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Hetzner Price Adjustment

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Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#751

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mpyne wrote: post #750
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would suspect that "hardware breaks over time" is a minor component of the cost. If you put computer hardware in a climate controlled environment with conditioned power, generally >90% of it will still be operational after a decade, with the expected replacement of wear items like fans and drives. To the point that the fraction of older hardware that fails will typically be smaller than the fraction you would replace for efficiency reasons regardless, and wouldn't be a large proportion of operating costs even if it wasn't.

Exceptions naturally if you for some reason had an abnormally high failure rate, e.g. capacitor plague.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#752

Post by vkou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #575
FridgeSeal wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that matters, if the populace lacks the purchasing power to sustain these “new markets”. It also assumes, that incumbents won’t enter the new markets, and acquire/squeeze/kill the new players.

A new market is made when a product or service which previously was too expensive becomes affordable to more people due to innovation. There's thousands of example, many of them in your own life. But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.

Could you give any examples of how these new markets have positively changed my life as a consumer? Did any of the stuff I buy become cheaper or better, or get replaced with something else entirely (that is cheaper or better)?

Where is the horse buggy -> automobile transition of this AI age? Where is the industrialization that made clothes 10x cheaper to make? Show me examples.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#753

Post by stymaar »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #721
stymaar wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very narrow? The masses could get a computer for almost all the time integrated circuits have been produced. The “personal computing for the mass” era hadn't even started when I was born, and I don't even consider myself old yet. > And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years. It's not because something happened before that it will necessarily happen again. > Even at current…

The masses could get one in the 70s or 80s depending on your exact threshold. Integrated circuits had only existed since about 1960. And the manufacturing improvement and price drop ramp has been going for 65 years. It's not guaranteed but better lithography machines keep being built and it's still happening with CPUs and GPUs. RAM at this level of profit is unstable.

[flagged]

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#754

Post by UnlockedSecrets »

matt-p wrote: post #733
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 sa…

Hah..... we recently had to buy a couple hundred 16GB DDR5 RDIMM for a few new servers and i wish it was only 280 pounds.... Double it and you are close....

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#755

Post by pdimitar »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #743
pdimitar wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 go…

I am unsure where your confusion comes from, the very first of my comments which you replied to was already expressing disagreement with my then-parent poster.

No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#756

Post by beepbooptheory »

pdimitar wrote: post #755
beepbooptheory wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

I am unsure where your confusion comes from, the very first of my comments which you replied to was already expressing disagreement with my then-parent poster. No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.

Ok, right, well.. Uh thank you for the thoughtful convo here?

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#757

Post by murderfs »

kuerbel wrote: post #263
colechristensen wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online.

SK Hynix just said they want to double wafer production by 2031.

That's only a 15% growth per year over 5 years.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#758

Post by throwaway85825 »

Aissen wrote: post #702
awongh wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik prices for the big cloud providers haven't changed this much. Their instance prices are already inflated and they're probably willing to eat into their own margins to keep prices stable and just wait out the capex increase (also probably a drop in the bucket next to the hyperscale rollout). People love to say how great it is for these alt clouds to have lower prices, until they're exposed to market forces with…

People love to say how great these big clouds are, until they discover they've been paying ten times the market price outside of crises.

The world's most expensive insurance and without any legal protection.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#759

Post by Dylan16807 »

stymaar wrote: post #753
Dylan16807 wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The masses could get one in the 70s or 80s depending on your exact threshold. Integrated circuits had only existed since about 1960. And the manufacturing improvement and price drop ramp has been going for 65 years. It's not guaranteed but better lithography machines keep being built and it's still happening with CPUs and GPUs. RAM at this level of profit is unstable.

[flagged]

> You are embarrassing yourself. «Ce qui est excessif est insignifiant»

Or you could not be an ass.

I think you're saying it would take an unreasonably extreme threshold to make that statement true? It does not. Note that "could" is different from "sufficiently motivated". Even with the limited abilities of computers then, 15% of US households had one by the end of that period, let alone the 46% and 37% numbers for school and work use. If computers were as useful as they are today, the household number would have been well over 50%.

> If the hyperscalers are able to make more money from these chips

There's a limit on how much volume they can absorb.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#760

Post by dbmnt »

theshrike79 wrote: post #747
stolsvik wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But more specifically why build a stack tied to a single vendor?

You talk about competent SRE being hard to find and manage but then you describe needing several AWS backend specialists.

I think I'd rather have a generalized SRE team with portable infrastructure.

Maybe that's just me. I watched an org get burned by Google App Engine. I find these proprietary stacks to be a giant trap.

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