Comment by binarymax
10 days ago
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.
Late reply. This is all assuming that the corps producing the hardware will live in the same world as before this squeeze. The reality is that the combination of a highly concetrated manufacturing landscape + the global political environment means that the same games that were played with ASML, Nvidia and TSMC will likely be repeated with the relatively lightly affected generic manufacturers of components. Given the close connections the hyperscaler CEOs have with the USGov, and the leverage the US has over South Korea and Japan, one executive order is enough to tip over the entire manufacturing sector and supply chain to the hyperscaler’s advantage.
As others noted, only the Chinese sector has a chance to fill the space for consumers in this nightmare scenario.
> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
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So far its just metastasized not smoothed out. GPUs then RAM then electricity then disk… long way to go till land then sunlight, hope we don’t get there!
Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years.
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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.
> I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
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I did exactly this and suggest it. Used Dell Latitude (the one I got is one from 2019 - model 5300). I put Linux Mint Debian Edition (https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php) on it. Works absolutely great.
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
I got an old hp elitedesk off of eBay, I don’t remember the cpu but it has 8 gig of ram and an ssd. Ubuntu+dokku and it runs all my self hosted stuff.
in the U.S & other regions it sucks cz you can hardly ever get static ip addresses at residential addresses to host things & expose to the internet
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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.
> the free investor money does run out
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
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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
I’ll wager $5 semiconductor companies are issuing stock to fund capital investment because that’s what you do when these things happen.
> 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.
It's quite crazy to imagine personal computing to die. It always felt as a staple, that I could always buy components, that someone would manufacturer them and I could cobble together a machine. But now the prices going so high that it kills the market is... just sad.
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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?
How many 90s computer components went up in price a couple of years after release?
And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic.
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
What they conveniently leave out is that it sometimes takes over a decade for a correction
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The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.
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It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online.
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Idealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that.
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I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?
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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.
To clarify: UC San Diego is planning to build a cluster of 2000 Pixel phones for computer science class use and Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones.
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Or they did it for positive PR.
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
It’s not just the hyperscalers, it’s also the boom in personal projects being launched. AI has massively decreased the bar to entry, and a lot more people need servers compared to before
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.
I believe that the explosion of software _production_ in the last 6-12 months in all areas of society is beginning to run headlong into a global bottleneck in the capacity to _deliver_ and _distribute_ that much more software.
Unlike previous boom/bust cycles, I do not believe that demand that's driving the capacity bring-up that's underway right now is going to level off in the near future.
I am personally witnessing teams at my employer that were previously unable to produce software - non-Eng teams - that are now empowered to do so, and some of them are building some cool stuff. I think this is happening at every company everywhere, and I think when we and everyone else solve the "how do we deliver and govern this stuff?" problem there's going to be an even bigger unlock.
Wild times.
My personal experience says yes. I doubled my usage of personal servers because it's so easy to self-host when I have an LLM holding my hand.
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.
Right, instead of using a managed serverless platform where you pay a premium for proprietary cloud provided services to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers, you can… pay a premium for proprietary cloud-hosted AI engines to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers.
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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.
But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up.
If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.
Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
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OVH just raised their VPS prices by about 30%.
They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.
Crazy stuff
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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!
It's almost 100% profit actually, because ISPs are willing to pay to be connected to Google network
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.
Graviton has had a price increase nearly every generation. So not really related.
AWS now has unmetered egress, but it's pretty expensive. A 10G port is $8k a month.
Got some info about this?
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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.
Oh, didn't realize that. Any recommendation for mitigating that if deployed there? Had thought about putting something on Vultr in a few months. Also open to any other good recommendations for providers that have a managed Postgres.
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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.
They're not the only ones, Anthropic and Google recently announced they'll be using xAI data centers, and I wouldn't be surprised if AWS also started to have capacity problems in the near future.
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.