Hetzner Price Adjustment • Hacker News Board

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#731

Post by antasvara » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

fl4regun wrote: post #547

antasvara wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints. For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't t…

The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers. Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absol…

>The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.

This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).

>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.

I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#732

Post by antasvara » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #722

antasvara wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints. For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't t…

It's hard to anticipate. If you'd asked me 20 years ago "maybe they'll invent a better apple" would not have crossed my mind, but Cosmic Crisp came out in 2019, and now I routinely eat apples which look and taste better than anything I previously imagined. My parents tell me they had the same experience with meal prep kits and Thai food.

True, but "a better apple" is unequivocally less impactful than "you no longer have to walk to the river any time you want to drink a glass of water."

I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#733

Post by matt-p » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

shakalandy wrote: post #649

Hetzner Founder and CEO Martin Hetzner shared a response to the critics in the Hetzner Forum (user benji) over here: https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/32635-standardisi... Translated from German via Claude: "For better understanding, I would like to provide some additional notes: Hetzner Online's pricing strategy has remained unchanged for many years. Our prices are based on the respective purchasing conditi…

It's interesting because there are still smaller providers who are offering slightly better prices than hetzner and large hyperscalers are keeping costs static.

Hardware costs are insane, no doubting it but it's more important than ever to be looking at the servers you're buying. For example a stick of 32GB DDR5 6400 ECC is about 1050 vs 16GB DDR5 6400 ECC is only 280 (pounds in this case), so if you can cope with say 192GB of ram in a 12 slot server, it's almost cheaper to buy two 192GB RAM servers than one 384GB one.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#734

Post by speedgoose » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #326

TiredOfLife wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which plan? Because even with this hetzner price increase it's still 2-3x cheaper than scaleway.

The bare metal dediboxes have better value I believe now.

Never mind, the good stuff is out of stock.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#735

Post by jm4 » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

chadgpt3 wrote: post #687

jm4 wrote: post #527

I use a cheapo VPS there to host some git repositories. It's going from $6.99/mo to $20.49. Who in their right mind would pay that for a 2 core/2 GB VPS? It makes me wonder if they are trying to shed some unwanted customers.

You continue to pay the old price as long as you don't change your plan!

That's good to know. Still, I'm stuck on that little instance. Scaling it means an exorbitant price increase. I would just leave for another provider at that point - and maybe that's what they're going for. They're not kicking people out immediately but making it uncomfortable to stay.

I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.

Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.

Of course, this is pure speculation on my part.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#736

Post by lenerdenator » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

chadgpt3 wrote: post #693

root9876 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality How's that possible?

I agree to pay you within 90 days of receiving the product, which you'll send me in 6 months. You get to count this promise as income i've paid you right now. 9 months later I might or might not have the money to pay it for real. The principle works for stable regular businesses where invoices do get paid, not for bubbles.

I'd argue the opposite: It works even better for bubbles.

Stable, regular businesses generally don't take on massive amounts of debt as a matter of accomplishing their value proposition. Maybe they take on the debt as a part of an expansion into a new geographic market or on developing a new product, but they typically have cash reserves to help fund those things. Accordingly the debts are relatively small and there's at least some collateral to secure them.

Any kind of bubble, on the other hand, is, by definition, financially massive. People taking on debts take on huge debts with the hopes of huge rewards. The problem is, the debts are so huge that neither the debtor nor creditor can allow them to go unpaid.

When you reach the scale of debt that you see for AI - literally trillions of dollars - the creditor isn't just a bank or a few investors, they're entire segments of the economy. The debtors can use that as leverage to get what they want. The Great Recession is a prime example of this. You had the US government print out or borrow $700 billion-ish dollars to absolve financial institutions of the toxic mortgage-backed securities on their balance sheets. Now, could they have simply declared bankruptcy and had the assets on their balance sheets claimed by other parties? Maybe, but that would have taken too long for most people's comfort and, moreover, would have been embarrassing for the country's monied elite. There had to be a bailout to keep a bunch of things solvent in the near-term, and they got one.

You could see this here: AI companies have everyone on the hook for their bets, and if it doesn't work, you can't simply write off the value of shares of everyone who has backed the bet.

They're too big to fail. If you owe the bank $1 million, you have a problem. If you owe the economy $1 trillion, the economy has a problem.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#737

Post by vkou » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #463

vkou wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is only relevant if one of the following two things happens: 1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.) 2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.) Your theory…

New markets are created all the time, as new products and services become viable. So one-to-two-person businesses don't necessarily compete with larger businesses for the same customers. And that's why both can have rising revenue.

Where are these new markets, and how much of my spend as a consumer is going towards them?

This isn't the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the textile loom, or the internet. The way people are doing work has changed a bit, but from the consumer end, all I see is shit like 'your health insurance will be 30% more expensive next year' and $11 for a gallon of milk and another rent increase and when I ask Google a question the results are sometimes a bit better and sometimes a bit worse.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#738

Post by andix » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

keybored wrote: post #728

andix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I start to think that AI might be a net negative on the economy. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, just to keep doing what we did before. Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They s…

> Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end. Poor companies missing out on consumer money. It’s funny to think ab…

Becoming homeless is probably not the right approach to think about that. Most people will somehow be able to continue a regular life.

They move to smaller houses or multiple families share a house. => landlords and real estate companies make less money. CEOs might not be able to upgrade ther yacht => more layoffs in the yachting industry

Parents, spouses or relatives will often chip in for rent and food. => less money spent on consumer goods and services. It's easy to cut cost for things like hairdresser, eating out, gardeners, smartphones. Instead of redoing the kitchen, the old one can be DIY fixed.

It's just a downward spiral in all parts of the economy. And in the end a lot of businesses have to cut their AI spending as a result.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#739

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

beepbooptheory wrote: post #711

pdimitar wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are kind of ranting here and your point seem to mostly be "but we should not do harness engineering at all" which I agree with btw. I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time. And you are describing a desired reality.…

I'm not being prescriptive here, just agreeing with the gp about greater labor interchangability! Like maybe step outside yourself for a second. We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore, but also at the same time we want to argue that its not easy, and you better know XYZ about it, and actually its not a magic bullet. How…

> We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore

I do not know who "we" is but I sure as hell am not arguing this -- that's demonstrably false for like 95% of all tasks I threw even at frontier/SOTA models.

I am on the side of "not as easy as many easily-hyped-up people make it out to be". Some things Opus one-shots in 10 minutes much better than I could in a full day. Most of them though, I have to keep pointing out mistakes and it missing the forest for the trees... constantly.

> And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it

I can only roll my eyes here. How dramatic.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#740

Post by jameshart » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

mrngld wrote: post #725

jameshart wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, instead of using a managed serverless platform where you pay a premium for proprietary cloud provided services to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers, you can… pay a premium for proprietary cloud-hosted AI engines to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers.

That's what I'm doing for my personal stuff. It's all running on a pair of Raspberry Pi's. There's an automation in Codex to, once a week, run a ton of health checks, updates, make sure backups are running, etc., and let me know the outcome. Tailscale acting a little wonky? One quick prompt (from my phone! don't even need to sit down at the keyboard any more) and it's sorted out. It's lowered the threshold for homela…

Using AI to manage self-hosted servers is completely different from using AI to manage VPS servers.

VPSes are usually compared to full-service cloud hosting and especially to serverless offerings, with proponents usually claiming that the costs of self-management of a VPS are vastly less than the premium AWS or Google charge for providing managed compute.

I’m mostly pointing to the irony of eliminating the ‘advantage’ of a VPS (that you can self-manage it like a grown-up, you don’t need a cloud provider to babysit you) by outsourcing management to a stochastic sysadmin who charges by the keypress.