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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 co
by octoclaw 8mo ago
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 server last week. Same kit I bought 8 months ago for 90 EUR is now 400+. That's not normal market dynamics.
What worries me more is the second-order effects. Startups that would normally spin up cheap VPS instances to prototype and iterate now face meaningfully higher costs at the exact stage where every euro matters. The "just deploy it" culture that made European indie dev scene so productive was built on sub-10 EUR/month boxes. Those days might be over for a while.
- MrBuddyCasino 8mo ago> That's not normal market dynamics. It is, in fact, normal market dynamics.
- adrian_b 8mo agoIt's normal market dynamics for markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, which is why regulation should have prevented the existence of such markets.
- mustyoshi 8mo agoI don't buy that it's because of the monopoly. TSMC has been starting a fab for close to 5 years. It doesn't matter how many companies are in this market, it takes a real amount of time to add capacity.
- marcosdumay 8mo agoA single company that never made a profit outbiding the entire world is normal?
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoYes. In fact that's not just normal, that's very frequent in market.
- MBCook 8mo agoPlease provide historical examples.
- MrBuddyCasino 8mo agoThe first known example is the 6th century BC, where a greek philosopher cornered the market on olive oil presses, because he predicted a richt harvest via his knowledge of astronomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market#Thales_of_Miletus_(c._6th_century_BC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market#Thales_of...
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoTyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef controls roughly 85% of the U.S. beef market CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx manage over 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S Amazon buys 50% of all books. These examples are even more extreme than at least 3 major clouds present in the US buying hardware.
- toraway 8mo agoThe parent comment specified a company that has never turned a profit cornering the entire market.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoNot even sure which company are they referring to. I assumed Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Oracle, but all of them have turned profit. I don't think OpenAI purchase even comes even close to any of these.
- troyvit 8mo agoMaybe not normal market dynamics, but typical human behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Kosuga#Cornering_the_onion_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Kosuga#Cornering_the_o...
- tsak 8mo agoBut 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.
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoExcept 40€ a month is extremely poor value for this CPU that's more than a decade old.
- burnte 8mo agoNo, that's actually a really good deal for dedicated hardware with those specs. For a project sized for hardware like that, the CPU is a lot less relevant than the RAM and storage and transfer.
- tmtvl 8mo ago8 threads at 3.4 GHz, 8MB cache. Seems fine, depending on your use case.
- Aurornis 8mo agoMeasuring CPUs by thread count and clock speed is not a good way to gauge performance. A current gen CPU would be several times faster than this old CPU. Depending on workload, this old CPU might be as slow as a 2 thread or even 1 thread current gen server.
- yread 8mo agoIt does 8000 CPU marks with 4 cores. Sure Xeon 674X does 83641 with 28 cores. But show me where can you find it for less than 10 times the price? And with 320GB RAM, 10TB of NVMe SSD storage and 10 GBit/s of "unlimited" bandwidth
- 8mo ago
- gib444 8mo ago[flagged]
- adrian_b 8mo agoWhen I have looked on Newegg and on Amazon USA last month, I have seen even greater prices than here in Europe, by 30% to 40% greater, which is reversed from previous years, when computers and computer-related components were cheaper in USA than in Europe. So I think that the victims are all the computer users of the entire world, with the exception of a negligible number of humans tied to the AI companies. Moreover, the US victims appear to be hit by the price hikes even more than in other countries, at least for now.
- rayiner 8mo ago[flagged]
- dewey 8mo agoEveryone knows what they mean, it's obviously not a real "tax".
- spankibalt 8mo agoMan alive, stop being performatively dense. Getting to pay "the tax" in this context is just a colloquialism equating getting to pay "the burden".
- Aurornis 8mo ago> 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 response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly. I do find it interesting that so many people think “market rate” means the opposite of what economics teaches, and that prices should stay stable and not change much when the economic conditions change. I also find it interesting to read all of the “we shouldn’t let them…” takes in response to this situation. The DRAM market is international. Trying to restrict it in one country would just see the data centers get built in another country.
- bparsons 8mo agoMost markets don't have three purchasers trying to corner the entire supply of one product.
- Aurornis 8mo agoEconomic history is full of examples of demand shocks. This is not some unique situation that has never occurred before. This is actually a clean commodity price spike because it’s specifically not for market manipulation or financial engineering. It’s because demand for this product really did explode overnight.
- fao_ 8mo ago> This is actually a clean commodity price spike because it’s specifically not for market manipulation or financial engineering. It’s because demand for this product really did explode overnight. Based on how the same 3 billion has been circiling between Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few other companies... I really doubt that this is the case, to be honest.
- 8mo ago
- oldherl 8mo agoHetzner should not be compared to AWS or GCP for pricing. It should be compared to Vultr, Linode or DigitalOcean.
- c16 8mo agoOf which DigitalOcean is running very outdated prices at 4USD for 512mb ram. The cheapest Kimsufi dedicated server with 32GB ram is $11.10/mo.
- xslvrxslwt 8mo agoThe reason Hetzner was cheap was bad latency and Arbor.
- handzhiev 8mo agoExcuse me, but if the difference between 10 EUR per month and 14 eur per month is going to kill your startup, you probably shouldn't try to start it. Might be time to think about using and creating less memory-hungry software.
- appsoftware 8mo agoActually I disagree. I've killed projects because I've run out of time for them and didn't like them costing me £50 a month. If I'd been able to keep them going at £10 a month, I might have kept them going until I could get back to them. Sometimes startups fail just because the owners get distracted by life, and the project just needs more time.
- everdrive 8mo ago"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." We might also have our aquifers depleted and our electricity prices skyrocket. But at least we see really great benefits, such as being able to script some side-project while unemployed due to AI.
- daxaxelrod 8mo agoAnyone who thinks modern data centers don’t use recirculated water can safely have their opinions summarily discarded.
- b40d-48b2-979e 8mo agoAnyone who thinks that modern data centers don't evaporate their "recirculated FRESH water" straight into the ocean can safely have their opinions summarily discarded.
- Betelbuddy 8mo agoData centers consume...a lot...of water by design, recirculated water, does not means no water consumption. Water must be continuously added in evaporative cooling systems used by many data centers. [1] - Cooling towers reject heat through evaporation, which uses water, not just recirculates it. Evaporated water is lost to the atmosphere and must be replaced with "make-up" water. As a result, recirculating cooling loops still require new water input to make up evaporation and blowdown losses. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
- 15155 8mo ago..so outlaw cooling towers and use dry coolers.. what?
- estimator7292 8mo agoPlease google "datacenter evaporative cooling" and then re-evaluate
- super256 8mo ago1) this reads like it's posted by an LLM 2) why could they not just up the prices for new deployments, like they did with their dedicated servers? I think that would be fairer to existing customers If you have a company, I can recommend leaseweb for cheap hosting. I host my personal stuff like my email and my ente.io instance there. They are cheaper than Hetzner (already before the new price increase) if you don't need managed k8s.
- dist-epoch 8mo ago> Same kit I bought 8 months ago for 90 EUR is now 400+. That's not normal market dynamics. That's exactly normal market dynamics during acute shortage. Remember 2020 when filtering face masks went up in price 10-100x?
- rob 8mo agoWarning: another bot - check their history.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoOn the plus siide, we all get to learn how few new computers are needed rather than chase number goes up.