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Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

131–140 of 312 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#131

If I am running Hetzner, I will be looking at an aggressive North American expansion. The energy cost gap between US and Europe are going to get bigger.

> The energy cost gap between US and Europe are going to get bigger.

Only briefly. The fracking boom is basically over:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/01/1027822/fracking...

We're presently running a good portion of our heating and electricity via the cheap gas that the fracking boom unlocked but that's going to taper off pretty quickly over the next decade. Because fracking was never a long-term solution.

Here's what's probably going to happen: Places like Europe will be investing heavily in renewable energy and locking in long-term contracts to get things like solar panels and wind turbine blades. Meanwhile the US will continue "business as usual" thanks to the largely for-profit power sector that only looks at next quarter. Then as the cheap gas from fracking runs out the US will be screwed and have the same problem that Europe is currently having.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#132
post #42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but looking at their map they will go live in Germany in 2025. Which is way too late to ride this out.

Continental Europe has a synchronous power grid, so Amazon can also use electricity produced outside of Germany for its German data centers.

Transit lines even in Germany are already at capacity, and the French are buying up whatever capacity they can because of their nuclear foolishness.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#133
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What other verticals does it have to seek out next, if growth is demanded by shareholders?

Apple shareholders aren’t demanding growth - they’re doing fine and given Apple’s history it’d make more sense to expand their consumer footprint, especially internationally, since that’s an area where Apple has considerable strength.

Cloud computing is also a hard field to move into: you need a significant amount of capital up front but customers will be slow to migrate. Google is struggling, I’m not sure what pitch Apple would come up with which is obviously better.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#134

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.

This picture shows you this crazyness: https://lampopumput.info/foorumi/attachments/1660195161813-p...

In north Norway the electricity costs: 0.75 c/kWh In south Norway the electricity costs: 307.00 c/kWh In Latvia it costs: 1,240.00 c/kWh

It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day, and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to its own market and prices drop considerably.

In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone followed, and now we are where we are.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#135
post #84
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€

You can use Nord Pool data for the last couple of years to do estimations. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...

You have day-ahead pricing at home? Please tell me how

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#136
Maybe at least increasing energy costs will force people and companies to ditch Electron-based "programs" (or Java/NodeJS in case of servers). Native is much more energy efficient by definition.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#137
post #97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€

I use $1 USD per watt per year, with electric prices around $0.10/kWh. Good enough to inform decisions like whether to leave a light on all the time ($5/year) or whether to purchase a NAS vs. used server ($40 vs. $300 per year). I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (th…

In sf electricity is closer to 4x that rate.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#138
post #72
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.

In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€

This lines up with my experience, I use ~2/3€ per year per watt

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#139

Just write efficient software, then you won’t need that many servers.

While this is true to a degree, development costs also come into play here. Let's simplify the problem a lot for a moment. Suppose the only thing you care about is cost and the only things you can control are the hardware you're running on and the code it runs. You can optimize your code to use less hardware, which would lower operational costs. But you also have to pay developers to optimize the code. In some cases,…

Well, let's play that game. 0.22€/kWh. So a 1kW server costs almost €2000/year. If you write Python vs. Go, the performance increase can be 10 fold, so you'd save €1800/yr. So when you're running 55 Python servers, you could earn 1 dev by rewriting (assuming €100k/yr, all in).

Not to upset anyone: there are a lot of assumptions. It's just ballpark numbers. There's a large difference between Python v. Go for tensorflow and as a Django backend.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#140
post #117
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany). Not really. Finland used to get gas from Russia but now it is mostly from a pipeline through Estonia to Latvia where it arrives in ships from wherever happens to be the cheapest (we are in process of building the first LNG terminal in Finland). Could be Norway but can also be USA, middle east, etc Finland just doesn't use much gas for electri…

There is no LNG terminal in Latvia the closest one is in Lithuania. Also AFAIK it doesn't even have enough capacity for the three baltic states let alone Finland. So chances are you most of the gas your buying through Estonia is Russian, just sold be some reseller.

Ok I got the country wrong but it is being bought from that terminal.

https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/helen-to-break-away-from-r... with similar moves by the other gas buyers in Finland.

Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is this pipeline (Balticconnector) as it connects to the Finnish gas grid that has its own pipeline to Russia and through the national grids and the pipeline between Lithuania and Poland that I guess allows access to the Russian pipeline in Poland.

So no clue where Estonia would get that Russian gas from.

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