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Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

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Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#741

Post by renaudg »

I am no environmental activist, but Hetzner's carbon footprint is so much worse than the rest that it's hard to ignore. I've always avoided them as a matter of principle.

Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas. As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).

Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.

Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.

Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#742

Post by robocat »

sshine wrote: post #679
robocat wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 theo…

> Businesses charge their customers as much as they can That's very imprecise. There are multiple optima on the price/demand elasticity curve. At the two ends: Few expensive items and many inexpensive items, Hetzner has consistently operated at low margins and massive volume. Which means they charge customers as little as they can to get as many customers as possible. You'll see that evident on any price comparison c…

Your overall point is true - but I'm unsure whether you are clarifying or trying to ackshualise.

And well actually, "price/demand elasticity curve" appears to be ambiguous word-salad (although a human mistake;)

I do appreciate your response: it makes me think about what I should have written. You are correct that my comment was rather unclear. Most of us misunderstand how businesses maximize profits. I find economics hard.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#743

Post by beepbooptheory »

pdimitar wrote: post #739
beepbooptheory wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minute…

Why are even engaging if you don't even agree with the contention this thread started with?? Do you like actually disagree with gp's original point or not? Is the implication you agree there is maybe a bit of bluster and hype when we talk about this? Such that maybe your "new reality" here is maybe not as radical or comprehensive as those words would imply?

Like its nice to be in agreement if we are but surely you got something better to be doing if you don't actually have some counter argument to my framing here? this forum is getting quite odd I must say.

And yes was being cheeky at the end there but I guess you're a little too used to being on the defense with this stuff? Or not? Still not sure. But I think your agent just finished another task, better go check!

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#744

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #683
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the situation for Micron. Not for Hetzner, since nobody is using them to run large scale AI.

Do we actually know that? If you're an AI company during a hardware supply crunch and Hetzner has a bunch of servers they could put GPUs in and rent out to you, what makes you ignore them?

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#745

Post by buredoranna »

eichin wrote: post #558
buredoranna wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1]. I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_... (edit: formatting)

2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?

Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions.

I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.

It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.

One specific upside from ai?

I no longer have to write systemd unit files.

That alone may be worth the cost.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#746

Post by AnthonyMouse »

stymaar wrote: post #644
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote. And there are no valid theories th…

I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either). And I tend to agree with /u/bayindirh that the original optimism of /u/Dylan16807 is baseless. We don't know have things will turn out, but it's absolutely not guaranteed that we'll ever…

> I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either).

It isn't a misunderstanding. Even in the original context, the proposal is to be impatient with something that takes time even if it eventually works. (It's also not even the best critique of the gold standard, which has plenty of problems not solved no matter how long you wait.) Worse, the quip has memetic fitness (people think it sounds edgy) even though it expresses no limiting principle and can thereby be used in service of every incitement to do something stupid immediately because the smarter thing takes a minute.

It's sometimes true that acting quickly is the better option, but by giving no indication as to which times that is, it's an ambiguous statement masquerading as a conclusive determination and an invitation to do the wrong thing in the common case.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#747

Post by theshrike79 »

stolsvik wrote: post #714
theshrike79 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My question to that is: Why do you? Why on earth do people want to tie themselves so hard to a specific mast?

With AWS I can build the stack so that I don't need to wake up in the early hours on a Saturday to fix it. Someone at Amazon is already sweating and pulling crap off racks or reconfiguring a switch or restoring a database. At max I can go "yea, not our problem, it'll come back up when the intern at Amazon stops messing with the DNS again" on Slack, put the phone down and go back to sleep =)

Running on bare metal VPS is only viable if you're:

a) a startup with a true shoestring budget, you can get massive use out of a single mid-tier server auction server with everything on it web, backend and database AND you have someone in-house with the skills to do that.

b) you're so big you can afford to hire a full rotation of SREs to manage your crap AND your devs / SREs are able to maintain Rabbit MQ, Postgres and whatever object storage you're using themselves - and someone Does The Math and calculates it's cheaper and the risks are manageable.

In the middle there's AWS. You can run millions of revenue through AWS with maybe 2-3 people managing the backend infra. 99% of times when something breaks suddenly, it's up to Amazon to fix it.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#748

Post by cyberax »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #654
cyberax wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS now has unmetered egress, but it's pretty expensive. A 10G port is $8k a month.

Got some info about this?

Here: https://aws.amazon.com/interconnect/multicloud/ - it's rolling out in us-east-1, and will come to other regions.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#749

Post by AnthonyMouse »

throw0101a wrote: post #681
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote. And there are no valid theories th…

> No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes: > The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quanti…

It is his fault, because he favored statements that go too far. "In the long run we are all dead" is so widely abused exactly because it's phrased in a way that allows it to be set against anything that takes time, even the things worth doing. It thereby sounds more authoritative than it has any right to be because it's so often the wrong conclusion.

This is the same guy who said it's better to give people jobs digging holes and filling them back in than to have them be unemployed, thereby giving every fool with a bad plan cover to ignore the false dichotomy and thereby the opportunity costs of doing something wasteful instead of something more efficient or productive.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#750

Post by mpyne »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #604
mpyne wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thus replace their hardware constantly? Yes? How else do you think it works? At scale, hardware breaks all the time and must therefore be replaced all the time. This is true even at Hetzner's scale.

It's not even the reliability which is the issue. Newer servers can put hundreds of cores in one physical machine, while taking up the same amount of rack space and using the same amount of electricity as older systems with tens of cores. How long do you want to run something that uses 3x the electricity for the same level of performance when you're buying power by the megawatt? How about the even older ones that use…

Yes that's a thing too, but it's a question of cost and potential revenue. So if replacement hardware is really expensive then maybe you make the inefficient stuff hang out longer, as long as it's not broken and you have paying customers.

But at some point hardware does break and if you're going to keep the datacenter open for business you'll need to address turnover of inventory on an ongoing basis, and if you haven't locked in long-term deals for hardware then you'll have to bear current market prices when you do that.

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