Hetzner is one of the go-to server providers for Fediverse instances, in part due to its cheap offerings while still providing high quality service. However, Hetzner has announced a price adjustment, which has increased the prices of some servers as much as 3-4 times the original. This kind of ruins the point in using Hetzner, as the main appeal was Hetzner's cheap server prices.

Some of their servers haven't increased an insane amount, for example, the CAX41 offering has gone from €31.49 monthly to €40.99 (30% increase). Others are much higher though; CPX41 has gone from €38.99 monthly to €120.49 (209% increase)!

To any Fediverse admins using Hetzner, how would you see this affecting your instance? Will you be migrating to a different service or sticking with Hetzner even with the price hike?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe existing servers will be grandfathered in to the old price point, so that will certainly buy some time to find a potential alternative.

I personally am using Hetzner for my Mbin instance, but the price increase doesn't seem completely unreasonable for the specific server I am currently using. I do not see myself needing to rescale the server any time soon, so I should be able to keep the old price anyway.

Hacker news discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844

Hetzner price adjustment table: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/

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[–] jerry@infosec.pub 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There was a big price increase a month or two ago that affected existing servers. I think this is recognizing that Hetzner just can’t acquire new servers (particularly memory) at anywhere close to what they could before. RAM prices are up about 400% in the past year and rising, and I think even server chassis and CPUs are being largely soaked up by the mesoscale datacenter builds.

Net net, this sucks. And my expectation is that Hetzner will still be the cheapest game in town by about the same percentages as before. It the costs keep going up, I think we will see the fediverse starting to struggle.

Between the absolute crush of bot registrations and the spiraling costs, I have been contemplating moving to a required donation for new accounts.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 8 points 1 day ago

Or we could talk about how wildly inefficient Lemmy is.