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

591–600 of 794 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#591

Post by jrflowers »

tptacek wrote: post #481
jrflowers wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tptacek is arguing that he, specifically, does not care about the Hetzner price increase. Anything outside of that (eg the cost spike in consumer computing https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260310-12959.h... ) isn’t relevant. There’s no point in making an argument about the material reality of things here because he’s objectively right that he, personally, does not care about it.

I'm thinking more about, like, my next door neighbors, who also don't care that my interlocutor had to turn off one of their hobby servers. That's OK, though, because they also think a Macbook Neo would cost $119 without the Apple tax, so I think we're at an impasse.

I am trying to parse this post because it sort of reads like “My neighbors are dumb and we care about the same things” but I can’t figure out why someone would write that

How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#592

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bayindirh wrote: post #581
Dylan16807 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wou…

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

The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.

> 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.

When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.

It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.

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

The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#593

Post by pjc50 »

deathanatos wrote: post #562
binarymax wrote: post #14

This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.

Microsoft can't supply sufficient compute capacity to itself ; they're in the news today for considering AWS for capacity.

Well, that's really the final humiliation for Azure, isn't it.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#594

Post by pjc50 »

motbus3 wrote: post #16
binarymax wrote: post #14

This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.

True but this is probably because now they have much more demand as other competitors got to expensive and now people are going for the smaller ones even with low service levels

I wonder what the effect of "move services to Europe ASAP" is on this.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#595

Post by rcxdude »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #98
drewg123 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI bubble has increased the prices of nand and ram by a factor of 4, so a 3x increase seems reasonable. Companies that are not big enough to have long term contracts with ram/nand vendors have been hit really, really hard by this.

There is no AI bubble There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production? Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao

All the money in the world won't spin up a fab in a year, much like all the women in the world couldn't take a child from conception to birth in a month. Some things do just have a latency to them.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#596

Post by robocat »

amoshebb wrote: post #260
andix wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have had delivery contracts from before the prices increased, so they didn't have to pass them to customers. Maybe the last servers from those contracts got delivered already and any new orders need to be bought at much higher prices. Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might…

I’m not a business person, but they’re already at the “hundreds of thousands of servers” scale, what about the 41st data center be organizationally far more expensive than the first 40?

Businesses charge their customers as much as they can. Businesses want to raise prices almost regardless of what their input costs are.

It is wrong to believe that a product's "correct" price is simply its cost plus a reasonable markup.

There's other factors that might limit how much a business can charge their customers. But an ideal business acts more like a monopoly and charges far far more than is 'fair'.

In theory competition keeps prices in check: in practice competition doesn't work as advertised.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#598

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rendaw wrote: post #578
andix wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple example: Pizza delivery service. The company runs very well, customers are happy, demand increases. At some point the demand gets so high, that they need to buy a second car for deliveries and a second pizza oven. They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the…

GP's point is this isn't the 2nd car, this is the 41st car. If they had 1 car it'd be a 2x increase. If they have 40 cars, the only way the 41st car would lead to a 2x increase is if that single car cost as much as 40 other cars. That's what the post you're responding to was asking.

The real question is whether it's actually just the 41st car or if the demand is such that they'd have to go from 40 cars to 200 and then risk having the demand fall back off after they've already sign on to making 160 more car payments.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#600

Post by indigo945 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #328
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...

It was never the same quality though. A VM at AWS or GCP is not even remotely comparable to a VPS at some low-end provider. Things like RAID, network/powersupply redundancy, internal privacy controls (nothing stopping a VPS provider from snooping in your filesystem), software patch quality, noisy neighbor mitigation, bandwidth quality, SLAs etc. Then all the value-added stuff like Terraform support, logging, monitori…

Yes, but Hetzner is not "some low-end provider". They have proper, high-quality datacenters with all the redundancy you want, excellent connectivity, great service, and much better privacy controls than any American company would be legally able to provide. Hetzner also offers instant scalability and has Terraform and Ansible support for infrastructure automation.

We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).

The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.

Post reply on HN