Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes.

Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized.

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.

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.

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.

It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Given coding is only a small part of the developer's job, there's just nothing new to consume.

The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases.

Prices have increased for literally nothing.

By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.

In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.

> 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 don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.

For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.

For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.

Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware.

This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase.

But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too

Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...

I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.

IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.

But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.

I wish I could say I am disappointed.

existing VPS will have the old price.

It get increased only if it is rescaled and for new VPSs.

Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.

To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.

And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.

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).

1. https://sive.rs/ti

Why? From what I understand, Ram production is not ramping up. Even if a bubble does pop, I don't think it's even guaranteed to drop to where it was.

I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.

I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?

The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.

It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this...

AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro.

Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner.

This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware.

The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers.

They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already.

Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers.

If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise.

There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?

Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao

The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.

If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)

They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality.

I mean don't get me wrong, this for sure is a factor but like others said, other services don't see such drastic price hikes.

If you just run some blogs, of course, this is not important.

Not fully true. AI is now often used to fix a lot of bugs in old and badly maintained software.

The quality of big and popular software probably decreased a bit, but the quality of niche products probably improved.

They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.

Crazy stuff

Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)

I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.

Outside of HN, this is all people are seeing. Gamers in particular aren't seeing a benefit. They are being priced out of their hobby. The recent DDLS 5 meme is what people think of when they hear AI.

Because the consumers won't upgrade to new hardware as fast as before. People who buy their first gaming PC in 2027 might even get a lower spec in average than people who bought in 2025. So new games might require even lower hardware specs than before, to sell enough copies.

A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long.

Is it? If by higher quality, you mean commenting properly, sticking to naming conventions etc. I can agree. But to me, AIslop looks like it lacks "intentionality" of code written by devs, no matter how bad they are at naming things and sticking to conventions.

i.e. people who are adequately good at their jobs usually do things for a reason, and they can explain it. Even if you don't find it agreeable, it usually is consistent.

How did you come to that conclusion? That goes against everything I've heard from people who understand development. Every resource I can find about AI vs non-AI development comes to the exact opposite conclusion you did.

Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread.

The only thing that is clear is that measuring programming is just as impossible as it has always been. In all my years of projects they've either been resounding successes or gone down in flames. The difference between good and bad is a difference in kind. Most of the bad ones didn't even know what the hell they were building and built the wrong thing.

Like, the entire idea that some omniscient manager is looking at a thousand timelines and pondering over whether to pick the $11.5M successful one or the $9.5M successful one is literally laughable. Half of them are going to make the Hindenburg look like a bit of a whoopsie and the other half you would lock in sight unseen without a second thought.

Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.

Indeed, never buy equipment unless all other choices were explored.

Note, we may be waiting till 2029 for GPU/ddr7/flash prices to fully normalize. =3

Just remember we are comparing slops. If you care about your code it really doesn't matter if you write it manually or with the help of a glorified typewriter.

Sorry, I meant 10-15% at most.

If it was by more than that then we'd see the effects in an obvious way. Since we don't those 15% are already generous.

After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.

It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".

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.

But even pure software companies are hit by higher hardware prices. Their customers need to buy expensive hardware and have less budget left to spend on software.

The last Hetzner box I leased I had to poll for availability as if I was Ebay auction sniping. It took me 2 days to acquire it.

There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?

Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?

Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.

I suspect this will soon follow and no fixed subscription model, which will enforce companies/developers to be moderate and thoughtful when using AI. Also I think Microsoft will do the same for copilot