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Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

61–70 of 312 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#61
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

> The fact that electricity costs is the dominating cost of cloud computing

In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than 10%.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#62

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.

The primary reason is: Winter is coming...

But there is more:

- They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind

- But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle the peaks), especially not in winter

- Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country, and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop natural gas, when we pay billions for it

- Hmm, well there is 'a country' that is using natural gas to do politics, but hey, they got Crimea now, what would they want more, when we are still paying that billions to them. Let's build another gas pipe, and pretend nothing can go wrong, while ignoring that negativistic east-european countries preparing for worst case scenario

- And, what about shutting down that completely functional nuclear power plants ? We want to be green, lets do that.

- Oops, our lovely natural gas supplier attacked another country

- Oops, our natural gas power plants are somehow costly to run now, lets burn some coal

- Oops, coal is also getting a bit expensive

- Oops, our not very friendly natural gas supplier, occasionally stops natural gas now

- Ooops, our natural gas reservoirs will be not full before winter

- Oooops, winter is coming...

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#63

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.

Finland has a lot of nuclear and hydro, which are stable sources. Hydro can get dirt cheap since production is basically constant even if demand is low.

Hydro may be stable, but prices are soaring in Norway as well, despite being mostly hydro. The entire energy market in Europe is having a tough time.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#64
post #61
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

> The fact that electricity costs is the dominating cost of cloud computing In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than 10%.

The article didn't seem to say how much they're raising prices, only that they're raising prices due to electricity.

Where are you pulling seeing the price change %? I may need to edit that to marginal, if it's only 10%. :)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#66
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

ARM on desktop => ARM for development => ARM on servers => ARM on cloud. Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.

> Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS

Are you saying Apple is going to roll out an AWS competitor to the public? I find that highly unlikely.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#67
post #7

Interesting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much, that’s a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal consumer, I’d have thought they’d get better discounts.

Colo costs are just insane compared to consumer prices.

At home: 12 or 42 €/month (details¹), depending on whether I want gigabit upload or not. Advantages:

- fast LAN speeds,

- don't need to go anywhere to do hardware maintenance/replacement/additions,

- low cost,

- partially solar powered if you have solar panels,

- don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like),

- likely you have more space available, and you get to share that gigabit uplink if you pay for it for your server.

Colocation: €128 / month (120 base price, 8 electricity in germany; if you want to fly to Finland for accessing your hardware, then electricity is half the price). Advantages:

- redundant power supply,

- maybe noise if you don't have a separate room for this stuff,

- you can do this also if your home has poor internet.

¹ I pay €50/month for my internet connection regardless (I didn't buy a bigger bundle for the server), the server uses ~35W average which makes ~26 kWh/month which makes ~9 €/month. Though, I'd pay the base connection fee for electricity anyway so the added cost is even a bit lower. Rent is about €6 per m², but I have my stuff in between storage (above and below) so the column above those 1.5 m² is basically cut in three, coming out to about 3 €/month added cost. The added cost of hosting a server at home is about 12 euros per month. If I wanted to upgrade to gigabit symmetric internet, that would be an added 30 €/month (total 42 €/month). At 35W it doesn't make much of a difference for cooling, but there is no AC installed in my home anyway.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#68
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that electricity costs is the dominating cost of cloud computing In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than 10%.

The article didn't seem to say how much they're raising prices, only that they're raising prices due to electricity. Where are you pulling seeing the price change %? I may need to edit that to marginal , if it's only 10%. :)

The article gives the prices in a table in you scroll down a bit :

electricity/air conditioning rate old price* new price*\

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh

Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#69
post #47

Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.

It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
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