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Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

151–160 of 312 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost me about 600€/year which is definitely significant.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#153
post #110

I'd have thought that these cloud providers would be pretty well insulated from the retail energy prices by their renewable energy generation.

That is not much use if the future contract prices at the moment are very high. 24 month consumer deals seems to be around 25 to 30 cents/kWh currently or even more, 12 month even more. And some sellers have stopped selling these.

Overall there is nothing much to do as unless you own the production there just isn't insulating contracts available.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth how? Sanctions achieved nothing on the military front. Is it more of a scaremongering thing? 'If we didn't do it, things would have been much worse'?

German here. The causes of Germany's sky high electricity prices are not the Ukraine war. A large part of the current spot price hike is the French bet on going all-in on nuclear: first, half the reactors is offline because they are simply broken down - they bet on Flamanville to replace parts of the extremely aged fleet which infamously failed. Then, the drought led to rivers drying up which means the reactors that…

[deleted]

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#155
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€

You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas.

With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.

New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#156
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide them now. The margin is something like 0.30–0.40 cent/kWh.

We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#157
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4) Cloud computing will be outsourced to low energy cost countries.

I wonder if latency allows this

It depends on your requirements. Serving user-facing content is likely to be a task best suited to data centers geographically close to the user base. There are plenty of non-user-facing tasks that could be offloaded to another location.

As an example, the product I am developing spends most of its time calling third party APIs to do bulk data extraction and processing. That can happen anywhere. After data processing and some batch ETL work, we surface that to our end users. The output of that ETL needs to go somewhat close to our users, but everything else could easily happen network-seconds away.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#158
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean if your competition is Amazon I image you'd have to be like that.

Amazon's margins are astronomical. Hetzner doesn't need to give up any where near as much consumer surplus as they do in order to compete on price, but having a solid offering at very low price point is how they have chosen to differentiate themselves from other providers on the VPS to cloud spectrum. Arguably they are competing more against Linode, OVH, digital ocean etc..

Massive respect to them for linking the change to electricity prices rather than just "inflation". They know that by doing this there will be pressure to reverse the increase once electricity prices normalise.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#159
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, you just purchase your electricity with a market price contract (usually with added margin) and every day the next day prices are published around 3pm Finnish time (perhaps 12 UTC). Then just use the free APIs to load data and use the data to adjust when you spend electricity on what. E.g. to charge EV on cheapest hours, or load batteries, or when you fire up your electric Sauna...

These days the price is different for every hour, in near future they move to 1/4 hour pricing.

About 10% of finnish household contracts are market price contracts. Most of the contracts are kinda continuous (price changes every 12 months) or fixed (e.g. a two year fixed price contract).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#160
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 don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.

It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
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