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Comment by dangerface | Hacker News Reader

Love Hetzner great to see a hosting company thats being upfront and transparent about its prices.

So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it like you will pay that month to month.

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AWS has never raised prices on me.

Don't worry they will. At least in Germany :-)

Electricity pricing is insane and will only get worse. I doubt AWS will operate a whole region at a loss.

Amazon invests a lot in its own wind and solar parks. Because of that, energy prices on the open market shouldn't affect them too much.

Interesting, but looking at their map they will go live in Germany in 2025. Which is way too late to ride this out.

Continental Europe has a synchronous power grid, so Amazon can also use electricity produced outside of Germany for its German data centers.

Transit lines even in Germany are already at capacity, and the French are buying up whatever capacity they can because of their nuclear foolishness.

Buuut... Just because you made a good business move and hedged one of your raw materials, doesn't mean your competitors did. If your competitors didn't, then you might as well rise prices and just take the extra as profit.

Or... look at it another way, you bought some nice energy futures contracts when they were cheap. You might earn more selling those energy futures contracts now they're very valuable than you make putting that energy into servers and selling the compute.

AWS EC2 is like 6x the price of Hetzner cloud (4x with reserved instances). I imagine AWS has a lot of room to absorb price swings, if they want to.

Dunno about you, but that tells me something about their profit margins.

They had boutique prices (think 10x Hetzner price) to begin with. And cost control is notoriously difficult.

because everything except the loss leader (EC2) has triple+ digit markup

What is "loss leader"? Do you mean they make a loss on EC2, or that it's the bottom entry if you'd sort by profit? I'd assume the former but making a loss at AWS' price level would be extremely impressive.

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