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/

  • jerry@infosec.pubEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    My instance runs on a dedicated server at hetzner, from their server auction. My price only increased like 3%, which is honestly lower than inflation given how many years we’ve been at that price point. So I’m completely fine with it. I’ve not heard of these enormous price hikes before.

  • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
    0·
    4 days ago

    I’m so happy that I went for local hosting at home since 2008. I started with game servers.

    Eventually hosting everything from git server to file storage. From todo list to my homepage. From my blog to voip server. From plantuml server to mbin. From Mastodon to my own search engine. From dashboarding to block chain explorer.