Comment by Lucasoato
15 hours ago
Kudos to the BunnyNet team!
I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.
They are vastly cheaper even than their actual competition in the US like Digital Ocean.
edit:
Actually I had completely missed the most recent price update. I made this comment referring to April 1st pricing.
I did not receive a communication about the June 15th update, because it did not apply to existing resources.
This gives the breakdown:
https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.
Not sure. They were cheaper than DigitalOcean, to the point where 1 DO instance cost would give you 3 on Hetzner, but now they're at parity, and DO seems to have a better product.
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That is shockingly more expensive. Damn, rip hetzner.
Yes Hetzner is still vastly cheaper option but there are better options now compared to hetzner and the issue is the way that they handled the pricing.
Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time
Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.
I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(
Are you a Hetzner customer? I'm a Hetzner customer, and my prices did not increase by 3x (it was more like 1.25x) and the price increase was communicated months in advance and several times. I am running stuff on their older infra, so maybe they handled it differently? When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases and they are still one of the cheaper/cheapest options for what I need.
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Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.
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I don't know your use case... we use only dedicated root servers (from the auction) and the cost is stupidly low, we run 6 x 64GB RAM, 6TB HDDs Xeons and each of them (with the price increase) cost us like 40 euro/month, which is redoncolus (ridiculous). The only "inconvenience" is that we have to do the infra ourselves instead of having a button to click but wow, the cost savings alone are insane. A 4GB RAM/20GB disk/1vCPU in DigitalOcean costs 7 euros/month with a horrid I/O that can't even run a static site (we tried to migrate)
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
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I'm a Hetzner customer and this year's price rises have been well communicated.
Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.
I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.
They are competitive price wise, but less competent human wise.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
Not saying there are companies going above and beyond for customer service but getting a human answer at all when spending single-digit euros a month seems impressive enough; then again I am european so certainly biased :)
What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?
It is common for support to closely work with product and be able to respond with product roadmap and feature guidance.
At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds
My website traffic was a couple megabytes per month. I paid them for about 3 years for neglegible usage. Should I have zero expectation for paying because its cheap?
You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s
Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s
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Something similar happened to me with twilio - years ago I had a number 'parked' with them, my card expired, they never notified me, account went into arrears, and they cancelled my number. I was quite a special number, a UK '0200' number they'd released somehow, which shouldn't have been released. When they then acquired sendgrid, to add insult to injury I eventually found out that I was blacklisted and had to go through various validation procedures in order to do business with them, which I declined to do.
How much do you pay per month? Never expect a real human tech expert if you only pay 10$/month for something. A human talking to you for 15minutes destroys their entire profit margin on your payments for years. Unless you hit a bug or something in their system, support is expensive.
> ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq
I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.
> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.
> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:
Monthly usage for May, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for February, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for June, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2022: $1
First one didn't happen, so I don't know what the threshold is. But don't sell me a credit based system if it can go in the negative. Again for a progress bar that doesn't represent negatives.
You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!
I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.
So you unhappy with their pricing policy, which sounds understandable. But what were you expecting the support to do about this?
Maybe an acknowledgement that is a limitation that they understand and it would be something they could change in the future. Maybe showing understanding that it is surprising that a credit based system goes into negative.
I don't know, this was not the first time I got surprised by their system.
Before that I preloaded my account for a couple of credits (+vat). Then they switched to monthly invoicing (+vat for my existing credit). Basically I got double VATed (?) for the single initial payment. Paid for 12 months upfront only to have to recharge more quickly. Why should it be my problem that they have problems understanding billing and building billing systems?
In the past when I signed up it was advertised as usage based billing with the fixed monthly fee somewhere in the fine print? But there is also some usage minimum because at some point I started getting credits used. But not in the first few months where my traffic was under some threshold.
It doesn't help that they constantly move things around in their website with no clear thought. Like how I was corrected in another comment thread with information that isn't on the expected pages like pricing or terms of service.
Maybe they just lack understanding of user experience. Or I'm just a dumb user. I accept either theory.
edit: honestly I don't know if I was double VAT situation or just became a non VAT except company, and ain't gonna dig that up, but if it's the later they should have swallowed the cost for existing credit because changing expected outcomes mid way is no bueno.
> I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
Similar US vendors = you're lucky to even get someone to talk to or is too far from the chain to actually know so you get a "generic" answer.
(Before Linode was acquired) I called in and quickly got on the phone with a live human who was very familiar with the product and helpful, and sounded (accent) like US-based support.
At the time I was paying $12/month IIRC.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
I think you're confusing this with the more classic "it's not X, but Y" trope. That sentence is a comma splice that I'd expect LLMs to avoid by default.
Here's an answer you can write in Hackernews:
If you want I can make it sound more natural, just let me know and I'll change it!
>I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company
yeah, nice try, clanker.
no human being ever said that.
this might be a case of AI feedback, where people have been exposed to so much AI writing that they are starting to write like AI themselves.
I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
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As a general observation, because I can't vouch for who used AI or not, claiming LLM is also a quick way to dismiss things. LLMs learned from human output so it should be obvious to anyone that enough humans write or express ideas in that style that it became the default for LLMs. Ideas were rarely judged on their merit on the internet even before LLMs, this AI age just gave those looking for a shallow dismissal more options.
> That sounds like a GPT trope
It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.
This is how the bourgeoisie win. By getting the intellectuals to fight amongst themselves, not about the ideas in the text that might threaten them, but by an offkilter assessment of the idea's provenance. Come on. Maybe We could argue about immigrants instead?
To be fair, Hetzner didn't change prices for existing services, just for new customers / services added. I think that's a fair and realistic approach.
I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.
As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)
To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/
> not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company,
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
+1 (828) 660-1813 seems American, no?
The sales number is American, but the company is Slovenian.
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