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Comment by glzone1 | Hacker News Reader

When has AWS done something like this?

LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.

It's easy to never raise prices if you have 1000% markup.

The point remains, if I was a customer who had planned my budget on the previously lower rates, this move’d be very disruptive.

Herzner is an established player, not a startup, this either shows a lack of regards for customers, or that they aren’t very well run.

If you need long term price security, than you need to get a long term contract. The big cloud providers will give you that if you pay them enough in advance, but probably for at least 50 times the price per TB.

If you use 20 TB each month the price will be 25.39€ instead of 5.39€. I can't think of any business that would seriously struggle with this 20€ monthly price increase.

Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not catastrophic.

In % terms though?

Is 500% on 5 bucks a lot?

Your traffic bill is increasing by 471% and that's not OK.

Bill increases don't have to be catastrophic to be bad. Remember that businesses/startups range from being well funded to not-funded-at-all-trying-to-survive. Depending on the country, 20€ can be a lot of money.

Yes,that is OK. It's still much cheaper than the alternatives.

Ya if you're on the cheapest service and and the next cheapest service is an order of magnitude higher or more then your business is already at risk. It's a sign that it's subsidized and that a pricing shock will happen in the future.

If it’s a competitive market you’re almost certainly exploiting some sort of anomaly that t will probably go away.

This. We got hit by a sudden change in a popular SaaS' pricing, from $10 to $75/mo - a 650% increase. We don't have a big margin, if a different provider did this sort of thing overnight, we could be instantly out of business. It's already difficult to build a competitive business even WITH the ability to outsource a class of problems to a SaaS.

I've been a big fan of Hetzner for the last decade, and I understand and agree with their motivation for this change. However December 1st is effectively almost tomorrow, they could have easily given us a month's notice instead.

You have until Feb for your existing infra, so that seems fair to me.

> Your traffic bill is increasing by 471% and that's not OK.

Your traffic bill is increasing by 20 bucks per month and that isn’t ok? If you’re running any sort of business and that isn’t ok I’m not sure what to tell you.

I've worked for a startup in my early years that was on a shoestring budget. We had no spare money. When we celebrated a big goal we bought a supermarket cake for $2 to go with the coffee. That happened max few times a year. 20 bucks is nothing when you have a lot. But if you have nothing then 20 bucks can be everything.

While perhaps not like this, AWS has from time to time ensured average rate goes up or introduced charges for something previously free:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/new-featu...

See notes 1 and 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/

Never. I don't think AWS have _ever_ icnreased prices.

Right - I’ve been on them since EC2 flat network / simple DB days and was trying to remember if I ever got an email like this.

I know google has jacked rates (maps etc) and killed services (I used their first paas before it was basically abandoned)

I have argued online with folks about their pricing - my point usually being as soon as you try to do Netflix or YouTube on the “Free” or unlimited or ultra low cost providers - you find out it’s a lie.

My impression was hetzner had started null routing customers for “abuse” who used a lot. No idea if that’s true, but used to be the way the “unlimited” VPS providers did it.

They have, but usually it is via introducing additional fees to services/transactions, eg:

https://www.astuto.ai/blogs/understanding-the-aws-public-ipv... https://www.wiv.ai/navigating-the-rising-tide-of-aws-pricing...

The IPv4 charge is a good one!

I thought this was to allow them to be more relaxed about the limit (5 per region) which is how they used to control fully free services that cost them.

But an increase for sure - they did note the supply of free ARIN allocations was gone

It's a matter of perspective, I don't do IPv6, when AWS decided to start charging for IPv4, I moved to Oracle Cloud.

I believe they have for very specific services, but never for things like EC2 or RDS.

There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading instance types in the same "size" are more expensive, but that is very rare, but I dont believe AWS has ever pulled the rug out from under you.

> There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading instance types in the same "size" are more expensive

An increase in price has been the rule rather than the exception for recent upgrades for vanilla instance types, e.g., c, r, m types in the newest generations (6 -> 7 for x86, 6 -> 7, or -> 8 for Arm types).

The increases have been modest though, perhaps around 10%. You get additional CPU and sometimes minor increases in other resources on the newer types.

Increasing prices is not "pulling the rug out from under you". Hertzer decided to raise their prices. Their customers can either continue using their service, reduce their use of the service, or go somewhere else.

Also, we live in a time of high inflation. We should expect price increases because they value of the dollar, euro, etc. is going down.

IPv4 charge caused me to have to redesign some things and cull servers for some projects.

I decided to move to Oracle Cloud when they made that move.

AWS raised the prices (/slashed the free tier) for Cognito literally last week[0], in a way that's quite similar to Hetzner.

[0]: https://saasprices.net/blog/aws-price-rise

AWS also charges multiples the price to begin with. I mean, the "scam" of AWS has always been the absolutely outrageous network egress pricing.

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