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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US tariffs.

"I’ve been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they’ve made a feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of “fairness”."

Hetzner is a company know for it's precise pricing structure. An increase in prices would be correlated to an increase in costs, and in fact the next paragraph Hetzner writes:

"With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible "

Bottom line, the US imposes tariffs, this increases the prices of imported products, of which Hertzner is one, (Servers from Europe)

How can you write an entire article to complain about a price increase and not see that it was actually your country that increased the price.

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They're not importing the VMs from Europe. And there are no new tariffs yet, inauguration is in January so there are only various announcements so far.

They're using tariff to mean price, which is an unusual choice and likely because it was written by someone from Germany. This would not necessarily sound out of place to a German speaker as "Tarife" is a common way to describe differently priced plans for any kind of service.

It's British English. Tariff is used to mean import duties, business prices (e.g. "phone tariff") and also prison sentences (e.g. "whole life tariff").

Though given the political context, it would probably have made sense to use a different word.

It's most likely imprecise wording due to a linguistic false friend from German (Hetzner is a German company); see also my other comment.

It's not a false friend, it is the same word.

Not only do they share an etymology (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing. It's also used in a bunch of other European languages in essentially the same way, with either a similar or identical spelling.

It's only US English where some of the meanings that are still common elsewhere are no longer used. It's actually kind of amusing that Americans would struggle to understand the meaning of an English word, but a French or Italian speaker would understand it. I wonder if there are any other words like this.

Having the same etymology and even having the exact same spelling in two languages does not disqualify a word from being a false friend at all!

Take "gift", for example: "Gift" means "poison" in German, despite both the English and German word deriving from the same Proto-Germanic root, meaning "to give".

> (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing

In this very thread you can find a pretty good counterexample to that proposition, at least in American English.

I said same etymology AND same meaning. They are the same word, not false friends.

US English may have dropped that meaning, but British English still uses it in this way, as do many Europeans when they speak English. It’s a correct translation.

This is an announcement targeted at US customers. One could assume that at least some of these might assume the American English sense of the word.

"Tarif" indeed roughly translates to "plan" in this context and can be used for all kinds of plans/rates/tariffs, not just the import duty kind.

No new tariffs yet. My bad. Misread

Sorry, is Hetzner a company from Canada, China, or Mexico? Are digital goods & services indicated to be under tariff as well?

Ah my bad. Tariffs not implemented yet, and restricted to those areas. Might have been a bad choice of word by hetzner

I hope this experience teaches you to be more polite and open-minded even when you think you know what you are talking about.

Yeah. Being wrong is always humbling.

That said, sometimes I'm right so I find a balance in the upswings and downswings of confidence

How do you tax internet traffic?

> US imposes tariffs

That didn’t happen yet and isn’t even 100% guaranteed to happen. So maybe it would be reasonable to wait?

Also what makes you think they are shipping their servers from Europe? How is them being an European company even relevant?

Cool: then maybe they can precisely explain the full breakdown of these changes instead of hiding behind a word that explains nothing.

Because of announcements of tariffs?

Probably more likely has something to do with increased energy costs.

Pretty sure VA/US energy prices are a lot cheaper than German ones.

I think it wouldn't be very relevant. A surge in US energy prices would be sufficient to cause a rise in US compute prices.

I think the US has been scaling compute for both AI and mining the last year, so it makes sense

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