Hetzner announcement: Price changes for servers ordered via the Server Auction | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner announcement: Price changes for servers ordered via the Server Auction

95 pointsdutchbrit139 comments

"Unfortunately, energy prices in Germany have been increasing dramatically, and electricity plays a big role in the operating costs for servers. We have always calculated the prices for the Server Auction to be as low as possible. The current prices for many Server Auction servers do not cover the increasing operating costs."

In my case, server price is going from €26 to €35, a 35% increase(!!!). Still cheap for what I'm getting but quite a price hike, new pricing starts in March in my case.

Received via email, no article on their website yet.

View on HN

Hetzner is a wonderful provider, and as transparent as possible, with exceptional prices/value.

I've recently decided to stop renting a machine - I've had 3 server auction machines across 10 years - with 2x3TB enterprise (internal ecc protected) HDD, Xeon, 16GB ECC RAM, etc. The hw is aging, the disks were reasonably new, and it all just works, for practically pennies compared to cloud providers (no IO, no internal bw cost, fully dedicated CPUs, and so on). My reason to leave it was lack of need; I decided to move my backups and archives offline and my services to a tiny home "server".

> I decided to move my backups and archives offline and my services to a tiny home "server".

I hope you're not gonna regret "moving" backups rather than "copying". I made that mistake once, and only once. Now I only copy my backups if there is some better alternative, while keeping the "worse" one unless I did it for security reasons.

There are always pros and cons to everything. Having reasonably personal and/or sensitive backups and archives on the same machine where I have web, email, and messaging services made me feel growingly uneasy. I also prefer not to use energy when not needed, meaning offline is a better thing for my world view. It is true that offline archiving is a mess: fire and waterproof safety boxes, reliable hardware, multiple copies, etc. plus I lose geographically duplicated datasets, which is something I haven't given up on - I just couldn't figure it out how to do it yet :)

I bought an 8TB hard drive for sole purpose of keeping offsite backups at my parents' house, in case of fire. Been over a year, drive has some backup data on it, but still haven't brought the drive over there.

I should have gone with my original idea, to install a server in their house and transfer over the internet.

In a few minutes of Googling, I can't seem to find a decent time series of average German electricity prices (€ct/kWh) by month. What has the increase been? [1] reports 54% (!!!) increase since 2020. Why?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/euro-zone-consumers-...

They went from nuclear to coal and gas to be more green.[0]

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2020/01/11/costs...

... and now Russia is becoming belligerent and there's a chance they will be targeted with sanctions if they invade Ukraine, which would cause gas prices to explode. Some of this risk is probably being preemptively priced into the market via speculation on gas.

There is a good chance that Ukraine will target these lines via valve and pumping station attacks as a form of resource denial to Russia. There are few alternate routes and the valves and pumping stations are not hardened. There are also many exposed runs that are vulnerable by shallow or even zero cover. Such damage would take a long time to repair, and large numbers of attack points that are hard to defend.

I'm no geopolitics expert, but I find it exceedingly implausible that Ukraine would sabotage energy delivery to Central Europe, the assumed allies, just to cause a small income drop for Russia.

Except that's not the case. But you already knew that. A side note in Sweden we had a 70% price hike and Sweden is nuclear and hydro.

This professor of energy policy thinks it is making a difference: “The end of nuclear power in Germany will likely push prices up even further, according to Sebastian Herold, a professor of energy policy at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences” (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211231-germany-to-cl...)

When you lose 25% of your 2011 energy producing capacity by closing many nuclear power plants, it’d be strange if there was no effect. The pollution increase is even more worrying after many new studies since then found negative effects on human health that we didn't know about earlier: https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2020/January/study-examines-...

Swedish price hike is due to the German screw up.

Even after closing some reactors (plus one more currently down due to some accident) Sweden is still producing 15% more than it needs. The price increase is due to increased international prices thanks to Germany, and Russia.

Electricity prices in Sweden have gone up due to two factors:

- the "green" party "Miljöpartiet" ("Party for the environment") has forced the premature closure of half of the nuclear power plants, going so far as to replace the leadership of the state-owned power consortium "Vattenfall" when they refused to fall in line. They actually boast about closing those nuclear power plants, indicating the disconnect between their party's name and its goals.

- Sweden has increased its exchange with other European power distribution networks which caused the higher prices on the European market to have a larger influence on local pricing. The country is divided into 4 pricing zones, the northernmost 2 of which have lower prices - closer to the price paid by all Swedes before deregulation and the introduction of the controlled market "Nord Pool" - than the rest.

Have a look at the "control room" site for information on current pricing, electricity flows, power sources and more:

   https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

It's interesting when discussing nuclear safety, proponents always say that modern reactors are much better than old designs, but when we talk about shutdowns they complain that reactors which have been running much beyond there original design lifetime are being shut down.

Moreover to blame the current price hikes on the nuclear shutdown is dishonest at best 8 of the 17 nuclear reactors in Germany were shut down in 2011 (and IIRC all of the were 40 years and older) without this causing a big price hike. Of the remaining only the last 3 were shut down in 2021 (the youngest being 31 year, with IIRC original permits being 40 years). It is also false to say that Germany replaced nuclear with coal, because coal reduced significantly as well during the same time, while renewables raised rapidly.

One could just as well argue that it's Frances fault for not investing in renewables at all (growth of renewables is tiny in France compared to Germany). Also of note is that nuclear relies just as much on gas peakers as renewables.

It's also funny that you blame the greens for the 12/2020 ringhals shutdown, because it was shut down by vattenfall due to low profitability[1]. This was one of two shutdowns the other was in 2019, so both also had very little to do with current prices.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-nuclear-power-split/

I did not mention nuclear safety anywhere, why do you bring this up? If you insist on discussing it I can bring up that US nuclear power ends up all the way at the bottom of the list over the mortality rate (direct deaths and epidemiological estimates) with 0.1 lives lost per trillion kWh. Global nuclear, that is including Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other known accidents in the last 40 years ends up higher at 90 deaths/trillion kWh. The list, in order from low to high mortality goes like this:

Mortality rate in deaths per trillion kWh

  0.1 - US nuclear

  5 - US hydro

  90 - nuclear

  150 - wind

  440 - solar

  1400 - hydro

  4000 - natural gas

  10000 - US coal

  24000 - biofuel and biomass

  36000 - oil

  100000 - coal

  170000 - China coal

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/25/natural-g...

Another thing, I related to the shutdown of Swedish nuclear power, not German nuclear power so why did you bring up those numbers on Germany? It is very clear that the closure of those Swedish nuclear power plants - which could have run until 2036 without problems, by which time replacements would have been in place - has made the electricity supply in Sweden less reliable and the price swings more frequent and intense. The oil-fired peak power plant in Karlshamn would normally only be fired up in the cold of winter but last year it was used in the middle of summer to avoid a brown-out in Stockholm.

I brought Germany up, because the whole topic here was on Germany and you make the exact same argument for Sweden as was made for Germany.

Regarding the plant shutdown, you nicely ignored the fact that contrary to your assertion it was just down for economic reasons. Sure Vattenfall could have kept it running and made losses and now that demand increased they would have stopped prices going up (likely not because the big winners of the price hikes are the nuclear power plant operators). They could have also build windfarms for that money that likely would have taken prices down.

No, this is an oft repeated statement which is simply not true. Had "Miljöpartiet" not pushed for the closure of those reactors they would still be running. If you'd rather take this from the horse's mouth here's Lorenz Tovatt, energy policy spokesman for that party [1]:

Haha det är så kul med kärnkraftshögermän som låtsas att vi i MP motarbetat kärnkraft ”i smyg” för att sen skylla på marknaden. Löjligt. Jag tar hemskt gärna cred för nedlagd kärnkraft. Utan MP hade nog flera av de nedslängda reaktorerna rullat vidare.

...which translates to:

Haha it's so much fun with nuclear right-wingers who pretend that we in the MP ("Miljöpartiet") opposed nuclear power "secretly" and then blame the market. Ridiculous. I'm terribly happy to take credit for discontinued nuclear power. Without MP, several of the closed ("nedslängda" means "dropped", I guess he meant to write "nedstängda" which means "closed") reactors would probably have rolled on.

So, no. Not "the market" but politics pushing that market in a certain direction.

[1] https://twitter.com/LorentzTovatt/status/1478049881487032328

"modern reactors are much better than old designs, but when we talk about shutdowns they complain that reactors which have been running much beyond there original design lifetime are being shut down"

These two claims aren't contradictions though.

It is both possible that nuclear tech has improved a lot, and that newer reactors would be better, but the alternative of "no reactors at all" is much worse than even running the existing ones beyond their design lifetime.

The basic electricity coverage that you are getting if you have no contract with any provider was around 74 €ct/kWh beginning of the year (maybe even 80 €ct, depending on where you live). But some are reducing that to around 54 €ct/kWh again, since it was just to cover the surge of new users that required them to buy energy for high prices. Having a proper contract with an energy provider it's currently around 46 €ct/kWh last I checked.

Previous prices were around 31 €ct/kWh on average (seen them as low as 26 €ct/kWh).

People that have ongoing contracts are the lucky ones currently.

That’s insane!

If I were to sign a new contract right now in Finland I’d pay 8 cents per kWh. Including transfer fees and taxes that comes to less than 15 cents all in.

And prices are extremely high right now over here. Normally you’d pay under 10 cents all in.

Do you know if in Finland, those prices are subsidised in any way?

No, these are market prices. We have no subsidized power in Finland.

Note that Hetzner has a datacenter in Finland! Feeling lucky right now that I picked Helsinki DC for my own server.

Electricity was always quite expensive in germany.

Right now for new contracts some pay like 80c/kwh.

This is good information. Thank you to share.

Do you think Finnish electricity prices are so much cheaper because of ample nuclear power?

Nuclear power is only 16% of generation capacity. Hydro is larger at 18%. Next up are biofuels 15%, wind 14% and natural gas at 10%.

Our newest nuclear power plant won’t be in production until summer, but once that comes online the nuclear share will go up.

Imports are mainly Russian nuclear and Scandinavian hydro.

Hydro and nuclear definitely help, as well as the low dependency on fossil fuels.

To give a more detailed picture than simply saying "nuclear gone, coal&gas usage up":

- Plan was to increase wind/solar electricity by massive amounts while phasing out old nuclear power stations over twenty years

- Plan was hampered by various political parties and lots of nimby's (one conservative state basically outlawed new wind power stations)

- Hence basically nowhere close enough new green electricity generation, while still phasing out nuclear over the last twenty years.

- Prices were shifted around so that private persons had to directly pay for the small amount of subsidies for green electricity, while subsidies for coal/gas were kept the same and paid for via general taxes

- This cost was not paid by companies, hence the total amount was put on the shoulders of private persons

- This all lead to this year where gas/fuel prices went up massively everywhere, so electricity prices went up as well. This isnt a uniquely German problem. This is the case in the whole of Europe.

> Plan was hampered by various political parties and lots of nimby's (one conservative state basically outlawed new wind power stations)

NIMBY for wind is expected behavior, they should really not base future electricity market predictions on ideal scenario's. The opposition was there from the start and it would of course increase once the easy locations have wind installed on them.

It went so far that some electricity lines carrying power between states have had massive year-long hold-ups because of problems of where to actually put them due to nimby's.

One of the main problems is the market design for electricity in Europe. It uses a merit order based pricing model.

Simplified version: - Everyone lists how much power they can produce at which marginal price (Renewables = 0c/kWh, Nuclear/Lignite = 4-8c/kWh, Gas peaker = very much based on the current gas prices) - Offers get sorted by marginal price. - Buyers put in the amount of power they want to buy. - The transaction (which is always a 1h timeslot) is resolved by adding up all buyers and take all offers from the list, till demand is fulfilled. - The price of the last kWh bought, will determine the price for everyone.

So, as soon as a single gas power plant is required to fulfill demand, the whole market price is going up. With the extreme rise in gas-prices, due to Russia playing games with the gas-market, The average market prices have gone up. Especially Nuclear and Lignite plants are very happy about the current situation, as they make much more money due to market mechanisms.

While lots of renewables drive the prices down (as they are usually valued at zero due to feed-in tariff regulations).

Another issue is, France has multiple nuclear reactors in unplanned maintenance due to failures. Their fleet is missing more than 10% of their capacity, while most of France is heating with direct electricity heating (not even heat pumps).

Result: The electricity market is in a massive crunch right now in Europe, electricity prices are driven by natural gas prices. And there we've got a huge dependency on Russia. .... And Russia is arguing that all Europe needs to do is certifying their new pipeline (Nordstream2), which comes with massive geopolitical problems attached to it.

Europe should certify the Russian pipeline after they move all their troops on the Ukraine border to the Far East, but fail to purchase gas from them and instead buy LPG from our US partners.

To play devil's advocate, don't some of these bullet points indicate that it was not a good plan to from the beginning? For example, if a plan's success hinges on building renewable generation in areas where it isn't wanted or can be blocked by the residents, it seems doomed.

Reality is a lot more complex. Conservative parties rule the majority of german states. Over time they added more and more rules to local law, which implicitly prevented more renewable generation, especially from wind.

Also there have been a lot of astroturf groups spawning up over the years. From hard climate change denial, blackout FUD-spreader and false claims about health impacts. They feed a huge load of BS to the locals, as soon as a developer wants to create a new windpark.

It was never a good plan from the start. They wanted to get rid of nuclear because of irrational fear. The path towards energy independence was always nuclear for every nation. But that got rejected thanks to fearmongering. Now we're basically fucked.

The German plan could never work. They installed a lot of solar which does not produce much energy in the winter. They installed a lot of wind which does not help when there is cold, since then there is usually not much wind. In audition they did not buy enough gas. Germans have been fooled by people who do not know how to use their calculators.

See this electricity map for realtime overview of production, consumption and export/imports. https://app.electricitymap.org/

This Norwegian article show historical average for Europe and current prices picture. https://e24.no/olje-og-energi/i/nWbMBo/nord-norge-hadde-bill...

Everytime there is a energy crisis the same group of people are quick to blame it on green energy. See for example the Texas outage.

Sweden is moving to greener energy and is currently exporting electricity to Germany and Poland. How come it works here but not down there?

Because bad planing, political sabotage and a whole lot of NIMBY.

Most of Sweden's electricity supply comes from hydro and nuclear though. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Swedens-electricity-prod...

Hydro is maxed out basically everywhere already and nuclear is being shut down in Germany, it doesn't take a genius to see it can't work. We can't keep increasing our demand while killing the only large/cheap/on demand energy source to rely on intermittent ones. It might work if we decreased our consumption by a lot but this doesn't seem to be the plan

> Sweden is moving to greener energy and is currently exporting electricity to Germany and Poland. How come it works here but not down there?

Sweden has 3.5x more hydro than wind energy (in TWh produced). Germany has 7x less hydro than wind. Sweden can easily use their large hydro reserves to balance out the fluctuations in wind power output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

They're not blaming on green energy. They're blaming it on utopian Energiewende pedalled by shortsighted anti nuclear Greens. We'll see how their eco hipster green foreign affairs secretary handles this Russian crisis.

Statista have wholesale price data from January 2019 to October 2021

Increase from a low of 17.05 Euros per megawatt hour in April 2020 to 128.34 in October 2021:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...

Even if you go with a more conservative average before the increase of 40 Euro, its an increase of 220%!

If you are stuck behind paywall: https://imgur.com/a/HfpD2Pp

just as one data point:

my current energy provider increased it like this (prices in Euro Cents)

Energy: 27.85 ct/kWh --> 40,7 ct/kWh Gas: 5,71 ct/kWh --> 19,87 ct/kWh

I am already in the process of ugprading appliances and decided against building a second home server I was planning.

My local city-owned provider ("Stadtwerke" as the general term; I'm in a large city in Bavaria) and my contract details are

Less than 1.400 kWh / year

  Price 
  30,27 ct / kWh
  Base price
  89,28 € / year
  Online-Bonus 
  10,00 € / year

More than 1.400 kWh / year

  Price
  27,92 ct / kWh
  Base price
  122,52 € / year
  Online-Bonus 
  20,00 € / year

I took the standard package and never shopped around. I'm using around this 1400 threshold. It was >1600 before I switched the energy-guzzling graphics card for a minimal one (I don't play games and videos are the only thing utilizing it a bit, on the 32 inch screen). Apart from the PC and 32 inch monitor an Italian all-metal and heat-radiating portafilter espresso maker (with E61 brew group, whose 1961 design did not care about energy efficiency, unfortunately) is the largest contributor to my bill. Lighting is negligible, heating is for the whole apartment building and gas-powered.

Looks like we share the same city even as I am not in that city anymore but still serviced by the same company directly and not as a reseller.

If you don't mind me asking, which city? I'm in Regensburg and recently got moved to my munincipal provider because my former provider closed shop and it's looking...bleak. We're talking ~60+ct / kWh.

N-Ergie, Nürnberg (Nuremberg)

https://www.n-ergie.de

Thanks, very interesting. Should've stayed in Nürnberg, I suppose :)

Yes, as they service only their own area and do not act as a reseller.

As from the latest newsletter I've got they are 100% sustainable and source everything themself without anything to buy in from nuclear, coal, and gas. That's the reason why they don't offer anymore the ecofriendly tariff, because they are 100% anyhow.

Good to know that the "energy" pun is versatile enough to translate! https://www.nrg.com/

'Base price' is what's called a 'Standing Charge' in the UK?

(it's a flat daily fee you pay regardless of your gas/electricity usage)

No, Base price is basically for renting the meter (and maybe some other internal fees).

It's a service charge. They say it's a rental fee for the meter. Just one of those scams that are allowed to go on because nobody bothers to take them to court for it. ISPs are doing it too, i.e. charging a monthly fee for the DSL modem they install in your flat.

+1, living in a large-ish German city, that aligns with what I pay at home.

For the generally curious, you can go to https://www.verivox.de/ click on "Strom" (= electricity), type in a german postcode (grab one off google maps, 5-digit number), and type in a kWh / year number. (The "number of persons" is just a fill-in aid for the kWh/yr.)

That said, these numbers are entirely useless for discussions around a hoster like Hetzner — they're end user prices.

My provider has increased the price by ~27%, to 39¢ / kWh.

Best offer from electricity price comparison sites is 44¢/kWh, so I guess I will stay with them.

People using electricity startups / discount providers (both gas / electricity) have seen them go into insolvency. They are automatically supplied by the base providers who run the networks in their region.

New prices are up to 1€/kWh on the high end. This is less a problem due to shutting down nuclear plants or the CO2 tax, but rather due to the energy market being de-regulated to casino style capitalism (meaning many more investors / companies being allowed to make a quick buck on the end user's expense).

edit: another reason for high energy prices: the former government has decided that wind energy farms require 1km distance from the nearest settlement (compared to less than half that for a coal-driven power plant...). Also NIMBYism prevents the building of desperately needed north->south electricity lines which could transport energy from wind farms to where its needed.

For one, we have had a new carbon tax since then (which also drove up the prices for petrol) and a couple old nuclear plants shut down.

The really important thing however is geopolitics and rabid capitalism colliding badly. Basically, for a very long time it was usual business practice of utilities to go for long-term contracts for natural gas and electricity itself... but nowadays, the market has shifted towards spot price contracts, which are usually cheaper. Under "normal" conditions, that would not have been a problem... but when market conditions dramatically change, everyone on a spot contract is pretty much fucked. Additionally, dynamic capacity ("Regelenergie") exploded in price for the same reasons [1], and that dynamic capacity which is needed to balance out unstable renewables (solar/wind) has to be paid for by all the consumers, further contributing to price hikes.

We do have regulations in place to prevent consumers from being on the hook for thousands of dollars like in that Texas power crunch, but nevertheless a couple of "discounter utilities" had to cease operating and a whole lot of others were forced to rapidly hike prices. The result of that was that the local utilities, which by law have to cover for such situations ("Grundversorgung"), were hit with an onslaught of new customers that they hadn't bought supply contracts for... meaning they had to raise the prices, too.

It's an all-around clusterfuck. The fact that our government was in a transition phase until mid of December didn't help either, and expensive energy is actually what the Greens want as an incentive for people and companies to save power - whereas the Social Democrats focus on how the crisis affects poor people (pretty badly!) and the Liberal Democrats only care about the economy aka their large donors. So it's not like actual solutions are going to crop up... sigh.

[1]: https://www.next-kraftwerke.de/energie-blog/steigende-preise...

> but when market conditions dramatically change, everyone on a spot contract is pretty much fucked.

hedging is the solution. without it expect bankruptcies.

You can use this website to get a graph:

http://www.bricklebrit.com/stromboerse_leipzig.html

You have to enter the date and so on. I have done it for the Jan 20 2021 to Jan 20 2022 range and obtained this deeplink:

http://www.bricklebrit.com/cgi-bin/spotmarktpreise.pl?VONDTE...

Indeed there has been a massive explosion at the wholesale markets for energy. Up to a 10 fold increase!

This challenge put a lot of smaller energy providers into a bad situation, especially those who would obtain most of their electricity through the exchanges instead of their own infrastructure or longer term contractual arrangements. They could only sell energy at the lower prices and had to buy at extremely high prices. So they mass terminated the contracts of their customers (otherwise they would probably have went bankrupt).

In Germany, this doesn't mean that people are without electricity though, as a so called "basic provider" kicks in, who is always the electricity provider with the most customers in a given area. Per regulation, that provider has to take you as customer if they want to or not. Of course these providers are in the same buying situation as the smaller ones, so have to buy the energy at those inflated prices. To get back those costs, they have often doubled or even tripled their end customer prices, but only for new customers, that is, those customers that got dumped on them by the smaller providers and those who were the cause of having to buy new electricity.

For the electric customers this led to a market split in two: first the customers who did not get dumped, still the vast majority of people. For them, there was barely an increase. Second the customers who did get dumped and now have to pay the extremely inflated prices. Some people claim this is unfair, but at the same time, the main reason for people to switch away from the basic provider is to use cheaper prices (outside of people who want to buy "green" energy), so it's not that unfair that it's these people have to shoulder the costs if the market is directed against their favour for a while.

https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche...

They're getting out of nuclear and it turns out wind/sun kind of sucks because they can't store the energy nor produce it on demand. Their two last nuclear reactors (max output 4GW) often produce more than their entire sun+wind system (max output 122GW)

https://mobile.twitter.com/fmbreon/status/148058947971495936...

The day I saw this twitt I passed by a large windmill farm close to Berlin and not a single one of them was spinning... so we end up buying gas from Putin

It has to be the dumbest energy long term plan I've heard about, and it's purely motivated by ideology, looks like they don't want to understand the reality of modern energy issues.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

My Power Systems course in college back in 2014 used Germany as an example of how not to handle energy policy due to the brain-dead decision to get rid of perfectly fine and functional nuclear plants. The professor also had us produce high quality white papers and present them to the class, and receive mock peer reviews on our work showing how terrible renewables are as a "solution" compared. That wasn't his stated goal, but it was the conclusion that 107 out of 107 people in the class independently came to after a review of the relevant academic research. The only sustainable long-term solution for baseload is nuclear fission for at least the next 50-60 years barring any massive breakthroughs in nuclear fusion. Every single other option is a massive disaster ecologically and economically.

I've started a thread on twitter about this: https://twitter.com/vikgl/status/1484500546358845442

and somebody from Hetzner decided to answer some of my questions. One of which is mind-blowing: apparently they are going to re-adjust the prices once the electricity prices go down: https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/148452210352112435...

I wonder why this wasn't at all mentioned in their initial email... note i don't remember signing a contract for hosting where the price is dynamically calculated on commodity prices...

Does the contract mention anything about connection and service costs that might fluctuate, or who is responsible for them ? I have OVH servers but haven't ever had a price change. But if there was no notification etc, I would first check there.

The terms of service mention they expressly reserve the right to chance any of the conditions or prices _with_ prior notice.

Which I guess they’re giving us now.

yeah, although with zero transparency in regard how they ended up with the new price(s). because so far the new prices (especially in function of the old) are all over the place...

I assume it has something to do with what the minimum for similar servers on current Robot auctions is. The servers I’m paying €21 for certainly never seem to hit lower than €29 these days.

We have recently sent affected customers another statement via email with more information. The new Server Auction prices differ from model to model depending on the type of hardware they have. Only some servers in the Server Auctions were affected. (That's why unaffected customers did not receive an email.) The affected servers were being run at operating costs before the electricity prices in Germany increased over the last several months. Despite this, we understand that the price changes might seriously affect some customers. That's why, in our last email to affected customers, we presented an alternative option. The prices for our new/current dedicated root servers and cloud servers will remain unchanged. --Katie, Hetzner Online

> but haven't ever had a price change

In fairness, I've never had a price change from Hetzner either in the years I've had service there.¹

If power prices keep increasing as they have everywhere in Europe², no doubt other providers will be forced to adjust some of their pricing too. Hetzner is not the first. Many of those auction boxes are older machines that will be relatively power hungry which I'm sure makes a difference too, if you look at what is available not only have they changed some prices but some really old units that used to float around the list have gone completely³.

[1] and in fact haven't been told of one for my current service yet (not sure if that means I won't or if the emails are going out in batches and mine hasn't been sent yet)

[2] though more in some countries than others

[3] unless they have coincidentally all been rented and no others re-released back into the pool

> auction boxes are older machines that will be relatively power hungry

Thats actually something I hadn't even considered !

My monthly electricity bill went up by ~29%, so sounds about right. In fact, my electricity provider raised everyone's rate, even those with a contract, but giving an option to leave and find another provider, and shortly thereafter went bankrupt.

Thats not true. Regional providers which source their energy by regional means without any nuclear, gas, and coal can sustain their prices.

I wasn't buying cheap before and stayed regional and now I am still at about 30 Cents/kWh. It the same with lumber last year.

>In my case, server price is going from €26 to €35, a 35% increase(!!!). Still cheap for what I'm getting but quite a price hike, new pricing starts in March in my case.

I'm going to convert to USD for a minute (since I'm in the US) ... that's a price jump from ~$29.50 to ~$40. Or less than two trips through a drive through of a [cheap] value meal at a fast food place (maybe one trip through some places).

> I'm going to convert to USD for a minute (since I'm in the US) ... that's a price jump from ~$29.50 to ~$40. Or less than two trips through a drive through of a [cheap] value meal at a fast food place (maybe one trip through some places).

I guess consider yourself lucky that you apparently wouldn't be bothered by such an increase?

if $10 a month is a make-or-break for you, don't have a $30 a month charge in the first place?

Where did they say it was "make-or-break"? You can be upset about a 30% increase in prices with no added value while still being able to afford the increase.

percentage increase makes for good scare headlines

it doesn't make for good budgeting

when 30% roughly equals a latte, it's nothing to write home about

when it affects your monthly budget, it is

if a few euros is a Big Deal™ to you, then you have bigger personal budget problems than a couple bucks a month

You're making a subjective argument but passing it off as if it is objective. It's possible for both a few euros to not be a big deal for my personal budget, but also be something that is not justified as a price increase.

Why? Maybe the service was worth it until the price increase. We don’t have to be talking about someone’s last ten dollars here. If suddenly pizza by you increased by 10 bucks would you just keep buying it because it’s only 10 bucks or consider other options?

that the price hasn't increased over time to keep up with inflation really means this is just fixing what should have been done for years

when prices are held artificially-low, eventually they'll jump by more than a "nominal" amount

had this price increase been, say, 1-2EUR/mo/yr, OP never would've complained

but because he was locked-in at a rate the provider couldn't maintain, he's mad

so, yes: when food prices go up, I keep buying it

We know Americans are rich. Other people are not.

If $10 a month makes you "rich" ... you shouldn't be paying $29 a month for a server

Maybe it’s better to use their datacenter in Finland. A country where nuclear power is not replaced by coal and Russian gas.

Much of Europe is on the same shared grid, so energy prices goes up everywhere when Germany cuts nuclear power. Unless there is sufficent energy available to replace it. (Spoiler: There aren't)

They might share a grid but the prices differ massively between countries, sometimes having a 200-300% difference as is the case with Finland and Germany.

Most of the end-user energy prices differences are due to local tax differences.

https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/148452802243056845...

waste and pollution in the industry are the real enemies, not people who speak a different language or salute a different flag, no?

Despite the email only mentioning German electricity prices we got it for a Finland server. 5.8% increase.

We recently sent out an email correcting this. The prices for Auction servers will not increase in Finland. --Katie, Hetzner Online

It's crazy, some energy providers like EWS Schönau (https://www.ews-schoenau.de/) don't even take new customers currently because of the volatility in the energy market.

That's why you don't shutdown nuclear plants before having a solid backup plan. Or better not shutdown at all.

In France about 30% of nuclear power is unavailable because of maintenance shutdowns.

The price hike comes because of the hiking gas prices.

Sure, at the time of writing, 62% of France's production of electricity is nuclear.

We're importing 9392MW also.

17 out of the 56 plants are in shutdown right now. https://jpt.spe.org/france-turns-to-coal-as-nuclear-plant-sh...

Sure, 2% (1765MW) of France's production is coal at the moment.

It does not matter that plants are in maintenance, that is the normal state of complex systems like nuclear plants and a very desirable one. Sure, we could do better and close the last two coal factories to get 0% of coal modulo imports. That is still very different from 0% of nuclear. :)

The problem was not the plan, it was execution.

Hetzner recommends migrating servers to Finland

https://twitter.com/Hetzner_Online/status/148452016233009152...

They're sending the same email + a price increase for Finland servers too.

I apologize for the miscommunication. The prices in Finland will NOT increase. Some customers with servers in Finland mistakenly received an email, and we have since sent another one out correcting this mistake. Affected customers also have received an alternative offer recently. --Katie, Hetzner Online

Same in a small German regional hosting provider where I have a server: price costs raised so much that they have stopped taking in new customers for now, and will have to increase the prices for 2023 for “15 to 40 Euro net per month, depending on server contract”.

I’m going from 20.99 to 29.00. 38% up.

Like, energy prices over the past year have gone up from €20 per MWh to €120 per MWh, so I sort of get it, but still.

Who would have thought the cost of the hardware would be irrelevant compared to the cost of the energy (or hell, the IPv4 address space)

> Who would have thought the cost of the hardware would be irrelevant compared to the cost of the energy

Makes me wonder how OVH / French alternatives will fare. My guess is much better, since they have a more stable energy infrastructure, from what I can tell. Peter Zeihan has some good analysis on that.

Currently it's even worse in France. At the moment, there are 17 of 56 reactors turned off, due to safety concerns. There is even the possibility of major outages when a cold wave hits the country.

somebody got a whooping 63% increase (from 32.51 to 53.24 EUR)

26.20 to 34.80.

The auctions after the price increase might be interesting.

i am wondering if the current auctions are already price adjusted.

i hope so. since auction servers don't have a setup fee i could actually save money and get a better machine if i switch now.

Very good question ... I have no idea, might take a look myself - pushing people off older, power hungry hardware seems like a benefit for everyone.

i just ordered a new server from the auction and from the looks of it, the prices are already adjusted. there was a note about adjusting prices in the head of the auction page, and if they weren't already adjusted i should have gotten an email like for the other servers.

as it is, i am saving money and i got a lot more diskspace. the cpu is probably better too because the one being replaced is quite old.

I did a switch just 2 or 3 months that sounds simliar to your before and after. New prices look adjusted already, I wonder how much legacy hardware they are going to be able to clean out of the datacentre when the dust settles on all this.

i just got another announcement where they offer to skip the setup fees if someone wants to upgrade their auction server to a regular one. it only lists my old servers, not the new one, which pretty much confirms that the new one is already price adjusted.

Just got the same offer myself - going to be looking into that! There is minor pain to resetting up server - but could be worth it for new metal...

What is crazy is, with the increased cost of my two 32gb servers, it is now a better deal to drop those and replace them with a single, new, 64gb server with new hardware (compared to the two old robot servers). All because of energy costs o_O

Yeah, new hardware can be wildly more energy efficient than older systems.

Looking at Twitter seeing a few people cancel. I'm really curious to see what fallout there will be from this. Will it not really impact Hetzner or will it be a major segment.

I previously had a server with Hetzner a few years ago despite being from Canada. The main reason I picked them was their pricing over other competitors.

They opened a DC in the US in November: https://www.hetzner.com/news/11-21-usa-cloud

Not sure if that'll help, but diversification seems good.

I've been able to get cheaper and cheaper servers every few years since 2012, each with better CPU and RAM than the previous. This is the first time in that decade I see a price increase. Only +4% in my case, for my fairly cheap machine.

What type of server do you have?

Another example:

Intel Xeon E3-1275, 16 GB DDR3, ~1 TB HDD. Price went from 37.60 to 59.29 (~57% increase)

Expected i guess

I don't know how it is in the US, electricity prices have skyrocketed in europe

My most recent monthly bill was $̶0̶.̶0̶4̶6̶/̶k̶W̶h̶ $0.092/kWh

Edited to show fully burdened rate, inclusive of delivery charges and other fees and taxes.

Are you in Washington or somewhere with a lot of hydro? Is that an all inclusive rate with delivery and line fees included?

Yeesh, no! I've edited to show the rate inclusive of delivery charges, taxes, and fees.

The Green Deal has been dealt – with much more to come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal

It does not have anything to do with the European Green Deal, and you probably even know that. Putin is putting pressure on Europe, because his only lifeline for money is going to run dry if we require less fossil fuels in the future.

Silly me! Yes it's the boogeyman's fault, of course.

OF COURSE the ideological movement to reduce EU's available sources of energy, plus make the existing ones more expensive, has nothing to do with the rising energy prices.

And OF COURSE second order effects that ripple through our civilization, so dependent on cheap energy, have nothing to do with it either. /s

It's all Putin.

Look up how the energy market works, thats one of the main culprits here, because it has been designed to shovel money towards large fossil baseload powerplants. Which are owned by large corporations with lobby groups just as big as your friends in the internet troll hut.

Most US rates are typically fixed with yearly rate regulation cycles -- my rate in North Carolina ($0.11/kWh iirc) was determined at the beginning of last year by the state energy regulatory agency (the power company fills out this extensive application saying "this is what we want to charge and why" and typically it's like a 50-100% increase, and the state says "hell no")

Part of the reason is taxes and carbon taxes. Another part is that growing demand requires investments in new capacity by energy suppliers. And of course European energy suppliers are investing a lot into that. And of course doubly so in Germany which is getting rid of nuclear this year and coal in the next eight years. And another part is that gas prices have risen sharply recently. So, those nice gas plants that were built to replace expensive to operate nuclear plants are now about as unattractive as coal plants are relative to renewables in terms of cost.

Of course Hetzner can choose to invest in generating their own energy. Those roofs over their data centers would be a perfect spot for solar. And in related news, that's exactly what they are doing: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/hetzner-online-ho...

Makes sense, it's what the big cloud providers are also doing. Consuming large amounts of electricity from the grid is not a great business plan when there are cheaper alternatives. And of course they get to advertise how green they are.

IMHO skyrocketing or unstable grid prices are a good thing in the sense that it makes people more likely to spend money on solutions like this.

Latvia, not far from Germany.. you may want to read this: https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/bizness/biznesa_vide/202...

Tldr: 2021 avg electricity price 88,78 EUR/MWh, 2,6x higher than 2020. December 2021 had highest avg price: 206,40 EUR/MWh (January had ~50+ EUR/MWh), with peak price for 1 hour: 1000,07 EUR/MWh

When did you receive your email? I too am a Hetzner customer but haven't received such an email (so far).

What kind of server do you have and which location? This only applies (as far as I’m told in the email) to servers ordered through their auction. I received this email at 13:15 CET.

Mine was in the spam

I also haven't received one. Checked spam too. My server is a 61 EUR/mo, and is a Xeon E5-1650v3 with 256GB RAM. It was only provisioned a few weeks ago.

It's likely that Hetzner doesn't make a loss on that machine, so they won't need to adjust prices there.

Exactly, only some models from the Server Auction were affected. So we only sent emails to customers with those servers. --Katie, Hetzner Online

Wholesale electricity prices are going wild so it was always going to filter through

I got one too, only for one of my two servers though:

    The monthly prices will change for the following servers you use:
    
    Server name             new price      old price      Starting on
    SB42 #xxxxxx            43.20 Euro     40.31 Euro     2022-03-15

Doesn't seem so bad to me.

I have an SB34 that went up 4.2% to €30.16. Your SB42 seems to be +7.2%.

My SB24 is going from 18.47 Euro to 29.00 Euro.

Strato increased prices too, from 5€ to 8€ in my case. Not pleased ofc, but well.

Every day I am getting an email about some service I signed up for which costs were never going to be jacked up get jacked up. Nothing is sacred.

Just cancel the ones you need the least.

Part of it is idiotic "green" policies, part of it is massive inflation, whether we acknowledge it politically or not.

Money is worth less and less, you'd better start charging more.

All the assets are up, the market is up despite the terrible economy, salaries of jobs which are needed are up. Startups are also incredibly overvalued, I think that's because nobody want to hold cash, which drives evaluations up. (Hence why all the recent unicorns)

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