It's interesting because there are still smaller providers who are offering slightly better prices than hetzner and large hyperscalers are keeping costs static.

Hardware costs are insane, no doubting it but it's more important than ever to be looking at the servers you're buying. For example a stick of 32GB DDR5 6400 ECC is about 1050 vs 16GB DDR5 6400 ECC is only 280 (pounds in this case), so if you can cope with say 192GB of ram in a 12 slot server, it's almost cheaper to buy two 192GB RAM servers than one 384GB one.