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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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer... And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I'm completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can't sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I'll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they're now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn't too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I'm gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wrt dns there are better ways. Like auto updating a dns record that regulary checks what your public ip is. And then automatically update it. Services like ddns.

I myself also host everything at home. But since 3 years now I went to an official business internet subscription, which allows me to have a static ipv4 and ipv6 ip address from my isp.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 1 day ago

I have a business internet connection as well. I'm going to cancel it though, eventually. It's a bit pricey. And they don't do IPv6 for longterm customers, I just got my static IPv4 and that's it.

Yeah, what I meant with DNS: I run a DNS Adblocker. And the big German ISPs do some silly DNS censoring, mostly for movie piracy websites. So I run my own DNS server. I had that configured on all my devices. Which is kind if great, I'll get a good amount of ads and trackers blocked without any additional effort. But it's a huge single point of failure. So now I have some services like DNS run on a VPS.