Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Hetzner is notorious for pushing down prices for everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components. Nearly nothing goes to waste.

[1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

View on HN

Why "notorious" though? Isn't this a good thing for them and for customers as well?

I would expect "famous", since this seems lika a feat/achievement to me.

"Notorious" isn't always negative—the connotations of the word depend on context (and probably regional use?) in sometimes confusing ways.

Indeed! It's a really interesting usage. Maybe it developed in a similar way as "badass" to convey a sense of (positive, approved) vaguely dangerous wildness and coolness.

It kind of makes sense here -- Hetzner's competitors probably hate this "notorious" behavior of being so good at ruthlessly[1] slashing prices

[1] See, another example of this sort of thing. Cool!

Interesting, didn't know that. Thanks for elaborating!

You still don't! I was speculating :)

For sure, and I agree, but that's underscoring my point.

The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex. And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of keeping it turned on and cool.

Hetzner has a data center in Finland as well. While the electricity price in Finland is going up, it is not going up as much as in Germany due to availability of nuclear power. If you want to use Hetzner services I recommend picking a location in Finland.

How is the peering to Finland nowadays? Last I heard it was all still going through their German centres.

From Telekom Germany:

Telekom -> Level3 (*.edge1.helsinki1.level3.net et al.) -> Hetzner Helsinki (core*.hel1.hetzner.com)

Wow, that's really cool. Love the old midi-towers.

I mean if your competition is Amazon I image you'd have to be like that.

Their competition charges XXX% markups on everything but EC2...

EC2, particularly traffic, has massive markups too.

EC2 is definitely at a premium. If you are pricing CPU and RAM, the big three cloud providers are near the top of the pricing continuum. Hetzner is usually at or near the bottom end of the pricing continuum.

If you are including the value-add of other cloud features, then it is not a like-for-like comparison.

Amazon's margins are astronomical. Hetzner doesn't need to give up any where near as much consumer surplus as they do in order to compete on price, but having a solid offering at very low price point is how they have chosen to differentiate themselves from other providers on the VPS to cloud spectrum. Arguably they are competing more against Linode, OVH, digital ocean etc..

Massive respect to them for linking the change to electricity prices rather than just "inflation". They know that by doing this there will be pressure to reverse the increase once electricity prices normalise.

Those consumer PCs don't look too energy-efficient, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com