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Hetzner Price Adjustment
- 076ae80a-3c97-4 4y agoReally annoying that they're not publishing the new prices now, we have to wait until 1st September.
- em-bee 4y agoyes, that's frustrating, but they would have to list both current and future prices or make some a list of changes instead of just updating the actual price when they go current
- trollied 4y agoAt least they're not changing pricing for already provisioned products until 31st December.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tecleandor 4y agoThey are publishing the prices now, just not in the main pricing page until the prices are current: The new prices for the colocation electricity/air conditioning rates are: electricity/air conditioning rate old price\* new price\* Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh \*These prices do not include VAT.
- schroeding 4y agoBut those are only the rates for collocation. The other server products (rented dedicated servers, VPS, etc) will become more expensive, too. Those prices are not yet announced, are they? (except the rough estimate of 10%)
- tecleandor 4y agoAh, it's true it isn't super clear... So "around 10%" and: The products that do not directly use electricity are not affected: IPs, domains, SSL certificates, racks, setup fees, and a few other examples.
- lukeqsee 4y agoWhile the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next few years where we can expect energy prices to continue rising. 3) Building more power-efficient chips is a big deal, and I'm glad to see more general ARM deployment, given their efficiency gains.
- ninjin 4y agoTo be fair, Hetzner is notorious for pushing down prices for everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components. Nearly nothing goes to waste. [1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
- lukeqsee 4y agoFor sure, and I agree, but that's underscoring my point. The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex. And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of keeping it turned on and cool.
- kilroy123 4y agoI mean if your competition is Amazon I image you'd have to be like that.
- dannyw 4y agoTheir competition charges XXX% markups on everything but EC2...
- 4y ago
- dangerface 4y agoLove Hetzner great to see a hosting company thats being upfront and transparent about its prices. So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it like you will pay that month to month.
- onphonenow 4y agoAWS has never raised prices on me.
- nik736 4y agoDon't worry they will. At least in Germany :-) Electricity pricing is insane and will only get worse. I doubt AWS will operate a whole region at a loss.
- Dunedan 4y agoAmazon invests a lot in its own wind and solar parks. Because of that, energy prices on the open market shouldn't affect them too much. Read more about that at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable-energy https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...
- nik736 4y agoInteresting, but looking at their map they will go live in Germany in 2025. Which is way too late to ride this out.
- Dunedan 4y agoContinental Europe has a synchronous power grid, so Amazon can also use electricity produced outside of Germany for its German data centers.
- mschuster91 4y ago
- Semaphor 4y agoInteresting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much, that’s a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal consumer, I’d have thought they’d get better discounts.
- jo909 4y agoI'd guess that they used to have very good discounted contracts but are not able to renew them anymore. The cost they charge also includes the cooling, so you could see it as for example 30c/kWh for power, 15c/kWh for cooling to compare it to a consumer contract. Maybe they have published their ratio of that split "on average" before.
- tecleandor 4y agoThere's a more than probable markup for redundancy and management. Anyway, I believe industrial power billing is quite a trip (at least in Spain), and probably have a miriad of different prices depending on the hour of the day, and different guarantees of delivery compared to a regular user.
- bombcar 4y agoIn many places if you as a business are willing to take intermittent power cuts (with varying warning times) you can get significant discounts.
- kuboble 4y agoI believe in EU household electricity is largely subsidized and the industry always paid more.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoGermany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.
- zach_garwood 4y agoFinland has oil. Germany imports oil from Russia.
- weberer 4y agoYou're thinking of Norway. Finland does not have any oil reserves at all.
- zach_garwood 4y agoYou're right
- jansan 4y agoOnly 0.2% of the electricity is generated from oil in Finland. But Finland produces a good quarter of its electricity from nuclear power. Maybe that makes a difference?
- ztrww 4y agoIt’s hard to export electricity from Finland due to it’s geographic location and it’s main connections are with Sweden where electricity is also much cheaper than in continental Europe.
- doikor 4y agoAnd the national grids of Sweden and Norway can't really keep up with the current load. The price of electricity up north is dirt cheap due to lots of hydro but the grid just can't get it to where the people are (south). So you get crazy 100x price differences between the two ends of the countries. This is also why both Sweden and Norway want to invest into new transfer lines to northern Finland as the national grid of Finland is actually in good enough shape that any electricity you get to any part of it can actually be sold to a customer anywhere in the country. This is why Finland is a single price zone when both Sweden and Norway are split into multiple zones (4 and 5)
- sammy2244 4y ago
- candiddevmike 4y agoWill this affect their US cloud (ASH)? I didn't see it listed but they mention all locations.
- Hetzner_OL 4y agoPlease see: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/#which-products-are-affected https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/#wh... "in all locations" = Yes, the ASH location will also be affected. --Katie, Hetzner
- tzahifadida 4y agoWorth it, especially because of the reasons the prices of electricity went up.
- spaceheater 4y agoWorth how? Sanctions achieved nothing on the military front. Is it more of a scaremongering thing? 'If we didn't do it, things would have been much worse'?
- tzahifadida 4y agoI am not talking about strategy but my own feeling that I don't mind to pay the increase. My wife family was wiped out in the holocaust. I don't think that sitting and doing nothing is a better option. And I do really not wanting to start an argument about it. As I said, it is a feeling and I am not a general and I have no knowledge of what is best.
- GeorgeWBasic 4y ago"We have to do something. This is something. Therefore, we have to do this." Never mind that it doesn't have any positive effect, and a lot of negative effects.
- spaceheater 4y agoI am discussing the idea in general. That's perfectly fine if you personally don't agree. Although I do not agree that there are only two options: 1) Do this, 2) Do nothing. It is always possible to.. 3) Do something else.
- mschuster91 4y agoGerman here. The causes of Germany's sky high electricity prices are not the Ukraine war. A large part of the current spot price hike is the French bet on going all-in on nuclear: first, half the reactors is offline because they are simply broken down - they bet on Flamanville to replace parts of the extremely aged fleet which infamously failed. Then, the drought led to rivers drying up which means the reactors that are operational simply cannot get cooled, which led to a further reduction in capacity right when AC demands a lot of power, which in turn led to the French buying a shitload of capacity from Germany, and our spare capacity is mostly gas peaker plants since we phased out many coal stinkers over the last year. The second part is regulatory... the fees that have to be paid for by everyone other than heavy industry for modernizing the grid and build out renewables are a large part, as well as the taxes that add on top of that. And the last part is that states like Bavaria did their very best to impede the build-out of renewable energies (especially wind farms) and, worse, transit lines that could ship cheap North Sea wind energy to Bavaria - that led to an oversupply in the North where wind and solar have had to tune out because the energy could not be transferred to where it's needed.
- rr888 4y agoIts fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
- PeterisP 4y agoIt's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
- Timshel 4y agoNot the first time I see someone saying this for refrigerators and I don't understand how it could be possible. From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27.122001.083452 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....) to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh. And with the kwh at 0.15$ (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610). You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year. I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
- bombcar 4y agoYou can get some pretty cheap fridges https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-refrigerator-with-reversible-door-white/6449409.p?skuId=6449409 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-r... - but as you suspect it's post-facto justification of a purchase someone wanted to make anyway. Once you account for manufacturing and disposal, running the older is probably almost always better.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoJust write efficient software, then you won’t need that many servers.
- michaelmior 4y agoWhile this is true to a degree, development costs also come into play here. Let's simplify the problem a lot for a moment. Suppose the only thing you care about is cost and the only things you can control are the hardware you're running on and the code it runs. You can optimize your code to use less hardware, which would lower operational costs. But you also have to pay developers to optimize the code. In some cases, it may be more cost effective to run less efficient code rather than pay for the development time to optimize.
- nerdponx 4y agoI do sometimes wonder about the global cost to run Python and Ruby versus equivalent but literally-more-efficient programs that otherwise do the same thing in e.g. Go or Nim.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoYou can pay lots of mediocre engineers mediocre salaries to ship tons of inefficient mediocre code. Or you can pay a few rockstar engineers high salaries to ship small and efficient software. Basically the WhatsApp model.
- tgv 4y agoWell, let's play that game. 0.22€/kWh. So a 1kW server costs almost €2000/year. If you write Python vs. Go, the performance increase can be 10 fold, so you'd save €1800/yr. So when you're running 55 Python servers, you could earn 1 dev by rewriting (assuming €100k/yr, all in). Not to upset anyone: there are a lot of assumptions. It's just ballpark numbers. There's a large difference between Python v. Go for tensorflow and as a Django backend.
- michaelmior 4y agoSwitching languages is highly impractical for most teams. It is possible in some scenarios code written by an experienced Go developer is 10x faster than code written by an experienced Python developer. However, I think it's unlikely that a team writing Python is going to be able to write Go code which is as efficient as an expert Go developer. Even if they could, I think the productivity (in terms of being able to quickly implement features) of writing Python is significantly higher than Go. If only for the massive amounts of existing packages available, not including the language itself. I don't think this loss would be made up by a single additional developer. I'm certainly not saying that's not possible to have a highly productive team of Go developers. But I think expecting a team of Python developers to become Go experts is not likely to work well. (Dropbox potentially being a notable exception, although I don't know how they navigated this change organizationally.)
- Ekaros 4y ago0.22€/kWh is actually pretty reasonable looking at what current long term contracts are offered in Finland.
- rgj 4y agoGuess this is something that has been going on for much longer already. Leaseweb has been raising their prices because of higher electricity costs on February 1st, and recently DigitalOcean raised their price by even 20%.
- omega3 4y agoI'd have thought that these cloud providers would be pretty well insulated from the retail energy prices by their renewable energy generation.
- Ekaros 4y agoThat is not much use if the future contract prices at the moment are very high. 24 month consumer deals seems to be around 25 to 30 cents/kWh currently or even more, 12 month even more. And some sellers have stopped selling these. Overall there is nothing much to do as unless you own the production there just isn't insulating contracts available.
- sremani 4y agoIf I am running Hetzner, I will be looking at an aggressive North American expansion. The energy cost gap between US and Europe are going to get bigger.
- riskable 4y ago> The energy cost gap between US and Europe are going to get bigger. Only briefly. The fracking boom is basically over: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/01/1027822/fracking-boom-jobs-industry/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/01/1027822/fracking... We're presently running a good portion of our heating and electricity via the cheap gas that the fracking boom unlocked but that's going to taper off pretty quickly over the next decade. Because fracking was never a long-term solution. Here's what's probably going to happen: Places like Europe will be investing heavily in renewable energy and locking in long-term contracts to get things like solar panels and wind turbine blades. Meanwhile the US will continue "business as usual" thanks to the largely for-profit power sector that only looks at next quarter. Then as the cheap gas from fracking runs out the US will be screwed and have the same problem that Europe is currently having.
- sremani 4y agoThis is a flawed analysis. 1. Permian basin itself will provide fuel for at least 300 years and right now if you have skills, you can get well paid job in Texas. 2. Texas has so much Wind and Solar footprint already it will make most European countries headspin, and we are not even adding Iowa! So, US has massive set up already and the best part is, unlike Germany, US has windmills where Wind is.
- jmbwell 4y agoFracking changed the market but the Western Hemisphere is not dependent on it. There is enough oil and gas in the North and South American continents to last hundreds of years by all projections. What’s likely to happen is the global market will split into three regional markets: the Americas, Europe and Africa, and Russia and Asia. The US will recalibrate for more local feedstocks and very much continue business as usual. The other markets will realign producing regions and consuming regions along political lines and eventually get back to business as usual. The difference will be the prices in each region, which will go back to pre-globalization independent activity. Other than that, yes, renewables and other sources will see heavy investment, but they depend on raw materials that come primarily from unstable (or newly unstable) political regions. I’d say it very much remains to be seen how this affects prices between renewables and petroleum. What’s clear is that we are all heading into an “all of the above” energy policy regime that will no longer enjoy the perks and stability afforded by the global market.
- xvilka 4y agoMaybe at least increasing energy costs will force people and companies to ditch Electron-based "programs" (or Java/NodeJS in case of servers). Native is much more energy efficient by definition.
- twobitshifter 4y agofirst I’ve heard of java not being energy efficient
- speedgoose 4y agoNative may also mean the software may not exist, because it’s too expensive, which is more sustainable.
- mattnewton 4y agoI don’t know about the energy usage of NodeJS but the jvm can be pretty efficient. Switching implementations or tuning an implementation is easier than rewriting an app to native c++ https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3475716.3475774?sid=SCITRUS https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3475716.3475774?sid=SCITR...
- sneak 4y agoNo. Most people do end user computing (where the Electron-based apps run) on laptops, which, for battery size/weight/runtime purposes, are already power constrained. The efforts are going into making browser engines and processors more efficient. > Native is much more energy efficient by definition. "much more" is not true. It may be much more efficient in some cases, but with modern runtimes for interpreted code for many operations it is very close to native performance.
- cbmuser 4y agoThe result of shutting down nuclear plants. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cgeier 4y agoWhile I'm a fan of nuclear power myself, I don't think this is true. Nuclear is only good for base loads, current high prices are mostly driven by peak demand.
- thatguy0900 4y agoWouldn't it be the case that the nuclear portion would be price stable, so any fluctuations in say the last 30% of power to reach peak power would be less severe in the final bill?
- wewxjfq 4y agoNo, the most expensive power plant defines the price.
- wewxjfq 4y agoIn France, yes.
- upupandup 4y agoWell the green energy proponents (which we are now learning were on the payroll of Gazprom lobbyists) launched a FUD campaign against nuclear plants which were completely safe and working fine post-Fukushima. This chess move by Putin is paying dividends because Germany is shifting towards populism/right wing as is the trend in Western Europe (can you really blame Parisians?) and realizing it can't replace Russian gas without incurring serious internal turmoil and economic ruin. Now we are seeing this impact everything. Even hetzner isn't safe.
- tafazi9090 4y agoWriting this on a new account because my main has been shadowbanned Why don’t they switch to an alternative cooling method like ground cooling?
- elorant 4y agoI have a bunch of servers in an apartment I use as a secondary office space. Monthly electricity cost increased by 230%. It’s like that since January. Hetzner’s 10% seems too low, although the increase is calculated on the total price of the server, so I guess it could be sufficient. I won’t be surprised if they further increase their prices in the near future.
- schroeding 4y agoI currently pay less per month to Hetzner for a rented dedicated server (from the second hand "server auction" section) than I would pay in electricity alone if I ran the thing in my home. Yeah, electricity is quite expensive now in Germany and Europe. ^^
- jacooper 4y agoI think Germany has the most expensive electricity in the world, and AFAIK that was 2021, so its even worse in 2022.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 4y agoServer pricing, potato pricing, I suppose every product has some energy component baked into the price. Probably more than I might even guess… High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face. Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods that households purchase. New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
- collegeburner 4y agoaaaand thank goodness i'm on an american server host or else i'd probably be getting the same rn.
- lovelearning 4y agoPutin's starting to get on my nerves.
- nikolay 4y agoRussophobia is a costly endeavour!
- ur-whale 4y agoWorth noting that most of Hetz infrastructure is deployed in EU, where cost of energy is hugely affected by events in Ukraine and Russia.