Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 794 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#581

Post by bayindirh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #252
originalvichy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.

> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works. > Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can affo…

> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.

I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.

...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".

Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.

> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.

I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.

Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#582

Post by preisschild »

lylo wrote: post #569

Hetzner could win back some of that love if they release the long-rumoured managed Postgres offering at a price that undercuts most of the competition.

I'd prefer that they concentrate on the "cloud servers" (better networking, more availability, BOYIP via BGP). You can always just host Postgres yourself on one of those servers.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#583

Post by scorpioxy »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #453
akerl_ wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?

Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.

This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#584

Post by srdjanr »

icyfox wrote: post #118
MinimalAction wrote: post #103

I understand this is ultimately due to AI boom. A couple of naive questions: 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity? 2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.

1. Factory limits basically. There's a limit to the amount of fabrication lines that can create ram. Combined with the market incentives right now to make high bandwidth memory (HBM) over server memory (DRAM)... HBM starts as DRAM dies, so it competes with normal DRAM for wafer starts / cleanroom fab capacity. 2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but th…

Are more plants coming? I think I heard it won't be many of them, because it's risky.

If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#585

Post by piokoch »

That's the difference between European and US companies and that's exemplification of the problem that Europe has. A big problem.

Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.

Having said that...

They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.

As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.

So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.

Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#586

Post by theshrike79 »

tda wrote: post #557
yread wrote: post #114

There can only be so many "I saved 10x by moving to Hetzner" posts before they pick up the value they were leaving on the table...

I literally migrated last week, and saved 8x by ditching AWS for Hetzner.

Just out of curiosity, which parts of AWS were you using? EC2 and something else?

It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#587

Post by locknitpicker »

Hamuko wrote: post #121
locknitpicker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity? For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.

The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a ye…

> The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up.

I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.

It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.

I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#588

Post by locknitpicker »

tengwar2 wrote: post #110
locknitpicker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service. I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference?

Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, with some legal safeguards for recovery, and the ability to get a replacement card with a different number. Passport carries an open long-term risk of impersonation and you can't just get a new passport because some company has a copy. Just the financial side of that risk can have much greater impact. Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your custome…

> Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, (...)

This belief is deeply misguided. Do you understand that credit card transactions are used to provide access to your personal information?

Some companies even employ small token charges as identity verification processes. Payment systems such as MasterCard even explocitly offer identity verification services built around their payment system.

https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/cybersecurity-...

But a photo of your id card with your mobile camera is where you draw the line?

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#589

Post by Hamuko »

locknitpicker wrote: post #587
Hamuko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a ye…

> The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected. It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND…

It's not sustainable because it'll basically ruin all of the industries connected to memory. OpenAI, Anthropic etc. all need a massive amount of compute to train and serve models, and increases in memory price will all drive up their already massive costs. And then on the other end, the people they need to use their AI services cannot either afford the devices they need to access the devices, or the device costs go up so much that they cannot afford to buy the services. If for example budget phones disappear completely because of memory prices, those consumers disappear from the customer pool and then the budget phone manufacturers disappear and stop buying memory, AI companies spend even more to build models for fewer people, etc.

Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?

And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.

Post reply on HN