Interesting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much, that’s a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal consumer, I’d have thought they’d get better discounts.
The cost they charge also includes the cooling, so you could see it as for example 30c/kWh for power, 15c/kWh for cooling to compare it to a consumer contract. Maybe they have published their ratio of that split "on average" before.
Plus some overhead costs (but with Hetzner, I'd assume they're minimal - they have razor thin margins).
At home: 12 or 42 €/month (details¹), depending on whether I want gigabit upload or not. Advantages:
- fast LAN speeds,
- don't need to go anywhere to do hardware maintenance/replacement/additions,
- low cost,
- partially solar powered if you have solar panels,
- don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like),
- likely you have more space available, and you get to share that gigabit uplink if you pay for it for your server.
Colocation: €128 / month (120 base price, 8 electricity in germany; if you want to fly to Finland for accessing your hardware, then electricity is half the price). Advantages:
- redundant power supply,
- maybe noise if you don't have a separate room for this stuff,
- you can do this also if your home has poor internet.
¹ I pay €50/month for my internet connection regardless (I didn't buy a bigger bundle for the server), the server uses ~35W average which makes ~26 kWh/month which makes ~9 €/month. Though, I'd pay the base connection fee for electricity anyway so the added cost is even a bit lower. Rent is about €6 per m², but I have my stuff in between storage (above and below) so the column above those 1.5 m² is basically cut in three, coming out to about 3 €/month added cost. The added cost of hosting a server at home is about 12 euros per month. If I wanted to upgrade to gigabit symmetric internet, that would be an added 30 €/month (total 42 €/month). At 35W it doesn't make much of a difference for cooling, but there is no AC installed in my home anyway.
Your consumer gigabit connection is not comparable to a DC gigabit connection. Your ISP is over subscribing 20x and hoping people don’t use anywhere near their capacity. To make it fair you should compare it to a business plan with a proper SLA.
If I am that serious, then I'd also want the redundant power and would have a budget for it. For business, 130€/month is going to be a fraction of the cost of your first employee. The scenario posed was "as a normal consumer".
For me it's either 40€ a month if I want Gigabit down or move to a different city in case I want Gigabit up. Which is actually pretty good for current German standards; most can only dream of Gigabit down. Also, your home link is meager compared to a Gigabit link with proper redundant links to IXPs.
If you have a big home with solar power, appropriate cooling, a good connection and space to stuff servers away then yes, you can outprice collocation - but that's excluding a lot of costs you had before; if I was already running a server farm, collocating my servers would be even cheaper ;) If, however, you live in a flat in a city or in a rural area with bad connection [0], these prices are very competitive.
[0] So, most of Germany.
There are also ISPs that expressly encourage it. Formerly I was with XS4ALL who encouraged it when I asked them on the phone (long time ago), nowadays their spiritual successor is Freedom Internet. I think the name says enough :)
Anyway, I believe industrial power billing is quite a trip (at least in Spain), and probably have a miriad of different prices depending on the hour of the day, and different guarantees of delivery compared to a regular user.
Basically residential and companies pay the same but are taxed very differently in a form that ends up with companies paying way less electricity taxes.
In Poland I have found that price for companies can be 3x higher based on at least one source. C11 - the tariff for the companies seem to cost 1.6 PLN / kwH [1] G11 - the same tarrif for households seem to cost more like 0.4-0.5PLN / kwH [2]
[1] https://www.energa.pl/mala-firma/umowy/prad-dla-firm.html [2] https://www.energa.pl/dom/umowy/taryfa.html