Good. This means the market is healthy.
Hopefully this also means new providers appear in Europe, to handle the increase in demand.
Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
401–410 of 662 posts
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#402Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
On the plus siide, we all get to learn how few new computers are needed rather than chase number goes up.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#403The post seems to indicate this is just for VPSs, which doesn't seem true, the email I just received from Hetzner mentions price increases for dedicated servers too. The ones I'm affected by seemingly: Product -> previous price -> New price as of 1 April 2026 EX42-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.65 -> € 51.13 AX41 (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.22 AX41-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.18 Server Auction -> € 65.22 -> € 67.18 Still cheap…
I'm not particularly tied to Hetzner as an American using their Ashburn servers, so I figured maybe this price increase puts them a little closer to DigitalOcean's pricing. The pricing is still pretty heavily in Hetzner's favor though: the CCX23s that I use will be $39.99 USD after April 1, but the closest DO equivalent is $126 USD with a third of the disk space.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#404Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
In many countries, its illegal to manipulate prices in bulk.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#405Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
The problem is that OpenAI has cornered the market. Maybe they haven't crossed the legal line or more to the point no one in this corrupt and incompetent administration is going to prosecute them, but buying up 40% of a market which hasn't got any additional capacity is cornering by any measure.
So yes, this is not a normal market. Your claim of a functioning market is the same as saying my laptop, having lit on fire, is a functioning computer after having 10,000 volts applied across it.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. In fact that's not just normal, that's very frequent in market.
Please provide historical examples.
The first known example is the 6th century BC, where a greek philosopher cornered the market on olive oil presses, because he predicted a richt harvest via his knowledge of astronomy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market#Thales_of...
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... They're not wrong. That IS the market. Unrestricted, gloriously free market with its historically predictable outcomes - yay! That's not where the interesting discussion is. The interesting discussion is with the notion that free unregulated markets are universally good and will naturally lead to positive outcomes because... I don't know, I'm personally not religious, but somebody here will help me :-).
Where are these unregulated markets? Are you trading with your neighbor? If so, good, the more of that the better.
An example of unregulated market is where I come to your house and put a gun to your head and in exchange for not pulling the trigger you give me your various items of value.
That's one form of trading with your neighbor.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#408For some reason I didn't get an email from them about this, even though one of my VPSs is in Helsinki.
Anyway, let's all please pretend that Hetzner is now way overpriced if anyone asks about it. :P
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like it's still a big difference between how the US and EU are responding to the chip supply wars. The US is actually building their own manufacturing capabilities domestically while the EU is apparently doing nothing, which is unfortunate.
Infineon is _opening_ its fab plant in Dresden this year which was supported by around 1bn euros from the EU equivalent of the CHIPS Act. They started building this fab in 2023, while TSMC, who started building its fab in the US right after covid just delayed the opening to 2027
The fab that Infineon is building is vastly smaller in scale, and their tech isn't really relevant to this discussion. For instance, it doesn't produce CPU/GPU microchips or DRAM. Also only 300mm wafer technology, which isn't competitive for anything except for some narrow industrial use-cases. Glad to see the EU is doing it, but it's a completely different thing.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
In many countries, its illegal to manipulate prices in bulk.
What makes it manipulation? If 5 companies want to buy a quadrilion ram chips to build datacenters, why is this manipulation moreso than a million companies each wanting to buy 100 ram chips?
I think the problem is that both the buyers and producers are too large. Governments should not allow companies to become this big, because... . If there were a thousand ram makers and a thousand datacenter builders, this particular problem would not exist.
But you can't just label any price evolution you dislike as "price manipulation".