Hetzner is awesome.
I wish they would go public.
Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.
We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
I wish they would go public.
Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.
We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
> PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
If they go public they will be bought by foreign private equity.
If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.
I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
Going public usually means unlocking funding, so they could grow business, build more services, compete with say OVH or if some hyperscaler will decide to step into this niche.
Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
In this sense, they’re selfish.
PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
(Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate" sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in your own financial affairs?)
some ordinary people who worked hard and made it happened: founders and early workers, usually rewarded very well
Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture capitalists".
After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon, Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that included every day people like you and me.
After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
Sounds like the selfish vulture capitalists are the insiders who sell the company.
>X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
This doesn't make any sense, because X is the original asset. If part of X is sold, then the remaining portion of X loses value (assuming the sold part is the good part). If X is used as collateral, then it also loses value.
They can also choose enshittification, but they are not pressured into it like companies with institutional investors are.
As a Hetzner customer, I would lose out if they went public.
Consider two possibilities. The first is, if you want to make money in an industry, you start a company in it. Lots of people start companies because lots of people want to make money and then there are lots of companies, causing the profits to be widely distributed.
The second is, if you want to make money in an industry, you buy shares of an existing company. You have to buy them from whoever currently owns it, so the ones who got in early become billionaires, meanwhile even if an ordinary person were to invest their entire net worth they wouldn't even own 1% of the company so they have so little influence over it that it isn't even worth their time to vote their shares, and therefore have no influence over it at all. But you still make some profit while not having to actually do the work of building a company, so more people do that instead of entering the market themselves and then there are fewer companies that are each bigger.
The second one leads to market consolidation and concentration of wealth and power, so which one is actually less social?