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This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azur
by binarymax 4mo ago
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed.
I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
- RIMR 4mo agoThe hyperscalers are the ones buying up all the memory and storage hardware in the first place. They aren't affected by the problem, they are the source of the problem.
- motbus3 4mo agoTrue but this is probably because now they have much more demand as other competitors got to expensive and now people are going for the smaller ones even with low service levels
- MattGaiser 4mo agoIt’s also trivial to use now. With AI, there’s no meaningful additional work in using a VM.
- jameshart 4mo agoRight, 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.
- mrngld 4mo agoThat'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 homelab style projects dramatically. It's not doing anything I couldn't have, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze before compared to, say, Pikapods. Now there basically is no squeeze, just juice.
- jameshart 4mo agoUsing 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.
- Capricorn2481 4mo agoI don't think any VPS provider has come close to raising their prices this much. There's absolutely not enough people flocking to Hetzner to justify this.
- harrall 4mo agoBut VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up. If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware. Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
- Capricorn2481 4mo agoThat's all true, but this seems disproportionate even to the hardware market. They already raised their prices recently as hardware got more expensive, and now they are quadrupled. Maybe I am just misreading the hardware market right now.
- markonen 4mo agoIf you see photos/videos of Hetzner datacenters, their servers are essentially plain, low-end motherboards (1G network, few slots) sitting on shelves (don't mean that as derogatory, it's an efficient design). What it does mean is that their per-server costs are absolutely dominated by the very components that are exploding in cost right now: RAM, SSDs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs.
- re-thc 4mo ago> But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.
- wiether 4mo agoOVH just raised their VPS prices by about 30%. They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices. Crazy stuff
- pjc50 4mo agoI wonder what the effect of "move services to Europe ASAP" is on this.
- stephenhuey 4mo agoInching closer to Vultr prices. There are some Rails projects I might have later this year, and I had already been thinking of putting them onto Vultr via Hatchbox since Vultr offered a managed db. Maybe for some stuff that I can run a Rails 8 Solid Stack app with just sqlite, I'd use Hetzner. I tested both with Hatchbox but have nothing in production on either yet and generally use Heroku and Render still. Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.
- chrisweekly 4mo agoI have a Vultr account but it's very lightly used. Came recommended by Derek Sivers^1 1. https://sive.rs/ti https://sive.rs/ti
- snarfy 4mo agoWhen I used them the main issue was latency spikes due to their IP ranges getting DDoSd. They host a lot of shady/spam sites.
- stephenhuey 4mo agoOh, didn't realize that. Any recommendation for mitigating that if deployed there? Had thought about putting something on Vultr in a few months. Also open to any other good recommendations for providers that have a managed Postgres.
- nijave 4mo agoHaven't used either but have heard good things about PlanetScale and NeonDB. Neon has a free tier
- dboreham 4mo agoI use it as a hosting target for automated deployment tooling we wrote. Tools were originally Digitalocean-only and I wondered if LLMs could add support for a second provider, so asked Claude to add Vultr which it did very nicely. But other than run the automated tests (which create VMs, DNS entries, check validity and tear down) and pay the monthly bill, we haven't yet used them for production deployments.
- oasisbob 4mo agoBeen wondering the same. GCP recently increased their egress pricing, and was expecting AWS to follow. So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability.
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo agoA ton of cloud workloads are still running on old Haswell-era CPUs with RAM that was bought a decade+ ago. Probably the costs will be made up with new VM shapes.
- rsync 4mo agoWe increased our prices - for the first time in 21 years - last week. The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.
- ranger_danger 4mo ago[dead]
- re-thc 4mo ago> GCP recently increased their egress pricing The peering announcement or did I miss something? I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering).
- pocksuppet 4mo agoEgress pricing? That's one of their highest margin products! Compute is the one that's being squeezed!
- rvnx 4mo agoIt's almost 100% profit actually, because ISPs are willing to pay to be connected to Google network
- 4mo ago
- originalvichy 4mo agoThis is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
- surgical_fire 4mo agoAnd I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic. I wish I could say I am disappointed.
- nazgulsenpai 4mo agoIdealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that.
- surgical_fire 4mo agoBecause, oddly enough, there are a lot more things going on. Government incentives, companies trying to stranglehold markets, FOMO-fueled massive investiment into the current fad, etc. Just to name a few.
- colechristensen 4mo agoIt 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.
- dd8601fn 4mo agoDoesn’t this presume that chip fabs are betting that the AI boom is a bubble that’s going to pop? Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
- bigbuppo 4mo agoWhat happens to these platforms when there's nothing left to access them? That's where we're headed.
- chadgpt3 4mo agoThey sell it to us.
- me551ah 4mo agoIt’s not just the hyperscalers, it’s also the boom in personal projects being launched. AI has massively decreased the bar to entry, and a lot more people need servers compared to before
- SomeUserName432 4mo agoDo you believe there are many enough of these at scale to make any meaningful impact? The vast majority of personal projects are not built by those receiving FAANG salaries.
- abyssin 4mo agoMy personal experience says yes. I doubled my usage of personal servers because it's so easy to self-host when I have an LLM holding my hand.
- Jgrubb 4mo agoI believe that the explosion of software _production_ in the last 6-12 months in all areas of society is beginning to run headlong into a global bottleneck in the capacity to _deliver_ and _distribute_ that much more software. Unlike previous boom/bust cycles, I do not believe that demand that's driving the capacity bring-up that's underway right now is going to level off in the near future. I am personally witnessing teams at my employer that were previously unable to produce software - non-Eng teams - that are now empowered to do so, and some of them are building some cool stuff. I think this is happening at every company everywhere, and I think when we and everyone else solve the "how do we deliver and govern this stuff?" problem there's going to be an even bigger unlock. Wild times.
- hdgvhicv 4mo agoWhy would their keep their costs down. Get business hooked on their product and then ramp up the price.
- xboxnolifes 4mo agoOr their margins were/are large enough that they are less hurt, and are instead attempting to weather the storm without touching pricing.
- deathanatos 4mo agoMicrosoft can't supply sufficient compute capacity to itself; they're in the news today for considering AWS for capacity.