buy massive hardware and thus replace their hardware constantly? At what rate? It seems the rate is massive. I'd gladly use a 4year old server for the old price.
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They are luckily only applying this to:
> The price adjustment applies to new orders and cloud instance rescales starting from 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST.
> For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I am surely/definitely happy that the price doesn't increase for me. If it increased for everyone, I'd expect a much smaller jump. Also I'm not sure how much flexibility they have to increase the price for everyone without notice, given that they are in EU.
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.
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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.
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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
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ARM instances (CAX) are all consistently at 30%.
It seems to be 2-tier pricing. You can pay 4x for guaranteed delivery... they may have excess capacity at some point (-LTD SKUs) and then you can pay 1.1x while stocks last.
It's so bad I will be looking at moving off Hetzner at this point. 3x is too much.
The new prices are here: 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.
Server auctions are more expensive than last month, I feel like 50% more at a minimum.
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Ah, so this is ANOTHER price increase in a short timeframe? Thought I read about this before
No, this is the same prize increase. The post from 38 days ago was the announcement this one will come, now it is active.
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
I literally migrated last week, and saved 8x by ditching AWS for Hetzner.
Just out of curiosity, which parts of AWS were you using? EC2 and something else?
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
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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).
Which plan? Because even with this hetzner price increase it's still 2-3x cheaper than scaleway.
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didn't Scaleway also increase prices 1st of this month?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944914
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
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".
Yes, but Hetzner is not "some low-end provider". They have proper, high-quality datacenters with all the redundancy you want, excellent connectivity, great service, and much better privacy controls than any American company would be legally able to provide. Hetzner also offers instant scalability and has Terraform and Ansible support for infrastructure automation.
We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).
The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.
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Hetzner has a decent terraform provider btw
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?
Not for me at least, I had to fire up the console and try creating a new server.
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.
I run a few stats site for a video game, and the overall hosting right now is ~€220 on Hetzner for a AX51-NVMe + AX61-NVMe + some extra SSDs + HDDs --- so that's the same price as just a AX42-1 in the new pricing model which is insane. If one of the servers goes down I'd need to likely shut down one of the projects or massively change the architecture.
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There's always lowendbox.com but Hetzner was more reliable than most of those vendors.
On netcup I'm paying only 9€ for better specs. AMD 4 cores and 8GB ram. Worth looking at their offers/deals section.
I was interested in Netcup for their dedicated-core vservers (they call them "root servers" although it is a kvm instance on bare metal - probably overprovisioned so also not really dedicated cores). What is your overall experience with them?
Which package is your 9€ one? The root server start at 13€ - maybe they price hiked already? Netcups vServers aren't really comparable to the CCX13 of Hetzner, as they have no guaranteed resources - those will be the root server on Netcups side.
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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.
US customers have much higher budgets (startup funding) and create much more hassle (wars, tariffs, overall humiliation) than European customers. It's a bold decision but they are apparently seeing a lot of demand and I'd say let the American customers pay for the costs they are causing. Call it symbolic "freedom fee" and they're happy about it.
Salaries
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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.
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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
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax102-u/
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
"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...
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.
First two sentences. Only new plans are affected. Hold onto your servers as long as you can.
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.
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Also running an AX41-NVMe for 6 years now. I cannot remember, but they do replace defective parts, right?
They do, as long as possible and for free. Some comments said if they can't source replacement parts they may force you to change server. I wonder if they'll still grandfather your discount in that case.
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.
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Yeah. If Hetzner prices are equivalent to AWS, what is the point in choosing them.
Don't forget to count your EBS and egress fees when you make your AWS spreadsheet.
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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.
A better analogy is renting a car, and then jacking up prices for existing rentals, rather than just new ones.
They are not raising prices for existing contracts, only new ones.
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…
I use a cheapo VPS there to host some git repositories. It's going from $6.99/mo to $20.49. Who in their right mind would pay that for a 2 core/2 GB VPS? It makes me wonder if they are trying to shed some unwanted customers.
You continue to pay the old price as long as you don't change your plan!
That's good to know. Still, I'm stuck on that little instance. Scaling it means an exorbitant price increase. I would just leave for another provider at that point - and maybe that's what they're going for. They're not kicking people out immediately but making it uncomfortable to stay.
I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.
Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.
Of course, this is pure speculation on my part.
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.
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.
Are more plants coming? I think I heard it won't be many of them, because it's risky.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
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.
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> 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.
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I heard a long time stock market analyst saying the semiconductor industry always has boom and bust cycles. This is a boom (for the semiconductor industry) and it will be followed by a bust as demand rapidly drops off, just like every other time.
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?
I needed to spin up a tiny little logging server this morning. Someone on Reddit recommended Datalix, so I'm trying their €2.50/mo VPS.
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Contabo price hasn't changed. I'm thinking of locking in some more VPS before it goes up.
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.
Contabo is still notably cheaper than it was 2 years ago. I just shut down a 2 year old VPS and made a new one because it was ~20% cheaper than it was two years ago, and I also get more CPU and more RAM
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.
Prices are going insane, and I am going for an alternative provider in the US.
I have 5 app nodes, 2 background workers, 1 DB replica, and 4 dev/staging instances.
On new Hetzner US pricing:
5 x CCX23 (app nodes): $514.95/mo 2 x CCX13 (workers): $101.98/mo 1 x CCX23 (DB replica): $102.99/mo 4 x CX33 (dev/staging): $39.96/mo Total: ~$759/mo or $9,108/year
On 3HCloud with equivalent specs:
5 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $160/mo 2 x 8 GB 2 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 1 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 4 x 4 GB 2 vCPU shared: $24/mo Storage ~250 GB total (SSD smart): ~$7.50/mo Total: ~$255/mo or $3,066/year
I will let you do the math.
Also they're mostly a VPS provider with some "dedicated servers" available after you talk to sales.
Hetzner is great because you can build from dedicated servers your own infra and not suffer the multi tenant issues on virtualized servers. (IOPS exhaustion for example)
What are you talking about? They have plenty of dedicated servers available at the click of a button...
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Looks great. But will 3hCloud be able to sustain those prices?
I don't think anyone can guarantee anything here, but I am going to bet that they will be a better-priced alternative.
Thanks Liriel how stable are they and how is 3HCloud support?
So far I haven't had any trouble, and they have servers right where I need them.
It had already been announced end of May that there would be a change: https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/standardization-and-price-...
I am no environmental activist, but Hetzner's carbon footprint is so much worse than the rest that it's hard to ignore. I've always avoided them as a matter of principle.
Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas. As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).
Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.
Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.
Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.
Hi there, we use a power supplier that uses renewable hydropower in Germany and Finland. See: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/nachhaltigkeit/ --Katie (Hetzner)
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...
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.
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.
Hetzner could win back some of that love if they release the long-rumoured managed Postgres offering at a price that undercuts most of the competition.
I'd prefer that they concentrate on the "cloud servers" (better networking, more availability, BOYIP via BGP). You can always just host Postgres yourself on one of those servers.
yeah that's what i do, but i kinda would like managed where i don't have to think about it ;)
I've been using their managed PostgreSQL for years. PostgreSQL is available on all of their managed servers (mx**).
that's not managed. that's just running PostresQL on a server, which is what I do already. I mean managed like https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
How much would you be willing to pay for managed Postgres?
Half the price of https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql?
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.
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.
Because heroku and aws were 10x previous hetzner price
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
Poor companies missing out on consumer money.
It’s funny to think about. One might lose their apartment because they can’t pay rent. Then they’re homeless. What does that mean? As long as they are eating, at least some moeny is circulating. Maybe not as much because of dumpster diving and things like that. Meanwhile what was lost? One less family to pay for rent. Which means that an apartment is vacant. And rent is mostly not productive. It is mostly rent on estate ownership.
The first level of destituness (for renters at least) might not lead to less productive money circulating. But less rent money. Then when that happens to enough people you simply have more vacant apartments. Okay, a little loss of productive circulation since no one is wearing out the floors etc.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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And yet the hardware cost increases caused by AI are not.
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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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Prices aren't high for the current capabilities or demand. It is all a bet on the future.
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.
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.
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 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.
"applies to new orders"
big sigh of relief
So glad I got all I needed recently.
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.
ah okay.
but do you know any alternatives to Hetzner for US?
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ovh ?
Oracle cut their Always Free ARM offering in half CPU & memory-wise, Hetzner is increasing prices by up to 300%. I think that this is going to push even more people to pick up a mini PC and forward ports to it on their LAN.
Maybe I should start a port-forwarding business.
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.
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
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.
This is crazy. I just got the CCX33 last week to migrate a Heroku db to it, that seems to have jumped over 100% now…? Need to reconsider
Edit: just noticed this is not retroactive. Still concerning looking forward.
I faintly seem to remember that Netcup is using Hetzner hardware at lower prices.
https://www.netcup.com/en/server
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>(world's first trillionaire anyone?)
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
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> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
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We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
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Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
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Finland and Taiwan has all of that with the added bonus of no Great Firewall of the Internet.
Social credit bonus for wild unfounded claims online is probably nice if you live in the top 5 megacities.
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There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
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We won't need to write our obituaries ;)
He wasn't just a software enginer — he was also a true innovator.
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> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
I think the upsides already hit, they just weren't meant for you and I
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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This a chamber of weights and measurements comment "I got mine, fuck everyone else".
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.
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> I can do more than I could before as the result of AI
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
Somebody will eventually know the difference.
And then you’re fired.
"The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours."
This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
Why does there need to be an "upside" legible to our profession?
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
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Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
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If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1].
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_...
(edit: formatting)
2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?
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You forgot tariffs, you can see the difference in the price increase between the US and the other places...
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
So far, there are more jobs.
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
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The upside is that people will no longer be obligated to struggle.
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality
I don't care about inequality, I care about the median.
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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
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The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
Quality of life for basically everyone and percentage of the earth living in poverty are getting much better.
What about all the employees who had options at SPCX and are now > millionaires?
There will be new jobs.
Are the new jobs in the room now?
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
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Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
What are these jobs?
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
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you know how many r are in strawberry
It's the human superpower!
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?).
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Toothpaste making did not completely take over the world's supply of plastic for caps.
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A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
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Less than there will be jobs in Antarctica.
Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons?
The next great American novels.
At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
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Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
Time to optimize your software stack. Stop using slow interpreted languages & bloated "scaling" setups in favour of tightly integrated natively compiled systems.
This gives permission for all other providers to do the same.
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 is no different from machine doing what took people earlier. In fact on the scale of many other things (spinning Jenny that could replace dozens, for one) this is probably benign. Because it also multiplies costs. Earlier innovations not only did it faster with less manpower, they did it cheaper too!
We are still around, enjoying fairly decent lifestyles for the most part, if you take away effect of politics, governance etc.
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?
https://ioflood.com/
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.
As a european and person valuing my privacy I wanted to chose an European provider, so far not impressed with their customer service...
Are the existing customers grandfathered to the old prices (at least for now)? I don't see the increase in my account.
Yes, this price hike is only for new servers or if you rescale, unlike the one in April that applied to everyone.
Come on, the article wasn't even that long :P
"Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers, as well as the future products that we will introduct using the new product structure."
The link goes halfway down the page so many people won't have scrolled up to the top.
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.
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.
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Where do you send emails from?
Same company that registers my domain as well. But I have readable local copy of all my emails.
There are large (x2, x3) price rises for US based servers but the German / Sweedish ones show much more reasonable increases ~30%
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 haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but, at some point it'll be worth looking at getting a static IP address and using Cloudflare tunnels to serve toyish projects from your home netwerk. Just need to work out how to firewall it properly from the rest of the home network.
A dumb and simple solution is separate physical routers for the home stuff and for the homelab stuff. Each group of clients is behind its own NAT.
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?
1. Inelastic supply. It takes quite a while to increase production.
2. Volatility creates uncertainty, which always increases cost. And we've seen extreme volatility in energy prices and tariffs under the current US administration.
Damn. I set up a 2vCPU 4GB RAM VPS on Linode for my web app (Linode 4GB). Was ready to move there. Then I found Hetzner has servers in the US and I could get more for my budget (~30$/month). Not anymore!
CPX22 (2vCPU 4GB) seems to be the exact same price as Linode 4GB (24$/month).
Linode dashboard is really good.
Another commenter mentioned this is about a huge leap in RAM and disk prices.
But why did the the CX33 only go up by €2 whereas the CPX32 went up by €21.50?
Both have 8GB of RAM, but the CPX32 has 80GB more storage and a bigger slice of CPU time.
You can see the same trend with CX23 vs CPX22.
In fact, CPX22 is now more than twice the price of CX23, despite having the same amount of disk and half the RAM.
Is there a CPU shortage now too?
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%.
because it's for new customers.
Just throwing it out there I've got an AX162-R (48c EPYC) with 128GB additional memory (384GB DDR5 total) that's been running a side project of mine for a year or so... I could be talked into moving that project if someone had a need for the hardware.
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.
Now you are still saving 3x. You underestimate how expensive AWS is.
If you already moved you're still saving 10x because the increases are for new orders.
they still save 3-5x
I wonder how this will affect their demand considering most people use them because they’re low cost
im moving my stuff as we speak, if those were just vms for services, no biggie but if you run business thats tied to repackaging compute - well, yeah there are better options
So are Hetzer VMs now only 1/2 the price of AWS rather than 1/5?
Looks like my AX162 isn't being retired anytime soon...
AX162 (256GB) went from €274 -> €844
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??
"First you corner the market, then you raise the prices" - Walter White
yeah, but hetzner isn't in this position, micron is
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.
Shades of the recent GitHub Copilot price hikes; class-leader in value to also-ran.
I wonder if there are underlying component cost connections or just corporate politics and the cold hands of the profit-people.
"price adjustment" isnt 2x+ price adjustment is like 5% or 10%
The price changes in Europe look reasonable, but US/SG are wild.
That's the difference between European and US companies and that's exemplification of the problem that Europe has. A big problem.
Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.
Having said that...
They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.
As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.
So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.
Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?
"Do one thing, and do it well."
Do you want hetzner identity management? Why? Xkcd standards situation? They host servers, that is what they do, I buy groceries from Walmart and I don't complain Walmart doesn't support Azure Entra ID.
They are reliable because they do one thing.
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.
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.
AI is a nothingburger, it's just the latest capital flight. Undeployed capital needs to go somewhere and this time it's AI, last time cryptocurrency, before that metaverse. One might reasonably ask why these bubbles keep getting bigger and bigger and the answer to that is almost entirely USA government policy which is to squeeze labor and expand capital at every opportunity.
I've had pretty good experiences with GTHost: https://gthost.com/
My guess is that due to AI Hetzner are having to invest heavily in GPU servers and these price increases are to allow this investment.
There is a huge amount of vendor financing available for this exact reason.
Hetzner presumably have been making use of this for years already.
It's far more likely they simply began raising prices and realized the market would tolerate it.
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
They are out of Ampere cloud instances as well. Where is a good place to get Ampere instances with similar cost and stability?
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.
I’ve had it catch a bunch of errors on borderline memory at home. (Despite the memory passing memtests).
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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 see that (new) EX44 servers are now 50% more expensive than before, ouch. Although there's none available anyway.
"Death of personal computing"
Renewed M1 Mac in 2026: <$400
Entry level MacBook in 2006: $1099
This hardware price spike is just a blip.
"Death of me"
Number of living cells when I'm 99: 100000000000000
Number of living cells when I'm a 2 day embryo: 50
This decline in my living cells is just a blip
When will people realize that Hetzner is not a good company? It is pretty bad to its customers.
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.
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Where can I see the source code for those models?
Agreed. We enjoyed a decade or more or cheap surplus hardware sitting in data centres, after the dot com crash. Rinse and repeat after the AI bubble bursts in x time from now (my forecast is x = 2-3 years).
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.
Not ragebait, actual question. Isn't this kind of scenario exactly the kind of thing where capitalism is supposed to generate a lot of competition that makes everything higher quality and cheaper for the end consumer?
There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?
The shortage is currently caused by the big players refusing to up their output because it seems likely the current increased demand is only a spike which will flatten out again in a year or two. I imagine that's the same reason it isn't appealing for new players as, indeed, by the time they get over the humps of "sheer expertise, capital, and time" etc. the bubble might have burst.
I've only been using this a lot for a few months now. I'm sorry to see this.
Price hike in Germany is minimal comparing to other DCs. Anyone knows why?
Price adjustment?! They just doubled their prices in some instances.
crazy price increases... my side projects just got killed
cloud up to 3x inexistent auction servers
AI must really be something.
waiting for the bear...
Me, a german, looking at my CAX11: this doesn't seem too bad
Americans:
So happy I came across this. Need to rethink a few projects.
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.
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OVH is more expensive
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>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.
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Is there a summary of price increases?
Summary: everything is 3 to 5 times more expensive. Existing plans grandfathered in. Existing servers will come back into circulation at their previous prices as they get canceled. Don't buy.
I don't get it, I have server for 5 years, its old hardware, nothing changed, why would they increase it?
They don't, in your case. Read the first 2 lines of the linked page.
Inflation, covering their increase in expenses by shoving it to their customers. Business 101.
Presumably you expect your provider to replace the hardware when it breaks.
A very welcome price hike
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)
Holy shit this is a big bump on a lot of them.
I’m so tired of this timeline. Rich people pillaging everything, governments happily allowing it, cost of living rising everywhere, a lot of environmental improvements have been put on pause (to prioritize profits for the aforementioned people)
Everything keeps going up.
I am now moving my stuff to cloudflare. Worker, Pages, R2, D1, heck even Hyperdrive with Neon or Supabase.
We can't factor out greed from this increase. Vote with your wallet! Please.
Moving my crap onto an old laptop and some kind of tunnel thing ... tomorrow.
Those are some huge increases.
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]
Ah yes the bait and switch. Didn't take long. Win some market share from unhappy AWS customers, hike the prices later
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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.
> 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.
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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?
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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.
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 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.
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.
It's a legal requirement in Germany exactly so the police can track who bought a spam server or a pirate server etc
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.
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"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.