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

Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

docs.hetzner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 662 posts

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#431

Post by jgalt212 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #362
Betelbuddy wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...

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 :-).

But these markets are only "free" if you ignore the net $5.5 trillion the Fed has printed post GFC.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#432

Post by Aurornis »

Betelbuddy wrote: post #345
Aurornis wrote: post #289

Earlier 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…

Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...

Hedge funds don’t have as high of institutional ownership as you assume. It’s actually pretty small.

That said, nothing about the situation you described is at odds with “free market”. You’re describing the operation of a free market.

I think a lot of people want “free market” to mean the opposite: A highly restricted market where they are protected from any supply and demand inputs from anyone else. They just want cheap things and don’t want to compete with anyone.

There are two sides to a free market, though. In your example where a hedge fund comes in and buys your entire neighborhood, they would have to do so by outbidding everyone. This drives up the price. If it’s an economically irrational move you’d be smart to sell your house to them at an inflated rate, too! Then move back in when the prices crash down.

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#433

Post by conradfr »

ilaksh wrote: post #408

For 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

I almost didn't see their email because it's sent by "notification" (notification@hetzner.com, no name set). Title is "Update on our pricing".

Anyway my increase is: EX44 (HEL1) € 44.76 -> € 50.76

Not pleased especially as the reason for the increase for existing customers is a nebulous "The costs to operate our infrastructure has increased dramatically."

Why?

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#434

Post by chneu »

BunsanSpace wrote: post #374
Aurornis wrote: post #289

Earlier 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…

> This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly. The problem is that demand is being propped up by speculative capital. The AI companies are a bubble that is suffocating productive parts of the market with the hording of capital which they're now using to also hoard hardware. All this without making money for data centres that aren't…

Yeah the dudes argument is bunk when we remember that openAI bought CAPACITY and not actual product. The market is also heavily manipulated by the big 3 players in the market.

OpenAI brazenly used their market position to create artificial scarcity. That's not normal market behavior. That's manipulation. And now we all suffer.

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#435

Post by Aurornis »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #363
xp84 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to say that but they own a very small percentage of housing in reality. What’s driving housing costs is also supply and demand. Especially supply, since we’re not allowed to build any houses in most places people want to live.

Prices are decided at the margins. Having PE and REITs at every single table, even if their actual ownership is small as a %, makes huge differences.

You’re still missing the key point: Hedge funds and REITs aren’t arbitrarily buying housing at any cost.

They are responding to the market. If they overbuy then they will lose money and have to sell at a loss, at which point you could snap up some good deals.

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#436

Post by Roark66 »

lucianbr wrote: post #410
cyanydeez wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

>What makes it manipulation?

Their size and the effect on the market they have

>×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?

Because they are 5 companies, especially when it can be shown they work in unison (formed a cartel)

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#437

Post by Aurornis »

Betelbuddy wrote: post #364
anthonypasq wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct, both of those things are examples of free markets

Adam Smith had already clarified free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. You are confusing market outcome with market structure.

But where is the monopoly here? Nobody has a monopoly on housing supply or DRAM production.

Nobody is making an artificial scarcity. They’re producing as much as they can.

You can buy the exact same DRAM that the data centers are bidding on.

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#438

Post by Roark66 »

tsak wrote: post #264
octoclaw wrote: post #235

Running 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…

But aren't those the same startups that think they need to run on AWS EKS instead of using a single cheap server? The cheapest used Hetzner server currently is €39.24 / month: - Intel Core i7-6700 - 32 GB - 2 x 480 GB Datacenter SSD - 1 GB/s - 20 TB traffic Their VPS are even cheaper. And you can run a lot on this.

Similar to my favourite OVH servers, but I have unlimited traffic at 0.5Gb/s 64gb ram and dual mics. Similar price (with vat in Poland).

If you wanted to run same workloads on Aws it would cost you few hundred euro a month.

I see a silver lining to all this. At least maybe the silly "throw more horizontal scaling at it" will stop being a default response to all performance problems and people that are able to squeeze more processing out of the same hardware will be sought after again.

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#439

Post by dijit »

Aurornis wrote: post #318
tsak wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't those the same startups that think they need to run on AWS EKS instead of using a single cheap server? The cheapest used Hetzner server currently is €39.24 / month: - Intel Core i7-6700 - 32 GB - 2 x 480 GB Datacenter SSD - 1 GB/s - 20 TB traffic Their VPS are even cheaper. And you can run a lot on this.

If your only need is a lot of bandwidth with very low server CPU use that’s fine. That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old. That DRAM is 2-channel DDR3. This could be a good deal for someone, but entrusting your startup’s operations to a 10 year old slow computer in Germany instead of using EKS would be an extremely short sighted move. A startup should be developing software and shipping it quickly to validate…

I said the same thing to myself.

But then I remembered that what AWS gives you is the same generation of CPU, just obfuscated.

GCP Also obfuscates it, but not as much: https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/general-purpose-m...

(note: skylake is 10 years old)

Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

#440

Post by dsr_ »

lucianbr wrote: post #410
cyanydeez wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

It's certainly price manipulation, but not likely to be intended price manipulation. Your arguments are flawed but you have reached the right conclusion.

This is one of the many flaws of badly regulated markets.

(There are no free markets, and there is never perfect information, and people often behave remarkably irrationally for many reasons.)

Post reply on HN