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Hetzner Price Adjustment

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Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#141

Post by mynameisvlad »

philjohn wrote: post #104
rr888 wrote: 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.

This is why for my home server I didn't get second hand servers but built the following in a 2U case that fits in my network closet: Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part, supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for…

My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives.

Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#142

Post by riskable »

samsk wrote: post #62
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

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, wh…

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

This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred but it was still significantly better.

They didn't do it just to "be super green". They did it because coal is all around bad and wasn't the future that Germany wanted--and they were right. They absolutely made the right decision back then and investments by the German government are a big reason why solar is the cheapest form of energy right now (thanks Germany!).

If anything they didn't invest enough in renewables. They obviously didn't expect the effects of global warming to come this quickly. A big reason why electricity is so expensive is because the rivers in France that supply water to their nuclear reactors dried up. I mean, how do you predict something like that happening even 10 years ago? Even if that was a possibility included in some climate change report how seriously would politicians take such a prediction?

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#143

Post by mynameisvlad »

wongarsu wrote: post #93
rr888 wrote: 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.

There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).

Highly disagree.

Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.

The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.

The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#144

Post by xuki »

lucb1e wrote: post #67
Semaphor wrote: 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)…

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

Your consumer gigabit connection is not comparable to a DC gigabit connection. Your ISP is over subscribing 20x and hoping people don’t use anywhere near their capacity. To make it fair you should compare it to a business plan with a proper SLA.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#145

Post by ReadTheLicense »

kuboble wrote: post #123
barney54 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the other way around, at least in Germany. Households pay more than industry for electricity. https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price...

Well. I have to admit you're right. But it seems to not be universally true. In Poland I have found that price for companies can be 3x higher based on at least one source. C11 - the tariff for the companies seem to cost 1.6 PLN / kwH [1] G11 - the same tarrif for households seem to cost more like 0.4-0.5PLN / kwH [2] [1] https://www.energa.pl/mala-firma/umowy/prad-dla-firm.html [2] https://www.energa.pl/dom/umowy/tar…

I'd guess this is because of price regulation, not subsidy.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#146

Post by Timshel »

PeterisP wrote: post #69
rr888 wrote: 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 envir…

Not the first time I see someone saying this for refrigerators and I don't understand how it could be possible.

From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....) to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh. And with the kwh at 0.15$ (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610).

You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year.

I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#147

Post by miohtama »

ninjin wrote: post #8
lukeqsee wrote: 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…

To be fair, Hetzner is notorious for pushing down prices for everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components. Nearly nothing goes to waste. [1]: https://yewtu.be…

Hetzner has a data center in Finland as well. While the electricity price in Finland is going up, it is not going up as much as in Germany due to availability of nuclear power. If you want to use Hetzner services I recommend picking a location in Finland.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#148

Post by speedgoose »

xvilka wrote: post #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.

Native may also mean the software may not exist, because it’s too expensive, which is more sustainable.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#150

Post by TylerE »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #141
philjohn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why for my home server I didn't get second hand servers but built the following in a 2U case that fits in my network closet: Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part, supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for…

My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives. Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.

I'd guess the issue isn't so much peak consumption but idle.
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