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yeoyeo42 2 minutes ago [-]
Not ragebait, actual question. Isn't this kind of scenario exactly the kind of thing where capitalism is supposed to generate a lot of competition that makes everything higher quality and cheaper for the end consumer?
There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?
binarymax 19 hours ago [-]
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed.
I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
originalvichy 18 hours ago [-]
This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.
> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.
It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.
> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.
stymaar 44 minutes ago [-]
> The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around
You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.
AnthonyMouse 1 minutes ago [-]
No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote.
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people forget that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
Gasp0de 16 hours ago [-]
Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
When the market's so hot I don't see why anyone would give them a particularly big discount. And they would have been getting a discount before, so they probably end up seeing a larger percentage spike in what they have to pay.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
sph 17 hours ago [-]
I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
drnick1 17 hours ago [-]
> I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
jermaustin1 16 hours ago [-]
I have a similar rig, but a 10th gen i7, 128GB of DDR4, 2TB NVMe, and dual RTX 3090s. Built it in 2021 for crypto mining, it ended up paying itself off just before Eth went PoW. I kept it mining even after profitability, because it ran warm enough to heat my apartment leaving my HVAC on fan-only to circulate the heat around.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
ornornor 17 hours ago [-]
You might sell it for more but buying a replacement costs even more so you’re losing money either way. The only way is to sell and never look back.
drnick1 6 hours ago [-]
I won't sell my 3090. It's still one of the best cards for a local AI and gaming mixed use. I put a waterblock on it and it just purrs along at 50C no matter what I throw at it.
dzonga 1 hours ago [-]
in the U.S & other regions it sucks cz you can hardly ever get static ip addresses at residential addresses to host things & expose to the internet
dv35z 17 hours ago [-]
I did exactly this and suggest it. Used Dell Latitude (the one I got is one from 2019 - model 5300). I put Linux Mint Debian Edition (https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php) on it. Works absolutely great.
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
I got an old hp elitedesk off of eBay, I don’t remember the cpu but it has 8 gig of ram and an ssd. Ubuntu+dokku and it runs all my self hosted stuff.
whatever1 16 hours ago [-]
If the hyperscalers demand is persistent, more hardware players will notice and will want a piece of the pie. You already see non traditional players entering.
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
fnordpiglet 9 hours ago [-]
I’ll wager $5 semiconductor companies are issuing stock to fund capital investment because that’s what you do when these things happen.
greenavocado 5 hours ago [-]
Is everyone forgetting that even hyper scaler hardware has a finite service life that isn't that long as hardware continues to rapidly improve?
In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
TacticalCoder 11 hours ago [-]
> I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
morkalork 17 hours ago [-]
How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s?
c-hendricks 13 hours ago [-]
How many 90s computer components went up in price a couple of years after release?
colechristensen 17 hours ago [-]
This is a market shock. The reason it doesn't alleviate sooner is the chip manufacturers are very wary of investing billions on capacity that won't come online until after the shock is over and subsequently going bankrupt. Because that's happened before.
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
seanw444 17 hours ago [-]
> the free investor money does run out
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
expedition32 15 hours ago [-]
The money always runs out. The dot com bust (Nina Brink forever!) and more recently "let's give a homeless man a 250k mortgage" 2008 bust.
colechristensen 17 hours ago [-]
And then?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
marcosdumay 15 hours ago [-]
Then it's not their problem and the company can fail.
rvnx 14 hours ago [-]
If you owe 1M USD, you have a problem. If you owe 100B USD, they have a problem.
cassianoleal 16 hours ago [-]
More government money to fund the ever elusive doomsday AI.
surgical_fire 18 hours ago [-]
And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic.
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
loveiswork 17 hours ago [-]
What they conveniently leave out is that it sometimes takes over a decade for a correction
ocdtrekkie 15 hours ago [-]
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
merelydev 17 hours ago [-]
The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.
malfist 17 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for a scrappy startup to spend a couple billion dollars and several years setting up a new fab for chips so we can see the prices go down!
surgical_fire 17 hours ago [-]
Good luck getting the hardware for that eh?
nijave 17 hours ago [-]
That's the rub. There is no such thing as "anyone that can supply hardware cheaply"
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
merelydev 17 hours ago [-]
I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go!
jermaustin1 10 hours ago [-]
I like this idea for something akin to p2p shared/sharded hosting.
merelydev 4 hours ago [-]
Wiregaurd, postgres replication and load balancing can do the job?
It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online.
kuerbel 16 hours ago [-]
SK Hynix just said they want to double wafer production by 2031.
pixl97 15 hours ago [-]
I mean, I want to double the the number of billions of dollars I have by 2031, doesn't mean I will. (actually I have 0 billion and double 0 billion is still 0 billion, so unlike them I'll accomplish that goal).
kuerbel 15 hours ago [-]
They already ordered Hanmi equipment and started construction at Yongin Mega Fab. Sounds pretty serious to me.
LaGrange 15 hours ago [-]
By 2031 the best employer in Europe will be the water gangs.
dd8601fn 17 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t this presume that chip fabs are betting that the AI boom is a bubble that’s going to pop?
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
nyeah 17 hours ago [-]
No. It doesn't have to be a bubble at all. It just has to be a cycle of rapid capital equipment build-out that returns to more normal levels in a few years.
colechristensen 17 hours ago [-]
Hard to believe that an industry making money hand over fist are reluctant to spend tens of billions expanding capacity that won't come online for years?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
nazgulsenpai 18 hours ago [-]
Idealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that.
surgical_fire 17 hours ago [-]
Because, oddly enough, there are a lot more things going on. Government incentives, companies trying to stranglehold markets, FOMO-fueled massive investiment into the current fad, etc. Just to name a few.
nh23423fefe 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pocksuppet 16 hours ago [-]
I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?
Const-me 14 hours ago [-]
“Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?”
Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
ssl-3 16 hours ago [-]
Capitalism isn't a magical instant fix.
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
larodi 16 hours ago [-]
Sadly this is not a joke nor some doomsday thinking. Google recently repurposed thousands of phones for server needs. Why? Well guess why… to teach everyone tis coming.
Brybry 16 hours ago [-]
To clarify: UC San Diego is planning to build a cluster of 2000 Pixel phones for computer science class use and Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones.
glenstein 16 hours ago [-]
Goodness. Thank you for the clarification as this is leagues different than what I originally thought I was reading from the other comment.
michaelt 16 hours ago [-]
Or they did it for positive PR.
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
me551ah 16 hours ago [-]
It’s not just the hyperscalers, it’s also the boom in personal projects being launched. AI has massively decreased the bar to entry, and a lot more people need servers compared to before
SomeUserName432 30 minutes ago [-]
Do you believe there are many enough of these at scale to make any meaningful impact?
The vast majority of personal projects are not built by those receiving FAANG salaries.
deathanatos 4 hours ago [-]
Microsoft can't supply sufficient compute capacity to itself; they're in the news today for considering AWS for capacity.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Well, that's really the final humiliation for Azure, isn't it.
hadrien01 27 minutes ago [-]
They're not the only ones, Anthropic and Google recently announced they'll be using xAI data centers, and I wouldn't be surprised if AWS also started to have capacity problems in the near future.
motbus3 19 hours ago [-]
True but this is probably because now they have much more demand as other competitors got to expensive and now people are going for the smaller ones even with low service levels
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the effect of "move services to Europe ASAP" is on this.
MattGaiser 19 hours ago [-]
It’s also trivial to use now. With AI, there’s no meaningful additional work in using a VM.
jameshart 17 hours ago [-]
Right, instead of using a managed serverless platform where you pay a premium for proprietary cloud provided services to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers, you can… pay a premium for proprietary cloud-hosted AI engines to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers.
Capricorn2481 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think any VPS provider has come close to raising their prices this much. There's absolutely not enough people flocking to Hetzner to justify this.
harrall 18 hours ago [-]
But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up.
If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.
Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
re-thc 18 hours ago [-]
> But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision.
Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.
Capricorn2481 18 hours ago [-]
That's all true, but this seems disproportionate even to the hardware market. They already raised their prices recently as hardware got more expensive, and now they are quadrupled. Maybe I am just misreading the hardware market right now.
markonen 16 hours ago [-]
If you see photos/videos of Hetzner datacenters, their servers are essentially plain, low-end motherboards (1G network, few slots) sitting on shelves (don't mean that as derogatory, it's an efficient design). What it does mean is that their per-server costs are absolutely dominated by the very components that are exploding in cost right now: RAM, SSDs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs.
wiether 18 hours ago [-]
OVH just raised their VPS prices by about 30%.
They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.
Crazy stuff
BoingBoomTschak 15 hours ago [-]
OVH still seems cheaper here for smallest VPS (what's needed to host a personal website), especially when you consider that you have to pay your IPv4 1.7 € with Hetzner.
For the exact same specs (CX23 vs VPS-1 2027), price is 6 vs 4.5 € and you can get a 15% discount on OVH if you order a full year.
oasisbob 18 hours ago [-]
Been wondering the same. GCP recently increased their egress pricing, and was expecting AWS to follow.
So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability.
rsync 18 hours ago [-]
We increased our prices - for the first time in 21 years - last week.
The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.
ranger_danger 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pocksuppet 16 hours ago [-]
Egress pricing? That's one of their highest margin products! Compute is the one that's being squeezed!
rvnx 14 hours ago [-]
It's almost 100% profit actually, because ISPs are willing to pay to be connected to Google network
tjwebbnorfolk 18 hours ago [-]
A ton of cloud workloads are still running on old Haswell-era CPUs with RAM that was bought a decade+ ago. Probably the costs will be made up with new VM shapes.
Graviton has had a price increase nearly every generation. So not really related.
re-thc 17 hours ago [-]
> GCP recently increased their egress pricing
The peering announcement or did I miss something?
I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering).
cyberax 14 hours ago [-]
AWS now has unmetered egress, but it's pretty expensive. A 10G port is $8k a month.
stephenhuey 19 hours ago [-]
Inching closer to Vultr prices. There are some Rails projects I might have later this year, and I had already been thinking of putting them onto Vultr via Hatchbox since Vultr offered a managed db. Maybe for some stuff that I can run a Rails 8 Solid Stack app with just sqlite, I'd use Hetzner. I tested both with Hatchbox but have nothing in production on either yet and generally use Heroku and Render still.
Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.
kamma4434 16 hours ago [-]
We use Vultr, DigitalOcean and Hetzner for global coverage. Vultr is by far the worst - some DC like Australia are pretty bad, lots of connectivity issues, some are OK. Their forte is that they offer a lot of DCs. We are migrating some workloads back to DO, where things are usually way smoother. Hetzner is our core, but does not offer DCs in Asia, Africa or Latam.
snarfy 18 hours ago [-]
When I used them the main issue was latency spikes due to their IP ranges getting DDoSd. They host a lot of shady/spam sites.
stephenhuey 18 hours ago [-]
Oh, didn't realize that. Any recommendation for mitigating that if deployed there? Had thought about putting something on Vultr in a few months. Also open to any other good recommendations for providers that have a managed Postgres.
nijave 17 hours ago [-]
Haven't used either but have heard good things about PlanetScale and NeonDB. Neon has a free tier
chrisweekly 19 hours ago [-]
I have a Vultr account but it's very lightly used. Came recommended by Derek Sivers^1
I spend about $100/month with Vultr. The uptime in the datacenters my VMs are hosted in is extremely good.
dboreham 18 hours ago [-]
I use it as a hosting target for automated deployment tooling we wrote. Tools were originally Digitalocean-only and I wondered if LLMs could add support for a second provider, so asked Claude to add Vultr which it did very nicely. But other than run the automated tests (which create VMs, DNS entries, check validity and tear down) and pay the monthly bill, we haven't yet used them for production deployments.
xboxnolifes 15 hours ago [-]
Or their margins were/are large enough that they are less hurt, and are instead attempting to weather the storm without touching pricing.
bigbuppo 18 hours ago [-]
What happens to these platforms when there's nothing left to access them? That's where we're headed.
RIMR 14 hours ago [-]
The hyperscalers are the ones buying up all the memory and storage hardware in the first place. They aren't affected by the problem, they are the source of the problem.
hdgvhicv 15 hours ago [-]
Why would their keep their costs down. Get business hooked on their product and then ramp up the price.
Liriel 1 hours ago [-]
Prices are going insane, and I am going for an alternative provider in the US.
I have 5 app nodes, 2 background workers, 1 DB replica, and 4 dev/staging instances.
On new Hetzner US pricing:
5 x CCX23 (app nodes): $514.95/mo
2 x CCX13 (workers): $101.98/mo
1 x CCX23 (DB replica): $102.99/mo
4 x CX33 (dev/staging): $39.96/mo
Total: ~$759/mo or $9,108/year
On 3HCloud with equivalent specs:
5 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $160/mo
2 x 8 GB 2 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo
1 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo
4 x 4 GB 2 vCPU shared: $24/mo
Storage ~250 GB total (SSD smart): ~$7.50/mo
Total: ~$255/mo or $3,066/year
I will let you do the math.
binarymax 56 minutes ago [-]
Looks great. But will 3hCloud be able to sustain those prices?
Liriel 25 minutes ago [-]
I don't think anyone can guarantee anything here, but I am going to bet that they will be a better-priced alternative.
eugenekolo 19 hours ago [-]
It really is an absolute massive jump. Have no clue what's going on in the back to warrant a 3x increase... 25-50%, sure.. but 3x is wild.
andix 18 hours ago [-]
They might have had delivery contracts from before the prices increased, so they didn't have to pass them to customers. Maybe the last servers from those contracts got delivered already and any new orders need to be bought at much higher prices.
Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes.
amoshebb 16 hours ago [-]
I’m not a business person, but they’re already at the “hundreds of thousands of servers” scale, what about the 41st data center be organizationally far more expensive than the first 40?
andix 16 hours ago [-]
Simple example: Pizza delivery service. The company runs very well, customers are happy, demand increases. At some point the demand gets so high, that they need to buy a second car for deliveries and a second pizza oven.
They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the prices, lower demand and make even more money without additional risk.
rendaw 3 hours ago [-]
GP's point is this isn't the 2nd car, this is the 41st car. If they had 1 car it'd be a 2x increase. If they have 40 cars, the only way the 41st car would lead to a 2x increase is if that single car cost as much as 40 other cars.
That's what the post you're responding to was asking.
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
The real question is whether it's actually just the 41st car or if the demand is such that they'd have to go from 40 cars to 200 and then risk having the demand fall back off after they've already sign on to making 160 more car payments.
robocat 2 hours ago [-]
Businesses charge their customers as much as they can. Businesses want to raise prices almost regardless of what their input costs are.
It is wrong to believe that a product's "correct" price is simply its cost plus a reasonable markup.
There's other factors that might limit how much a business can charge their customers. But an ideal business acts more like a monopoly and charges far far more than is 'fair'.
In theory competition keeps prices in check: in practice competition doesn't work as advertised.
weakened_malloc 8 hours ago [-]
It's a business that seems to have high operational leverage. Effectively, similar to airlines. Enormous capital outlays with low marginal costs, so once the current infra has been built at cost x, the additional data centre at cost 5x (or whatever multiple) might mean that it's not profitable to keep serving at the current prices.
Shank 17 hours ago [-]
> Have no clue what's going on in the back
Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized.
bourbonproof 11 hours ago [-]
doesn't this imply that they buy massive hardware and thus replace their hardware constantly? At what rate? It seems the rate is massive. I'd gladly use a 4year old server for the old price.
kuschku 8 hours ago [-]
Then check out the Serverbörse https://www.hetzner.com/de/sb/ that's exactly what you're asking for. Used servers, some of them with Skylake (2015) processors, some even with Haswell (2014) processors.
Hetzner keeps running the old machines as long as they can find customers for them, which means they have entire buildings of 10+ year old machines still running.
mpyne 8 hours ago [-]
> thus replace their hardware constantly?
Yes? How else do you think it works? At scale, hardware breaks all the time and must therefore be replaced all the time.
This is true even at Hetzner's scale.
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
It's not even the reliability which is the issue. Newer servers can put hundreds of cores in one physical machine, while taking up the same amount of rack space and using the same amount of electricity as older systems with tens of cores.
How long do you want to run something that uses 3x the electricity for the same level of performance when you're buying power by the megawatt? How about the even older ones that use 10x as much?
franciscop 10 hours ago [-]
They are luckily only applying this to:
> The price adjustment applies to new orders and cloud instance rescales starting from 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST.
> For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I am surely/definitely happy that the price doesn't increase for me. If it increased for everyone, I'd expect a much smaller jump. Also I'm not sure how much flexibility they have to increase the price for everyone without notice, given that they are in EU.
mpweiher 3 hours ago [-]
ARM instances (CAX) are all consistently at 30%.
drewg123 19 hours ago [-]
The AI bubble has increased the prices of nand and ram by a factor of 4, so a 3x increase seems reasonable. Companies that are not big enough to have long term contracts with ram/nand vendors have been hit really, really hard by this.
benjiro29 18 hours ago [-]
These prices have absolute nothing to do anymore with memory prices. Do not forget that Hetzner already increased the setup fees by a factor of 4x before to compensate for the price. And also servers getting price increases.
It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this...
AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro.
Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner.
This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware.
The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers.
They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already.
Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers.
If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise.
pocksuppet 16 hours ago [-]
The big increases here are for their cloud product, which is hourly billing with no setup. In that context it seems more reasonable. I guess we need to remember that hourly billing and flexible prices cut both ways, eh?
rigonkulous 17 hours ago [-]
Also, a price increase like this can be used to address over-subscription/under-utilization .. there will be a lot of dormant chaff blown off by this, or in other words the provisioning demand will also be adjusted by this aggressive price change, imho.
mschuster91 18 hours ago [-]
> It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs.
Monthly costs have gone up as well. Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, construction has exploded far beyond inflation and, most importantly, electricity prices are still ridiculous due to merit-order and the refusal of splitting up Germany into multiple power pricing regions.
benjiro29 18 hours ago [-]
I remember the price increase that Hetzner did during 2022 because of the invasion in Ukraine. The said they will adjust the prices down when the electricity price reduced.
Guess what? I am paying as a consumer about the same price as before 2022. Did Hetzner change their price down? Remember, the industrial price also dropped (and they also build out a large solar plant). No ...
Ok, inflation? But those price increases already covered part of that... Just saying, its not been the first price increase that happened. There have been multiple ones that Hetzner did over the years. Some flew under people radars.
> Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany,
Yea, we have seen nothing of that increase... O, wait, they reduce our income because the social security increase their costs. Yay ..
pocksuppet 13 hours ago [-]
Since I started using Hetzner in 2020 they have increased prices 4 or 5 times and I am now paying 50% more than I started, but my grocery bill also went up 50% and my rent went up 50%, so that's just matching inflation (even though the government said inflation was 5%). Now they're doing a 300% increase (not for me) all at once.
omnimus 15 hours ago [-]
The reasons really doesn't matter. As long as they are in top of price/performance/quality nobody will switch. Once they stop to be then people will think about it.
thisisit 16 hours ago [-]
Its not only RAM. I have seen people who are vibe coding their app and instead of choosing Vercel as default they are learning about dedicated server hosting, docker etc and moving to providers like Hetzner. This is why whenever someone says - with AI everyone is going to write their own SaaS, I am always like - and what happens to hosting? Even Vercel might increase their costs if that comes to pass.
Aissen 18 hours ago [-]
It's a bit higher than 4 now.
microtonal 18 hours ago [-]
They probably also have to factor in the pricing trajectory to avoid changing their pricing too often.
magicalhippo 9 hours ago [-]
I almost pulled the trigger on a 2x64GB 6400MHz CL36 kit for about $650 last August. It's been insane since the spike happened, but went down somewhat last month. I just checked and it has gone up $1500 since then to $5000.
So that's over 7.5x what it was when I (sadly) did not buy it. Totally not kicking myself for dragging my heels on that purchase...
Cheapest 2x48GB kit I can find here now is $1500, yay. That's 5200MHz CL48 stuff.
MagicMoonlight 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
WhereIsTheTruth 18 hours ago [-]
There is no AI bubble
There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao
dindunuf 18 hours ago [-]
>billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are:
A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity
B) raise prices by 100%
I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future.
bloppe 12 hours ago [-]
They are doing all of the above. Investment in new memory fabs is booming. It just takes a little while to get chips out the door.
rcxdude 2 hours ago [-]
All the money in the world won't spin up a fab in a year, much like all the women in the world couldn't take a child from conception to birth in a month. Some things do just have a latency to them.
duttish 18 hours ago [-]
As I understand it ramping up a new fab takes a couple of years and several billion dollars. The last time they ramped up production prices had crashed back down by the the time the new fab was fully up and running, so this time they're betting that the scarcity will resolve itself like it did last time.
benjiro29 18 hours ago [-]
They are scaling up, but most will only come online in end 2027-2028 time frame. And Memory, as in what we use in PCs is easier to manufacture then HBM memory. But all the money is in HBM ...
So for every ~4GB of memory that you can produce in normal DDR5, you can only make 1GB of HBM. But you make multiple times the revenue.
The demand for HBM memory is not going to go away. LLMs are memory bandwidth hungry, and we are going to see production going to AI. But also to "lower end" like B200's.
That means, they are producing multiple times less memory (if we look for the normal market demand), but still need to produce more for the memory bandwidth hungry market.
We are seeing more products entering the "prosumer/business" market that are also memory bandwidth hungry. This demand will not go away. It will actually increase as companies move to more localized workloads. There is is a issue with data privacy that a lot of companies legally deal with.
The lacking ramp up is not a sign of them being scared of over production, its a realization that 3 companies hold the market in a strangle hold, and "slow" scale. If everybody plays friendly, they can milk this for years.
China is a solution but China does not have the HBM production levels, and will take years to scale and put a dent in the market. And China is ... allocating a lot to domestic production of AI > HBM ...
The reality is, that unless competition ( as in China ) does not start scaling beyond the expected levels, the big 3 have no reason to scale too fast.
And money is not the issue ... have you seen their revenue (and net profit!! ) numbers. A few billions is peanuts for them at this point. They simply do not want to scale too fast because that means less milking ... Memory demand is not going to away. When people talk about the AI bubble popping, its more in terms of the stock market. The product is here and not going away.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
This does suggest a path to improvement, though. A significant factor in the demand for HBM is how expensive the actual GPU chips are, making you want to use the absolute best memory to support them. When there's more competition in GPUs and the memory is actually a lot of the total price, you see things like Apple silicon with LPDDR5 being very popular. You can get a lot of bandwidth out of normal memory if you put in 256 or 512 bit bus. If we can get more midrange competition, we can focus more manufacturing capacity back on some form of DDR, and lessen the squeeze.
iririririr 15 hours ago [-]
until china reveals a fab opening up next week.
gmerc 18 hours ago [-]
They are not ramping up.
mrweasel 18 hours ago [-]
Because they think it may be a bubble. If it's not, no harm done to the hardware manufacturers, they just make more money per unit, but if it is a bubble, they don't want to be stranded with excess capacity.
dabinat 17 hours ago [-]
There is potential harm if it’s not a bubble and their competitors scale and capture more of the market and they don’t. That’s why CXMT is a real wildcard - they could use this situation to become a big player.
Sohcahtoa82 18 hours ago [-]
I'm trying to understand the intent of your comment.
The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly.
urda 6 hours ago [-]
It's so bad I will be looking at moving off Hetzner at this point. 3x is too much.
The price of server auctions seem pretty much the same as before: https://www.hetzner.com/sb so if you don't need the latest hardware, Hetzner is still and outstanding deal.
Foobar8568 5 hours ago [-]
Server auctions are more expensive than last month, I feel like 50% more at a minimum.
moontear 4 hours ago [-]
Ah, so this is ANOTHER price increase in a short timeframe? Thought I read about this before
saltmate 1 hours ago [-]
No, this is the same prize increase. The post from 38 days ago was the announcement this one will come, now it is active.
yread 18 hours ago [-]
There can only be so many "I saved 10x by moving to Hetzner" posts before they pick up the value they were leaving on the table...
tda 4 hours ago [-]
I literally migrated last week, and saved 8x by ditching AWS for Hetzner.
theshrike79 2 hours ago [-]
Just out of curiosity, which parts of AWS were you using? EC2 and something else?
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
praseodym 18 hours ago [-]
Just wait for the hyperscalers to follow suit
speedgoose 17 hours ago [-]
I moved to Scaleway one or two price upgrades ago. Be ready to see the same, but with OVH or Scaleway instead.
ethin 17 hours ago [-]
Problem with Scaleway (for me) is physics. I get 200ms (at minimum) roundtrip latency to any of their EU servers (and for their dedicated offerings that can boot custom Linux distros that's pretty much all I have access to).
miyuru 17 hours ago [-]
didn't Scaleway also increase prices 1st of this month?
Which plan? Because even with this hetzner price increase it's still 2-3x cheaper than scaleway.
speedgoose 14 hours ago [-]
The bare metal dediboxes have better value I believe now.
ffsm8 18 hours ago [-]
The same will happen with the other providers.
Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware.
This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase.
But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too
roncesvalles 14 hours ago [-]
It was never the same quality though. A VM at AWS or GCP is not even remotely comparable to a VPS at some low-end provider. Things like RAID, network/powersupply redundancy, internal privacy controls (nothing stopping a VPS provider from snooping in your filesystem), software patch quality, noisy neighbor mitigation, bandwidth quality, SLAs etc. Then all the value-added stuff like Terraform support, logging, monitoring, IAM roles, instant scalability etc. Not to mention the benefits if you use the same cloud's managed services like databases.
If I can get a same-spec EC2 instance at AWS for just 2x the price of a Hetzner box, I would never consider Hetzner. It had to be a "10x savings".
indigo945 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, but Hetzner is not "some low-end provider". They have proper, high-quality datacenters with all the redundancy you want, excellent connectivity, great service, and much better privacy controls than any American company would be legally able to provide. Hetzner also offers instant scalability and has Terraform and Ansible support for infrastructure automation.
We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).
The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.
Not for me at least, I had to fire up the console and try creating a new server.
littlecranky67 15 hours ago [-]
They price hiked my existing CCX13 from 16€ to 43€ - that is a 2.6x price increase (!). Technically they didn't increase it yet, for as long as I don't order a new one or rescale (up/down) they let me use the old price. This is insane (it is a cloud server, with 2 dedicated cores and 8 GB RAM).
civvv 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I host three small-scale game servers for an indie-game, all out of pocket. 50-80 players hop on every day and the community is super nice. Its been possible because the price has been €16 per instance, but with these new prices, it will absolutely not be possible anymore. I imagine a lot of small game server communities will meet the same fate now, since Hetzner has been the go-to for this kind of stuff.
noxvilleza 11 hours ago [-]
I run a few stats site for a video game, and the overall hosting right now is ~€220 on Hetzner for a AX51-NVMe + AX61-NVMe + some extra SSDs + HDDs --- so that's the same price as just a AX42-1 in the new pricing model which is insane. If one of the servers goes down I'd need to likely shut down one of the projects or massively change the architecture.
tomschwiha 10 hours ago [-]
What do you mean with if the server goes down? As far as I know Hetzner will replace tje hardware for free: "Support services include the free replacement of defective hardware."
noxvilleza 17 minutes ago [-]
I think that's true provided they have replacement hardware - for harddrives/RAM that's almost always true, but a few years ago I had an EOL motherboard issue and was forced into moving to a different server that was a bit more expensive.
Tepix 13 hours ago [-]
There's always lowendbox.com but Hetzner was more reliable than most of those vendors.
k4rli 3 hours ago [-]
On netcup I'm paying only 9€ for better specs. AMD 4 cores and 8GB ram. Worth looking at their offers/deals section.
littlecranky67 6 minutes ago [-]
I was interested in Netcup for their dedicated-core vservers (they call them "root servers" although it is a kvm instance on bare metal - probably overprovisioned so also not really dedicated cores). What is your overall experience with them?
frn123 14 hours ago [-]
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zrm 15 hours ago [-]
It seems like what's missing here is lower cost plans, because the existing plans had been fairly affordable, but now they're basically triple.
The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price?
IsTom 15 hours ago [-]
It's wild how much more expensive they are in the US compared to Europe.
rvnx 14 hours ago [-]
Salaries
kay_o 14 hours ago [-]
My recollection is that Hetzner own all they DC in .de, self built, land incl. however .us and .sg are standard DC colo/rack
alberth 15 hours ago [-]
I use to be a huge Hetzner fan but it doesn't appear they have launch any new hardware in the past 3-years.
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
(Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well)
EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line
Is there a lot of new enterprise server hardware coming out lately? Consumer stuff has been stagnant with all the ram cost issues so I could see servers running into similar issues.
chrisandchris 14 hours ago [-]
Proliant G12 was introduced end of 2024, and based on their previous lifecycle I guess they will at least last 3-5 years before a new line comes.
fuzzy2 14 hours ago [-]
Hetzner is almost exclusively offering consumer-grade hardware.
tencentshill 15 hours ago [-]
They are attempting to refresh it now, it's just the worst possible time to do it. Prices are at a peak (hopefully).
antonkochubey 15 hours ago [-]
it's not that bad, EX63 dedicated servers were a great deal until this week (especially with 192 GB ECC RAM upgrade) and it has a 2025 CPU, for example
patrickdavey 41 minutes ago [-]
I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but, at some point it'll be worth looking at getting a static IP address and using Cloudflare tunnels to serve toyish projects from your home netwerk. Just need to work out how to firewall it properly from the rest of the home network.
tauntz 18 hours ago [-]
"Fun" times for services selling micro-VMs running on top of Hetzner bare metal machines for a small margin. 3x increase in input pricing with essentially no notice (there was a 2 weeks notice of "we will change pricing" but no details. People assumed a max of 50% increase, I guess, not 3x)
ramblurr 17 hours ago [-]
Don't forget these price increases are only for new purchases. Old rentals keep their price.
100ms 18 hours ago [-]
You knew when they didn't include actual details at the time that something huge was coming
2001zhaozhao 16 hours ago [-]
Well crap, I was planning on doing this.
Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...
jm4 6 hours ago [-]
I use a cheapo VPS there to host some git repositories. It's going from $6.99/mo to $20.49. Who in their right mind would pay that for a 2 core/2 GB VPS? It makes me wonder if they are trying to shed some unwanted customers.
SXX 19 hours ago [-]
If you personally need it there is still time to get cheaper ones off auction:
Yeah mostly old CPUs, but considering RAM shortages gonna be much cheaper than colocation.
PS: link contains 256GB RAM filter since I guess OP need RAM.
moomoo11 19 hours ago [-]
how's that work? do they operate them on the buyer's behalf?
svelle 18 hours ago [-]
It's old servers they have already written off and would otherwise decommission. You're basically only paying for power and network traffic.
moomoo11 18 hours ago [-]
i'm looking at the site and it seems they don't have this in US
jorams 18 hours ago [-]
Hetzner doesn't offer dedicated servers in the US. They operate two of their own data centers in Germany and one in Finland. In the US and Singapore they offer only cloud servers, running on hardware in others' datacenters.
moomoo11 12 hours ago [-]
thank you
esskay 17 hours ago [-]
Getting close to losing any point of them existing. They were the cheap one. You take that away and their unique offering vanishes and makes them pretty pointless to even consider as a provider. Really hope they can sort out something for their hardware sourcing as this isn't sustainable.
nine_k 17 hours ago [-]
The above assumes that other providers will not do their own adjustments.
esskay 14 hours ago [-]
This is Hetzner's third increase this year. Not seeing any sort of similar levels of recurring price hikes from the other big vps providers.
Aldipower 25 minutes ago [-]
OVH suddenly seems cheap. :-P :-D
Aeolun 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah. If Hetzner prices are equivalent to AWS, what is the point in choosing them.
CGamesPlay 7 hours ago [-]
Don't forget to count your EBS and egress fees when you make your AWS spreadsheet.
alfanick 19 hours ago [-]
Seems like it doesn't apply to older machines, I have AX41-NVMe, it's not on the list, I also didn't get any notification from them (and they usually send some) - no need to panic if you're longterm customer.
Aldipower 24 minutes ago [-]
Also running an AX41-NVMe for 6 years now. I cannot remember, but they do replace defective parts, right?
avian 19 hours ago [-]
I hope it stays like that for a while, but I suspect it won't.
Advertised prices for my setup are now roughly 2x what I'm currently paying.
alfanick 18 hours ago [-]
Seems the driver is DDR5 memory, DDR4 servers are not affected from my quick look.
Aachen 14 hours ago [-]
That'd be nice. The only server I can't host at home is basically just ferrying bytes to and fro, to have the right IP address for email deliverability. I'd buy DDR0.5 and a Pentium 2 if they'd offer it
lylo 4 hours ago [-]
Hetzner could win back some of that love if they release the long-rumoured managed Postgres offering at a price that undercuts most of the competition.
preisschild 3 hours ago [-]
I'd prefer that they concentrate on the "cloud servers" (better networking, more availability, BOYIP via BGP). You can always just host Postgres yourself on one of those servers.
Daviey 17 hours ago [-]
As a long term metal customer, I understood the need to raise prices for energy usage.... but for disk/ram I'm struggling to be sympathetic. The hardware I am using is already procured by them, and until such time there is a hardware failure I cannot support a price rise, because were is their justification for existing hardware?
tzs 16 hours ago [-]
An ongoing business that intends to remain ongoing has to charge current customers based on the replacement cost of consumable items used to service those customers.
That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while.
Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is.
greyb 17 hours ago [-]
Because in a free market, making rational choices about pricing in line with the industry allows you to build capital to further expand, which coincidentally also lets you buy more RAM.
t0mas88 16 hours ago [-]
They are not raising prices for existing contracts, only new ones.
Stitch4223 17 hours ago [-]
They will need to buy new hardware too I guess…
pocksuppet 16 hours ago [-]
The last price increase was 5-10%. This one is a 150% increase. Goodbye Hetzner. The old version of you will be missed.
duckmysick 16 hours ago [-]
Where are you moving to?
qingcharles 4 hours ago [-]
I needed to spin up a tiny little logging server this morning. Someone on Reddit recommended Datalix, so I'm trying their €2.50/mo VPS.
TurdF3rguson 8 hours ago [-]
Contabo price hasn't changed. I'm thinking of locking in some more VPS before it goes up.
tuhtah 21 hours ago [-]
Hetzner dramatically increased prices for new and rescaled instances starting 15th of June, 2026; 8 AM CEST.
For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
MinimalAction 18 hours ago [-]
I understand this is ultimately due to AI boom.
A couple of naive questions:
1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.
icyfox 18 hours ago [-]
1. Factory limits basically. There's a limit to the amount of fabrication lines that can create ram. Combined with the market incentives right now to make high bandwidth memory (HBM) over server memory (DRAM)... HBM starts as DRAM dies, so it competes with normal DRAM for wafer starts / cleanroom fab capacity.
2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online.
srdjanr 2 hours ago [-]
Are more plants coming? I think I heard it won't be many of them, because it's risky.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
zettabomb 18 hours ago [-]
The entire capacity of RAM production is basically booked out, for at least the next year. All fabs have sold their allocations already, and it takes years to build a new one. As a result, no it will likely not ease up if demand continues like this, again for at least a year.
lenerdenator 17 hours ago [-]
Also worth noting:
They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality.
root9876 13 hours ago [-]
> and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality
How's that possible?
kuschku 8 hours ago [-]
You know how fractional reserve banking can create money out of thin air? In theory, the stock market can be used in the same way. Which is what the AI providers have been doing.
lenerdenator 12 hours ago [-]
Credit.
locknitpicker 18 hours ago [-]
> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.
Hamuko 18 hours ago [-]
The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a year ago.
dopa42365 16 hours ago [-]
Meet the new memory cartel, it's just like the old memory cartel but with CXMT being priced a tiny tad below.
Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.
locknitpicker 2 hours ago [-]
> The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up.
I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.
It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.
I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.
Hamuko 2 hours ago [-]
It's not sustainable because it'll basically ruin all of the industries connected to memory. OpenAI, Anthropic etc. all need a massive amount of compute to train and serve models, and increases in memory price will all drive up their already massive costs. And then on the other end, the people they need to use their AI services cannot either afford the devices they need to access the devices, or the device costs go up so much that they cannot afford to buy the services. If for example budget phones disappear completely because of memory prices, those consumers disappear from the customer pool and then the budget phone manufacturers disappear and stop buying memory, AI companies spend even more to build models for fewer people, etc.
Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?
And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.
hurtigioll 34 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI/Anthropic are in the business of "replacing workers with AIs", not in the business of "selling AIs to workers"
that is a 20T market
they dont need you to afford a subscription, they need your boss to replace you with their service
xslvrxslwt 18 hours ago [-]
Hetzner has long been affordable due to its subpar latency and protection, making this price increase very questionable. No one has real reason to choose hetzner if it is not affordable. OVH ends it, one Romanian provider as well.
watermelon0 17 hours ago [-]
Can you tell more about their subpar latency?
I've been using Hetzner for many years, both personally and for business use, and I've not seen any noticeable issues regarding the latency.
Granted, my use cases are webapps/backends that are not particularly latency sensitive, and are primarily used from a few European countries.
For what's worth, I've seen cases where download speeds from Hetzner are considerably higher than from AWS eu-central-1.
hudo 1 hours ago [-]
I don't get it, I have server for 5 years, its old hardware, nothing changed, why would they increase it?
ulimn 25 minutes ago [-]
They don't, in your case. Read the first 2 lines of the linked page.
sevenzero 1 hours ago [-]
Inflation, covering their increase in expenses by shoving it to their customers. Business 101.
zenapollo 19 hours ago [-]
Contabo, an even cheaper alternative to Hetz, raised prices this month as well by 30-35% as well. Just noting it here because i couldn’t any info elsewhere.
CryptoBanker 13 hours ago [-]
Contabo is still notably cheaper than it was 2 years ago. I just shut down a 2 year old VPS and made a new one because it was ~20% cheaper than it was two years ago, and I also get more CPU and more RAM
marlovovic 14 hours ago [-]
Interesting, but still very good pricing compared to the enormous increases we now see at Hetzner (plus the increase before that one). I'm wondering if they have more hardware on stock and/or better means of hardware supply.
I have a few more or less idle VMs running at different providers, and keeping an eye on the european VPS market it seems that many struggled, while contabo is relatively stable. E.g. ovh at times limited the buying process to 1 instance (now it is at 5, not sure what was the default before) and also available locations were limited at one point a few weeks back.
18 hours ago [-]
dllrr 15 hours ago [-]
I just used Claude to convert my app to a serverless architecture and migrated to Cloudflare and their generous tiers. Not every app fits that model, but it's more than you'd think. Now I only pay when the app is used, not a penny more.
mhitza 19 hours ago [-]
They are also becoming greedy. I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee. Whereas it was something like 60 euros a year ago.
elmo2you 16 hours ago [-]
We (company) do the same. Though in our case the setup cost was 80 Euros (I think), less than a year ago. As the GPU proved not really suitable for any serious server workloads (it's a workstation class card), we'll soon be ditching that machine anyways (now for sure). Maybe our other inventory at Hetzner too. Not even because of the price increases themselves, but rather because the way in which they've communicated those. Personally, I've been a loyal customer and avid advocate for Hetzner, for well over a decade. They sure knew how to nuke that in record time. They can spin their story any way they like, but I'd say their board better consider sending most of their management packing, without bonuses or severance pay.
mhitza 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting over the price increase rollover now the setup fee is around 110 euros.
The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.
If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)
jorams 16 hours ago [-]
> I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee
Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234.
nomilk 18 hours ago [-]
Similar providers (heroku, aws) haven't increased their compute/ram/ec2/dyno prices recently; why is Hetzner's increase so massive (> 3-4x) - wouldn't increased hardware costs affect everyone else too?
Shank 17 hours ago [-]
For the record, those providers already charged a significant premium for the equivalent compute you could get at Hetzner and OVH. The margins have decreased but they've had a profit margin on compute for a long time.
Aissen 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, and they will to preserve margins at some point. They're just doing a huge Mexican standoff, waiting for others to move. All smaller clouds have raised some prices already.
They'll probably wait for summer, the world cup finals, or whatever's last big US government thing is so it flies under the radar.
energy123 18 hours ago [-]
Step change makes sense for a smaller provider. You bait people to build on top of you with the best prices, then rug pull and hope the switching costs and economic frictions delay the attrition.
TiredOfLife 17 hours ago [-]
Because heroku and aws were 10x previous hetzner price
jovial_cavalier 18 hours ago [-]
idk if you're comparing like-for-like here. I think on EC2, other customers can balloon up to fill your idle time because they're running on the same physical hardware. What this is talking about is renting hardware that is exclusively earmarked for your usage, so your compute is not fungible with other customers. It's more correctly priced against buying your own hardware and maintaining it yourself.
avarun 16 hours ago [-]
They've tripled on "cloud servers" (shared hardware) as well.
fxwin 2 hours ago [-]
Me, a german, looking at my CAX11: this doesn't seem too bad
Americans:
mellosouls 4 hours ago [-]
Shades of the recent GitHub Copilot price hikes; class-leader in value to also-ran.
I wonder if there are underlying component cost connections or just corporate politics and the cold hands of the profit-people.
TkTech 19 hours ago [-]
This continuing trend is going to do a fantastic job of ensuring fewer and fewer individuals can launch casual projects and gating (non-VC) startups to those who already have the means.
karussell 18 hours ago [-]
Wow. This is crazy. And not only much more expensive but the standardization means you have to buy more disk if you e.g. just need more RAM or similar.
And does the standardization mean that I can no longer buy extra hardware?
Moving my crap onto an old laptop and some kind of tunnel thing ... tomorrow.
Those are some huge increases.
kopirgan 9 hours ago [-]
AI is no different from machine doing what took people earlier. In fact on the scale of many other things (spinning Jenny that could replace dozens, for one) this is probably benign. Because it also multiplies costs. Earlier innovations not only did it faster with less manpower, they did it cheaper too!
We are still around, enjoying fairly decent lifestyles for the most part, if you take away effect of politics, governance etc.
pelagicAustral 19 hours ago [-]
For EU-based ops I moved to UpCloud, they have top customer service and their offerings are far more complete than Hetzner... Plus, they have more zones.
transmit101 18 hours ago [-]
Is there anything to suggest these increases are not reflecting the increased baseline price of RAM, GPUs, etc?
If not then it is only a matter of time before other providers are forced into similar price hikes.
ghosty141 16 hours ago [-]
Is there anything to suggest these increases are reflecting the increased baseline price of RAM, GPUs, etc?
I mean don't get me wrong, this for sure is a factor but like others said, other services don't see such drastic price hikes.
sinpif 11 hours ago [-]
Time to optimize your software stack. Stop using slow interpreted languages & bloated "scaling" setups in favour of tightly integrated natively compiled systems.
shibel 13 hours ago [-]
This is crazy. I just got the CCX33 last week to migrate a Heroku db to it, that seems to have jumped over 100% now…? Need to reconsider
Edit: just noticed this is not retroactive. Still concerning looking forward.
I built a new computer with lots of RAM and a nice NVMe drive about a year ago, and I feel like I hit the jackpot with timing.
But just like a low-interest rate mortgage, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for a long time, it seems.
zsellera 20 hours ago [-]
It's been a struggle to allocate cost-optimized VPS at them for months now (in some regions), they were very often out-of-stock.
r0b05 5 hours ago [-]
They are out of Ampere cloud instances as well. Where is a good place to get Ampere instances with similar cost and stability?
noIdeaTheSecond 11 hours ago [-]
As a european and person valuing my privacy I wanted to chose an European provider, so far not impressed with their customer service...
ryandvm 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thisisit 5 hours ago [-]
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
mullingitover 5 hours ago [-]
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
Valakas_ 4 hours ago [-]
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
vanviegen 4 hours ago [-]
> Demand is higher than supply.
Only when the product is being given away for free or sold way below cost. It's still unclear how large the actual market is.
Duralias 3 hours ago [-]
If the research about it making people reliant and dumber is true, then they can probably do some serious price increases before people actually consider stopping to use them, but of course that would be in the future when the entire market in general stops subsidizing the cost.
ksec 11 hours ago [-]
>(world's first trillionaire anyone?)
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
FridgeSeal 10 hours ago [-]
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
ksec 6 hours ago [-]
>Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that,
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
mkesper 4 hours ago [-]
Please show sources. Maybe no one appreciates it because it's only rumors spread by enterprises massively profiting from such rumors?
And about your toilet paper analogy: Every producer tried everything to improve output. You cannot just let your machines run faster. You also need input materials, workers and logistics to scale accordingly, which is often not possible.
ethbr1 9 hours ago [-]
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
bigbadfeline 5 hours ago [-]
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
flossly 12 hours ago [-]
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
id00 10 hours ago [-]
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
kopirgan 9 hours ago [-]
Can you explain? What sort of surveillance that affects a casual visitor?!
id00 8 hours ago [-]
Here is my experience in the center of Shanghai, very subjective of course:
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
michaelteter 8 hours ago [-]
Re: KYC
US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
kelnos 4 hours ago [-]
It's surprising to me to learn that a place like Texas is like that. I live in California and have access to lots of public spaces, and rarely see police or fences. Private security is pretty common, but that don't bother me much; most of them don't carry firearms, and there's very little they're legally allowed to do. (And they don't make enough to risk life and limb, so they're not going to get into any but the lightest of confrontations.)
I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.
I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.
id00 7 hours ago [-]
I'm an Australian who was born in Eastern Europe. I've travelled around the world, lived in the US for 4 years and done a few cross country trips in the US including visiting Texas. With all its pros/cons, my experience there can't be compared to what I had in China
montag 6 hours ago [-]
It sounds like "know-your-customer" is not the problem, but rather the quaint assumption of a permanent mailing address is the problem. Isn't some manner of KYC an essential part of a society with laws?
greenavocado 5 hours ago [-]
> You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles
Yes you absolutely can there are landlords that will rent you a crappy cheaper place that you can use to establish some identity chain within a month
m00dy 6 hours ago [-]
yes, currently getting credit cards way easier than checking accounts.
ValentineC 6 hours ago [-]
> you need VPN
Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.
But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.
l23k4 4 hours ago [-]
>Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?
kelnos 4 hours ago [-]
Usually, yes, but it's an IPsec VPN that the great firewall will explicitly not mess with in any way, because they don't want to inconvenience foreigners who are there on business.
polack 3 hours ago [-]
> - I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).
I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?
kopirgan 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting...although most of these are present in any country, at least the ones I have been to. You can use Google in India but not Tiktok (to give one example). Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to. Crackdowns on private condos becoming hotels with guests dragging their luggage and strangers in lift 24x7 have created a lot of trouble in many cities.
Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.
As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.
ValentineC 6 hours ago [-]
> Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to.
They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.
Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:
Wouldn't they have most of that just from customs/your passport? Not saying it isn't all rather dystopian, but, like, they have your ID as soon as you hit an airport.
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
Added surveillance bonus(!) at Mainland Chinese airports: When doing international to international transfers, you are required to have your passport scanned. I have never seen this in free countries. You just wait in an international terminal (no customs, etc) and take the next flight. I am curious if CCP will require HK Airport to change their rules/procedures in the future.
kopirgan 7 hours ago [-]
In Singapore Changi, the arrival and departure are at same gate so you can just sit and wait for next flight. Passport is checked before you get into next flight at the gate where they check your boarding pass as well..right there your bags are also scanned (at each gate or group of few gates)
Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.
But PP checks do happen in both cases.
l23k4 3 hours ago [-]
Big difference between airline employee checking whether or not you're the ticket holder and the government checking every passenger for warrants.
The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.
10 hours ago [-]
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
> In China you have clean streets and low crime
Finland and Taiwan has all of that with the added bonus of no Great Firewall of the Internet.
kelnos 4 hours ago [-]
There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
simianparrot 11 hours ago [-]
Social credit bonus for wild unfounded claims online is probably nice if you live in the top 5 megacities.
mfru 4 hours ago [-]
Social credit does not exist the way you think it does
Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline)
All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate)
Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×)
Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×)
Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×)
Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×)
Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×)
Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×)
---
Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same.
The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.
menno-sh 9 hours ago [-]
This is ignoring a lot of variables, the most obvious of which is that crime rates for people in economically disadvantaged positions are unsurprisingly higher.
I was going to explain some of the others when I realized that in the context of this thread — namely comparing Europe to China in terms of ethnic diversity — these misleading statistics smell like a call to return to a ‘monocultural’ Europe. My grandparents have had pretty bad experiences with Germany’s last attempt at that; I therefore want to stress how dangerous it can be to present statistics like these as ‘neutral’.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
how does claiming that the US has strong arguments to support your point, but discussing them would derail the thread, when the person you were replying to was showing data from Texas, a US state?
He wasn't just a software enginer — he was also a true innovator.
black_knight 12 hours ago [-]
Memories of his work will forever live in the models trained on his GitHub repositories.
jrave 12 hours ago [-]
:chef's kiss:
varispeed 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jacobsenscott 6 hours ago [-]
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
skissane 9 hours ago [-]
> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
nelsonfigueroa 10 hours ago [-]
I think the upsides already hit, they just weren't meant for you and I
buredoranna 8 hours ago [-]
If you're interested in upsides, I can highly recommend the book "Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future", by Johan Norberg [1].
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?
ffsm8 6 hours ago [-]
You forgot tariffs, you can see the difference in the price increase between the US and the other places...
anonzzzies 5 hours ago [-]
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
Why does there need to be an "upside" legible to our profession?
windexh8er 11 hours ago [-]
Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
akerl_ 11 hours ago [-]
Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
kpcyrd 11 hours ago [-]
This. Capitalism only became problematic the minute it stopped having a cozy spot for software developers~
And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
throwway120385 5 hours ago [-]
I always thought raw, unchecked Capitalism sucked. I've thought that my whole life. "Welcome to the asylum" and all that.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 10 hours ago [-]
Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.
scorpioxy 3 hours ago [-]
This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).
akerl_ 10 hours ago [-]
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be nice if the skillset I happened to hone turned out to be the one field that stays lucrative for my entire career. I just don't think the market owes me or people in my field a job, and if we get displaced and have to learn new roles, we'll be in good company with most other humans alive in our generation.
stanmancan 6 hours ago [-]
The ones most likely to be “exposed to market forces” right now are the junior developers who never got to “have it good for so long”.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
I mean, that very well could be the case. It often is the case with any kind of automation. There's a plausible claim that things will turn out fine, and another plausible claim that it could be a disaster for the profession. But whether or not it's a disaster for professional developers is separable from whether (a) it's a disaster for, like, society, and (b) whether or not it fundamentally is an important new fact about the world --- like, whether we're OK with it or not, it does appear likely that a huge swathe of professional software development work is fully automatable.
carlosjobim 11 hours ago [-]
It doesn't seem like it, but there are other people in the world besides programmers and venture capitalists. They will benefit from AI, many already are. Some professionals are not.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
applfanboysbgon 11 hours ago [-]
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
applfanboysbgon 11 hours ago [-]
Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions?
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.
applfanboysbgon 11 hours ago [-]
Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
What's the thing that relies on servers that got 4x more expensive for consumers? I think this is something you want to be true more than it's something that is true.
applfanboysbgon 10 hours ago [-]
I didn't make that exact claim, and I also spoke of future tense "will be". Obviously, the budget prices just raised. You can see some anecdotes here:
...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.
For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.
---
rate-limited, so:
> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
jrflowers 10 hours ago [-]
tptacek is arguing that he, specifically, does not care about the Hetzner price increase. Anything outside of that (eg the cost spike in consumer computing https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260310-12959.h...) isn’t relevant. There’s no point in making an argument about the material reality of things here because he’s objectively right that he, personally, does not care about it.
tptacek 9 hours ago [-]
I'm thinking more about, like, my next door neighbors, who also don't care that my interlocutor had to turn off one of their hobby servers. That's OK, though, because they also think a Macbook Neo would cost $119 without the Apple tax, so I think we're at an impasse.
sieve 4 hours ago [-]
There are people running sites hosting old religious texts and hymns and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with programmers. A 4x jump in the bill for someone on limited income not gaining anything from it is not trivial. It results in the disappearance of a site that will not come back.
jrflowers 2 hours ago [-]
I am trying to parse this post because it sort of reads like “My neighbors are dumb and we care about the same things” but I can’t figure out why someone would write that
How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts
jrflowers 10 hours ago [-]
If we’re going to define what’s good for the general public based on a single arbitrary product from a company of our choosing, the Steam Deck just got a $300 price increase for the same hardware.
Capricorn2481 7 hours ago [-]
It literally has 8gb of RAM. It's a great laptop, but its value is specifically in how much it can do with cheaper parts using their infrastructure.
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
its anecdotal, but the non software engineers in my social circles wont even consider trying games with rumors of breaking hardware like Jumpspace with GPU bricking[1] because they feel they can no longer afford to replace the hardware in their gaming rigs. I have had several people independently complain to me that they are locked out of the hobby whenever their GPU or ram dies.
The upside is that people will no longer be obligated to struggle.
ericd 12 hours ago [-]
So far, there are more jobs.
dakolli 12 hours ago [-]
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
ericd 11 hours ago [-]
Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
BeratnaGas 10 hours ago [-]
Of the 172,000 (adjusted) new jobs in May, 70,000 are attributed to hospitality when 14,000/month is the norm. World Cup temporary jobs. Hourly average earnings rose 12 cents in May while the average price of gas rose $1.17/gallon since the start of the war. One could argue that some of the people participating in the surveys have a vested interest in the numbers looking good.
Ok, still over 100k not including those temporary jobs. I’m not arguing that the overall picture is amazing, just that it doesn’t seem like the narrative that AI is causing massive net job loss is true yet.
thelastgallon 9 hours ago [-]
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
jadar 7 hours ago [-]
What about all the employees who had options at SPCX and are now > millionaires?
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
moralestapia 13 hours ago [-]
The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality
ymolodtsov 13 hours ago [-]
I don't care about inequality, I care about the median.
outside1234 12 hours ago [-]
These two things are linked because the outcomes are power law.
dakolli 12 hours ago [-]
This is a literal Evil (I mean literally) idea wrapped up with statistical terminology and made to seem "logical". You should re-evaluate this.
thegrimmest 12 hours ago [-]
How are we torturing morality so that the median quality of life rising by just about every metric is "Evil"?
colechristensen 14 hours ago [-]
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
stetrain 14 hours ago [-]
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
colechristensen 14 hours ago [-]
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
digitaltrees 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, in theory but if working more confers an advantage then work expectations will stay the same and will show up as higher productivity. So the real question is how will that productivity be distributed. Right now it's being concentrated into shareholders value rather than wages.
toomuchtodo 14 hours ago [-]
Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)
jokethrowaway 13 hours ago [-]
It is not.
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
toomuchtodo 13 hours ago [-]
So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.
kvam 12 hours ago [-]
Actually participating in commerce is considered a pillar in defining a liberal democracy, in the words of John Locke, so I would say that is a right.
vkou 14 hours ago [-]
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
colechristensen 14 hours ago [-]
It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
vkou 13 hours ago [-]
> It's easier to enter the owner class.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
colechristensen 13 hours ago [-]
>Based on what?
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
vkou 12 hours ago [-]
Which is only relevant if one of the following two things happens:
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
Your theory does not match reality.
carlosjobim 10 hours ago [-]
New markets are created all the time, as new products and services become viable. So one-to-two-person businesses don't necessarily compete with larger businesses for the same customers. And that's why both can have rising revenue.
FridgeSeal 9 hours ago [-]
None of that matters, if the populace lacks the purchasing power to sustain these “new markets”. It also assumes, that incumbents won’t enter the new markets, and acquire/squeeze/kill the new players.
carlosjobim 3 hours ago [-]
A new market is made when a product or service which previously was too expensive becomes affordable to more people due to innovation. There's thousands of example, many of them in your own life.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
sarchertech 14 hours ago [-]
I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.
sublinear 11 hours ago [-]
Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
Yizahi 12 hours ago [-]
This a chamber of weights and measurements comment "I got mine, fuck everyone else".
sillysaurusx 14 hours ago [-]
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
pdimitar 14 hours ago [-]
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
beepbooptheory 12 hours ago [-]
How long does it take to learn all that then? Can't imagine it would take that long.. At least compared to, eg, becoming an experienced Rust or C programmer.
And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?
Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.
Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.
pdimitar 9 hours ago [-]
You are kind of ranting here and your point seem to mostly be "but we should not do harness engineering at all" which I agree with btw.
I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.
And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.
black_knight 12 hours ago [-]
Judging by the students I have seen, it will take longer. You could become a mediocre programmer in months, and still be useful by doing grunt work. I don’t see how people will become master architects steering fleets of agents without a deep understanding of the fundamentals, which takes longer to master.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
colechristensen 14 hours ago [-]
Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
mlsu 14 hours ago [-]
Somebody will eventually know the difference.
And then you’re fired.
knifeinhead 13 hours ago [-]
"The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours."
This will never happen in the USA.
Together with UBI.
throwatdem12311 13 hours ago [-]
> I can do more than I could before as the result of AI
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
RIMR 14 hours ago [-]
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
0x3f 13 hours ago [-]
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
eecc 12 hours ago [-]
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
colesantiago 12 hours ago [-]
There will be new jobs.
fireflash38 11 hours ago [-]
Are the new jobs in the room now?
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
jcgrillo 8 hours ago [-]
Best state in the country, jobs or no.
thayne 7 hours ago [-]
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
jplusequalt 11 hours ago [-]
What are these jobs?
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
paulinho1 11 hours ago [-]
I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
FridgeSeal 10 hours ago [-]
Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars!
/s
xdennis 14 hours ago [-]
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
sylos 14 hours ago [-]
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
illiac786 14 hours ago [-]
That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend.
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
DarkUranium 8 hours ago [-]
There's a (IMO) great, if a bit long, article making exactly your argument. I found it on HN a few days ago: (lost the HN link, sorry)
You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s
gdhkgdhkvff 15 hours ago [-]
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is:
Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier.
Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
chrisandchris 14 hours ago [-]
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
theobreuerweil 14 hours ago [-]
I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
pdimitar 14 hours ago [-]
This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
azan_ 13 hours ago [-]
> This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.
Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.
panopticon 12 hours ago [-]
I have a hard time finding quality stuff, even when I want to pony up for it. Do you have a good resource?
It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.
pdimitar 9 hours ago [-]
I live in country where shrewd salesmen know that people like me would pay extra for quality so they sell me crappy quality still, just for 3x the price.
So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.
robocat 3 hours ago [-]
The assumption is that price is supposed to reflect quality. Unfortunately as you say, too often price is a weak signal. And price often signals current fads/fashions rather than quality.
Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.
Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.
Finding the right compromises is hard work.
JCTheDenthog 4 hours ago [-]
>Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.
You might want to read *A Market for Lemons".
ericd 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it doesn't seem like people remember how expensive in real terms things were in the 80s.
FridgeSeal 9 hours ago [-]
> Actually good quality stuff is prohibitively expensive for the non-ultra rich, and the rest of the quality stuff is increasingly being hollowed out by private equity and rapidly declining quality. People just can’t afford to pay for quality and things that last due to price gouging, wage stagnation, and increased cost-of-living.
There, fixed that for you.
azan_ 28 minutes ago [-]
Look how expensive things were in the 50s then 1) start buying things as expensive in real terms and evaluate their quality; 2) consider whether more or less people can afford that. People have very rosy view of the past because they compare median worker nowadays to top 1% richest households back in time.
20after4 13 hours ago [-]
Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now.
ericd 12 hours ago [-]
It's not forced on you. If you do a minimal amount of research (which LLMs are very helpful with!), you can still find durable stuff. A Speed Queen washer is still built like a tank. It's just that the less durable stuff is absurdly cheap now. /r/BuyItForLife/ is a decent place to hang out if you care.
pdimitar 9 hours ago [-]
If you really like to argue semantics, OK, nobody put a gun to my head and said: "Here, buy this washing machine that will break just two weeks after its meagre two years of warranty, or I blow your head off!". Fine. But it is, shall we say, strongly encouraged with marketing and it makes sure those less quality products are always the most prominent. Happened to me and many acquaintances with extended families.
Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.
And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.
ericd 7 hours ago [-]
Heh I just mean that it's usually not that hard once you learn how to look, and if you care. In some categories, I agree, can be tough, but there usually tends to be at least one old stodgy brand that refuses to cheap out, and usually they're rewarded with premium pricing. But oftentimes, the per-year cost is competitive or better. Speed Queen, Miele, Bosch, that sort of manufacturer tends to still make really solid stuff. In the case of speed queen, they're made in Wisconsin, and tend to use a lot of heavy steel parts, and be very repairable. Consumer Reports likes them, too, worth paying for a subscription if you're on a quest to find long lasting stuff, though they're not perfect.
RE marketing, highly recommend ublock origin and SponsorBlock if you don't have both yet.
pdimitar 7 hours ago [-]
I have them but they can't quite save me from shitty articles, sadly. Shitty videos I learned to avoid.
But yeah we don't disagree. I don't mind investing time and effort into becoming an informed consumer. But I just wish I did not have to.
But wishful thinking is nearly done wasting my years and money. If it has to be done then it does get done.
ericd 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah fair, we're all a bit overloaded, would be nice if that was just taken care of. I've been idly thinking about what sorts of tools might help with this stuff. Like, CR has really good data, but it's also one of the least accessible sources of data.
philistine 14 hours ago [-]
It's all a matter of perspective. 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
andsoitis 13 hours ago [-]
> 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
What’s your data source?
Keep in mind that the modern, mass middle class was created in the mid-20th century through government policies and post-WWII economic growth.
blmarket 12 hours ago [-]
Am I the only Korean(or other countries under colonialism) laughing?
SpicyLemonZest 14 hours ago [-]
The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
fl4regun 13 hours ago [-]
This is a truth very few people are willing to confront. My grandmother lived in a village, on a farm, growing her own food and slaughtering her own animals, with no working plumbing, using a well for water. Of course a lot of that changed even just moving up to the 70s, but at that point there still wasn't quite the consumerist "buy whatever you want from wherever and whomever you want and have it almost immediately" environment. I can go to a grocery store here in Canada, buy tropical fruits year round that grow nowhere near me. I never have to concern myself with "this ingredient won't be here because it is seasonal", it'll be there, it'll just be more expensive out of season, worst case I just have to go a bit farther out to a different grocer than I usually go to.
antasvara 11 hours ago [-]
This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints.
For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?
In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.
And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?
fl4regun 5 hours ago [-]
The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.
Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
Volundr 11 hours ago [-]
I guess it's "only" 40 years, but my 1985 Civic was an amazing car. Definitely not a death trap, but after I did end selling it for a 99 Acura with airbags. Still kind of regret that one. My house was built in 1970, it's enough for the two of use, but would admittedly be cramped for more. That said at 850 square feet, it's quite a bit smaller than the 1,400 average for 1970.
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
jeltz 3 hours ago [-]
Other than coal gas being not very efficient use of coal what was so bad about it? Stockholm still had coal gas in the early 2000s and accidental carbon monoxide poisoning was very rare. Of course the alternatives are better, but only marginally so.
lanstin 13 hours ago [-]
Or fresh oranges.
andrepd 12 hours ago [-]
That's total bullshit. Middle class families in 1976 did NOT live in smaller houses than today, and certainly did NOT eat "poverty meals"... What on earth are you even talking about.
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
3 hours ago [-]
SpicyLemonZest 11 hours ago [-]
Again, I would encourage you to research historical statistics or talk to people who lived in 1976 about their practical living conditions, rather than going off of your intuition about what is "bullshit" or which things are "absolutely fucked". Our intuitions about these things are heavily warped by social media, where stories that feel true without being true are easy to tell and often more viral.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
5 hours ago [-]
guender 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
missedthecue 10 hours ago [-]
you can live an 1880's lifestyle working about 5 hours a week. Outdoor toilets, no plumbing, uninsulated housing. Essentially zero healthcare. No lighting after the sun goes down or before it comes up. Little variation in diet and enough calories and nutrition to make you a strapping 130 lbs five foot four.
You just don't want that.
__s 14 hours ago [-]
Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
9cb14c1ec0 12 hours ago [-]
It turns out the demand for software is so great that even when it can be produced instantly at zero cost demand still far outstrips supply.
dheera 12 hours ago [-]
Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
throwitaway222 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mark242 13 hours ago [-]
Toothpaste making did not completely take over the world's supply of plastic for caps.
root-parent 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jayd16 12 hours ago [-]
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
EasyMark 11 hours ago [-]
Like in "Hello, Tomorrow" ?
eecc 12 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of a film I saw…
;)
sciencejerk 12 hours ago [-]
Bladerunner?
sans_souse 11 hours ago [-]
Less than there will be jobs in Antarctica.
throwup238 14 hours ago [-]
Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons?
The next great American novels.
KellyCriterion 13 hours ago [-]
At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
root-parent 13 hours ago [-]
They are are hiring AI Ethics Officers for robots deciding who gets the last potato.
erulastiel 9 hours ago [-]
Quality of life for basically everyone and percentage of the earth living in poverty are getting much better.
Kon5ole 13 hours ago [-]
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
throwaway2037 8 hours ago [-]
The price changes in Europe look reasonable, but US/SG are wild.
BaudouinVH 17 hours ago [-]
I faintly seem to remember that Netcup is using Hetzner hardware at lower prices.
Anyone know why? Some of the tiers more than doubled in price, that's pretty insane.
jpk2f2 16 hours ago [-]
Hardware prices, especially RAM, have skyrocketed. Priced out new baremetal servers recently and prices were 3-6x what we paid 4 years ago for the newer equivalents.
dns_snek 19 hours ago [-]
RAM prices, surely?
Neywiny 18 hours ago [-]
Was looking into a ram upgrade and the kit is 4x what it was even a year ago. I'm with you on this one
mfuzzey 14 hours ago [-]
There are large (x2, x3) price rises for US based servers but the German / Sweedish ones show much more reasonable increases ~30%
Implicated 11 hours ago [-]
Just throwing it out there I've got an AX162-R (48c EPYC) with 128GB additional memory (384GB DDR5 total) that's been running a side project of mine for a year or so... I could be talked into moving that project if someone had a need for the hardware.
AltruisticGapHN 13 hours ago [-]
Damn. I set up a 2vCPU 4GB RAM VPS on Linode for my web app (Linode 4GB). Was ready to move there. Then I found Hetzner has servers in the US and I could get more for my budget (~30$/month). Not anymore!
CPX22 (2vCPU 4GB) seems to be the exact same price as Linode 4GB (24$/month).
For example, their 'Regular Performance' cloud server tier has seen a 173% price increase.
ianberdin 15 hours ago [-]
I say hello to every happy HN and twitter post “we moved to hetzner and saved 10X”.
I told ya about silent happiness…
omnimus 14 hours ago [-]
You are saying that like it's some kind of rag pull. This is situation of the market. The people who moved still saved the money and are still saving money because Hetzner is still cheaper and they are also paying the old prices.
It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp.
csunbird 14 hours ago [-]
they still save 3-5x
0x70dd 18 hours ago [-]
I’m running a cheap VPS on hetzner. Wanted to bump up my plan but they are out of capacity for some of their plans. Demand is brutal.
winterbourne 12 hours ago [-]
This gives permission for all other providers to do the same.
minraws 15 hours ago [-]
Well we are officially fucked. That's some increase, not angry against hetzner they might have been forced, but man is this sad.
I built a homelab before the crisis started which might allow me to survive this for the next few years.
But man am I sad about folks trying to build new projects.
shdh 19 hours ago [-]
I wonder how this will affect their demand considering most people use them because they’re low cost
memothon 20 hours ago [-]
Was this announced beforehand? How do you double prices for customers so abruptly with no transition period?
There are actually two separate pricing increases. One was introduced about 1-2 months ago. The one from today was announced at the end of May, without actually revealing new pricing then. The new levels were made public today or yesterday, I believe. And they are much bigger than before, some hikes are well above 200%.
18 hours ago [-]
neals 17 hours ago [-]
I was shopping for this past weekend. I found a 16core 128gb-ram(1!) unit for 110€/month with a competitor. Crazy deal. I suspected it to be a mistake, but after 24 hours it actually came online. Runs very smooth.
esafak 15 hours ago [-]
Where??
zx8080 8 hours ago [-]
Price hike in Germany is minimal comparing to other DCs. Anyone knows why?
packetsent 18 hours ago [-]
Looks like my AX162 isn't being retired anytime soon...
AX162 (256GB) went from €274 -> €844
awllau 8 hours ago [-]
So happy I came across this. Need to rethink a few projects.
romaniv 17 hours ago [-]
AI seems to be ruining every single major thing that drove economic growth for the past 4 decades. PCs, the Web, software in general, high-capacity servers, Raspberry Pis and so on. The next thing to be affected will probably be smartphones. All of these things are foundations of profitable businesses right now and we are destroying them on the mere promise to get to some idiotic utopia in the future.
16 hours ago [-]
Valodim 18 hours ago [-]
I'll happily pay the new prices, if they actually have the servers available. Cheap pricing is nice, but not that useful when in practice you can't actually buy most of the time.
21 hours ago [-]
king_zee 19 hours ago [-]
I hope this doesn't hit the other servers, did they announce anything on why this increase happened? I would hate to need to move elsewhere
Aldipower 18 hours ago [-]
And the worst for my setup, there is no more ECC RAM available in their offers. At least not unless you pay an insane amount of cash..
Not reliable, from a buying/availability perspective.
elAhmo 18 hours ago [-]
Is ECC RAM that much valuable in day to day for non-critical usages?
Aldipower 17 hours ago [-]
Short: Yes, but of course it depends.
Long: I am dealing with a huge amount of fitness related health data which gets aggregated into metrics. If those metrics are wrong, for whatever reason, this is not great.
If you just run some blogs, of course, this is not important.
sph 17 hours ago [-]
The risk of bit flips is a percentage. The more RAM you have, the greater the likelihood. I have experienced heisenbugs on my 64 GB desktop that I bet were because of random bit flips
Havoc 17 hours ago [-]
I’ve had it catch a bunch of errors on borderline memory at home. (Despite the memory passing memtests).
Aachen 14 hours ago [-]
Just to throw it out there, surely we've ruled out ECC RAM gets away with worse modules because the checking bit will catch it? Because I actually tried to generate bit flips for a project once and we got nothing. Also a relatively high traffic site, registering a few bit flip variants (so like example.com -> fxample.com) got no hits whatsoever across a year. I keep seeing reports from people with ECC or people who found an available bit flip variant of a top X website, but it never happens to me on normal RAM. I can't imagine that ECC vendors are selling worse RAM with a check bit, but the more I read the more I wonder if maybe we should check just to be sure
Havoc 26 minutes ago [-]
It’s quite possible that they’re worse but I doubt it.
If you have one product line where error will go undetected and another where it will be visible to the user (and result in returns) the manufacturer incentive is in the opposite direction as what you describe
toast0 10 hours ago [-]
> Just to throw it out there, surely we've ruled out ECC RAM gets away with worse modules because the checking bit will catch it?
Doubtful. With proper support, you get reports/counts per bitflip. Most people will swap out ram that has any detected bitflips or with a small number anyway. And if you have a significant number, the machine check interupts really kill perf anyway.
Aeolun 12 hours ago [-]
Price adjustment?! They just doubled their prices in some instances.
ilioscio 20 hours ago [-]
Wow this is a brutal price increase for a lot of plans, at least it appears old user instance prices are grandfathered unless you rescale them.
conradfr 19 hours ago [-]
I see that (new) EX44 servers are now 50% more expensive than before, ouch. Although there's none available anyway.
AussieWog93 11 hours ago [-]
Another commenter mentioned this is about a huge leap in RAM and disk prices.
But why did the the CX33 only go up by €2 whereas the CPX32 went up by €21.50?
Both have 8GB of RAM, but the CPX32 has 80GB more storage and a bigger slice of CPU time.
You can see the same trend with CX23 vs CPX22.
In fact, CPX22 is now more than twice the price of CX23, despite having the same amount of disk and half the RAM.
Is there a CPU shortage now too?
sammy2255 8 hours ago [-]
A very welcome price hike
beratbozkurt0 19 hours ago [-]
I've only been using this a lot for a few months now. I'm sorry to see this.
zsoltkacsandi 19 hours ago [-]
Correct me if I am wrong, but AI made software development and operations more expensive than before. Yes, it is faster too, but the question: is it worth the price? Can the users consume new features in that pace?
andix 19 hours ago [-]
I start to think that AI might be a net negative on the economy. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, just to keep doing what we did before.
Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end.
AI is great, but I think it got too big.
Just my thoughts, not backed by any data. I'm not even sure I'm right.
Capricorn2481 19 hours ago [-]
> I start to think that AI might be a net negative on the economy. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, just to keep doing what we did before
Outside of HN, this is all people are seeing. Gamers in particular aren't seeing a benefit. They are being priced out of their hobby. The recent DDLS 5 meme is what people think of when they hear AI.
andix 18 hours ago [-]
Even inside the software bubble it's debatable if there is a significant benefit on productivity (judged by total cost).
But even pure software companies are hit by higher hardware prices. Their customers need to buy expensive hardware and have less budget left to spend on software.
Oras 17 hours ago [-]
It will clearer soon after the api pricing model enforced on enterprise accounts.
I suspect this will soon follow and no fixed subscription model, which will enforce companies/developers to be moderate and thoughtful when using AI. Also I think Microsoft will do the same for copilot
citrin_ru 19 hours ago [-]
AI investors bet on the high return in the next 10-15 years, they have no reasons to care if everything which require semiconductors will become much more expensive in the process.
conradfr 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe AI could now optimize all the server software made when RAM was cheap.
andix 19 hours ago [-]
I think we are also going to see a lot of new software that is less hungry on compute and RAM than before. Probably first with games not requiring new hardware anymore.
Because the consumers won't upgrade to new hardware as fast as before. People who buy their first gaming PC in 2027 might even get a lower spec in average than people who bought in 2025. So new games might require even lower hardware specs than before, to sell enough copies.
applfanboysbgon 18 hours ago [-]
This is a wishful fantasy. Vibe coded applications like ChatGPT desktop and Claude Code routinely take 1~2GB of RAM to display <1kb of text. There is zero initiative to make better software, the software industry is just saying "fuck you" to the rest of the world until the bubble pops.
andix 18 hours ago [-]
Sure, that's why I think it will start with games. You don't buy a game if you can't (properly) play it. Either you get a new gaming PC, or stop buying new games and keep playing old ones.
grishka 19 hours ago [-]
The use of AI is still optional.
noodlesUK 19 hours ago [-]
Yes but paying massively inflated prices for compute are not anymore. Even for consumer gear I am being quoted prices that are more than 2x what they were only a year ago (and availability is hard).
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
But its impact on new hardware costs and replacement costs is not.
A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long.
jnwatson 19 hours ago [-]
I think it is worse for Hetzner. The secret is out. Their prices have attracted a lot of demand, and they need to buy equipment to satisfy that demand.
The last Hetzner box I leased I had to poll for availability as if I was Ebay auction sniping. It took me 2 days to acquire it.
SoftTalker 18 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. Replacement is one thing, but there is also the need for new hardware to meet growing demand.
danesparza 19 hours ago [-]
And yet the hardware cost increases caused by AI are not.
gchamonlive 19 hours ago [-]
> is faster too, but the question: is it worth the price?
Those aren't the only metrics, quality and efficiency is also important. AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average.
entropi 18 hours ago [-]
> AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average.
Is it? If by higher quality, you mean commenting properly, sticking to naming conventions etc. I can agree. But to me, AIslop looks like it lacks "intentionality" of code written by devs, no matter how bad they are at naming things and sticking to conventions.
i.e. people who are adequately good at their jobs usually do things for a reason, and they can explain it. Even if you don't find it agreeable, it usually is consistent.
gchamonlive 18 hours ago [-]
Is it AI that lacks intentionality or your prompts?
Just remember we are comparing slops. If you care about your code it really doesn't matter if you write it manually or with the help of a glorified typewriter.
arcatech 18 hours ago [-]
> AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average.
How did you come to that conclusion? That goes against everything I've heard from people who understand development. Every resource I can find about AI vs non-AI development comes to the exact opposite conclusion you did.
gchamonlive 18 hours ago [-]
Devslop is spaghetti code that grows organically. AIslop is overly complicated code that someone neglected to read. I just distrust the former more than the latter.
jvuygbbkuurx 19 hours ago [-]
Prices aren't high for the current capabilities or demand. It is all a bet on the future.
Pxtl 19 hours ago [-]
AI could theoretically also be used to optimize existing code instead of producing new features, allowing existing tech to run on lighter hardware. Rent me an rpi if the software is fast.
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the laugh. When has optimization ever been a priority over delivering new features? AI is going to make this problem far worse.
fluidcruft 19 hours ago [-]
Raspberry Pis are also quite expensive now.
_3u10 18 hours ago [-]
Not really. You can still not use AI. The solid data is that RAM is more expensive than before… so there’s a small case to be made there because of you need a new computer you can’t avoid that.
iLoveOncall 19 hours ago [-]
> Can the users consume new features in that pace?
It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Given coding is only a small part of the developer's job, there's just nothing new to consume.
The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases.
Prices have increased for literally nothing.
andix 18 hours ago [-]
> The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases.
Not fully true. AI is now often used to fix a lot of bugs in old and badly maintained software.
The quality of big and popular software probably decreased a bit, but the quality of niche products probably improved.
BigJono 18 hours ago [-]
> It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI.
Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread.
The only thing that is clear is that measuring programming is just as impossible as it has always been. In all my years of projects they've either been resounding successes or gone down in flames. The difference between good and bad is a difference in kind. Most of the bad ones didn't even know what the hell they were building and built the wrong thing.
Like, the entire idea that some omniscient manager is looking at a thousand timelines and pondering over whether to pick the $11.5M successful one or the $9.5M successful one is literally laughable. Half of them are going to make the Hindenburg look like a bit of a whoopsie and the other half you would lock in sight unseen without a second thought.
iLoveOncall 16 hours ago [-]
> Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread.
Sorry, I meant 10-15% at most.
If it was by more than that then we'd see the effects in an obvious way. Since we don't those 15% are already generous.
noodlesUK 19 hours ago [-]
This is such disappointing news. I was planning on migrating some of our workloads to hetzner specifically to take advantage of the AX162 pricing which was incredibly competitive.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers?
jonatron 19 hours ago [-]
From memory, OVH and Scaleway are similar to Hetzner
markvdb 18 hours ago [-]
Hetzner is actually somewhat reliable, and OVH is not.
BadBadJellyBean 18 hours ago [-]
I know that they had a huge oopsie with their wooden datacenter burning down but apart from that I didn't notice any problems recently.
mhkool 19 hours ago [-]
OVH is more expensive
Aachen 14 hours ago [-]
And tells you in an FAQ to go to a competitor if you want to send emails (personal or commercial does not matter). Various bugs in the ordering systems too. Domain names run smoothly (fast and cheap) once you got the payment systems dealt with but for servers it doesn't seem great
BadBadJellyBean 19 hours ago [-]
Are they though? They have their KS, SYS and RISE lines with slightly older hardware. The prices are not too bad, I think. https://www.kimsufi.com/en/
Joel_Mckay 19 hours ago [-]
>Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers
They are quite good at costs remaining predictable. However, a few years back they cut the low-end hosts 1Gbps unlimited data transfer down to a 20GiB/month cap, and wanted everyone to go full cloud/retard to fully leverage the hardware infrastructure.
If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not worth the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3
noodlesUK 19 hours ago [-]
> If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not work the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3
Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)
I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.
jonatron 18 hours ago [-]
Have you looked at used servers from eBay / bargain hardware / ETB tech etc?
noodlesUK 18 hours ago [-]
I have but it seems to me that the stuff that's actually particularly well priced is really old (2016-2018ish). Even a single DIMM of used 32G DDR4 from ETB is now > 250GBP. The used market is also blown to pieces because of the price pressure.
jonatron 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah it doesn't look good. Idk your requirements but this is one of the better deals I could find https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126986603191 . For used eBay servers it's always worth making an offer rather than Buy it Now.
Joel_Mckay 18 hours ago [-]
>but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.
Indeed, never buy equipment unless all other choices were explored.
Note, we may be waiting till 2029 for GPU/ddr7/flash prices to fully normalize. =3
moomoo11 19 hours ago [-]
what's a good hetzner alternative for US?
i'm currently using their hillsboro instances.
i'm not going to pay 3-4x more.
miyuru 18 hours ago [-]
> i'm currently using their hillsboro instances.
existing VPS will have the old price.
It get increased only if it is rescaled and for new VPSs.
moomoo11 12 hours ago [-]
ah okay.
but do you know any alternatives to Hetzner for US?
Liriel 10 minutes ago [-]
You may want to look at 3HCloud.
dzonga 1 hours ago [-]
ovh ?
OutOfHere 7 hours ago [-]
When will people realize that Hetzner is not a good company? It is pretty bad to its customers.
piokoch 2 hours ago [-]
That's the difference between European and US companies and that's exemplification of the problem that Europe has. A big problem.
Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.
Having said that...
They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.
As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.
So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.
Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?
zuzululu 18 hours ago [-]
"First you corner the market, then you raise the prices" - Walter White
htx80nerd 12 hours ago [-]
"price adjustment" isnt 2x+ price adjustment is like 5% or 10%
andrepd 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a summary of price increases?
hyperionultra 18 hours ago [-]
We can't factor out greed from this increase. Vote with your wallet! Please.
HackerThemAll 15 hours ago [-]
I tried to sign up to Hetzner services once. They wanted photo of my government ID, and almost all my personal data, full dossier. So I abstained.
None of OVH, GCP, AWS, Azure wanted so much data about me, and I run my services in all of them successfully. Not in Hetzner.
Sorry Hetzner, you're too data-hungry. Nothing you say justifies that.
dcchambers 18 hours ago [-]
Most people IN TECH still don't realize how much hardware prices are going to continue to increase, much less the 95% of the population that's completely unplugged from what's going on with AI-driven hardware demand.
All of these price increases are going to get passed down to consumers eventually via increased prices.
petesergeant 17 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't production increase to offset this?
kuschku 8 hours ago [-]
1. Inelastic supply. It takes quite a while to increase production.
2. Volatility creates uncertainty, which always increases cost. And we've seen extreme volatility in energy prices and tariffs under the current US administration.
FpUser 18 hours ago [-]
The solution I think is to tell all of them starting with clouds to go fuck themselves (where possible of course) and start self hosting. I do this for years and am totally happy. I was also hosting on Hetzner and was thinking to do it again for some (not all) services but not with this new wonderful deal.
da02 18 hours ago [-]
Other than the price increases, any issues with Hetzner? Any alternatives you would recommend?
mardix 17 hours ago [-]
Pricing was the "selling" point. People chose Hetzner for their affordable prices compared to anybody else.
But when Hetzner is priced like everyone else, it makes it harder to pick them over the giant AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean etc.
FpUser 16 hours ago [-]
AWS does not give "bare metal" and the equivalent is still way more expensive. However Hetzner was much preferrable to let's say OVH who also "deals" bare metal but not anymore. So yes Hetzner has lost what I consider was their only advantage.
Aachen 14 hours ago [-]
Where do you send emails from?
FpUser 13 hours ago [-]
Same company that registers my domain as well. But I have readable local copy of all my emails.
ulfw 18 hours ago [-]
Everything is getting stupider by the day.
Tech is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts.
Then we'll be in a decade of drought again like 2001
alfanick 18 hours ago [-]
It's kinda awesome, the DDR prices will go extremely down (lower than before the bubble), and it will be spring time for self-hosted opensource models, cause people will be able to afford the hardware. We just need to wait for the peak.
jaza 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed. We enjoyed a decade or more or cheap surplus hardware sitting in data centres, after the dot com crash. Rinse and repeat after the AI bubble bursts in x time from now (my forecast is x = 2-3 years).
Capricorn2481 18 hours ago [-]
> the DDR prices will go extremely down (lower than before the bubble)
Why? From what I understand, Ram production is not ramping up. Even if a bubble does pop, I don't think it's even guaranteed to drop to where it was.
ascii0eks84 18 hours ago [-]
2005 - 2015'ish the DDR prices were artificially inflated by factory fires and such in asia. hope it's not going to repeat, need to have some excuse to drive the prices up..
dartharva 18 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "decade of drought"? In most accounts the 2000s were the absolute best years for rapidly emerging and fun tech.
drstewart 18 hours ago [-]
Just like the energy industry is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts again. Can't wait till oil / solar prices implode and there's a decade of drought where no one users energy for a long time.
zkmon 17 hours ago [-]
It is sucking away electricity from cities, making hardware costly for common user, pumping heat into global atmosphere, taking away jobs, creating massive amount of slop, killing human motivation for creativity, making academics and exams harder, creating fakes that are undetectable, filling internet with plastic content, pumping tons of unmaintainable code, wrecking websites ...
Still - AI is a great achievement?
andai 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Aachen 14 hours ago [-]
Things do tend to end up being a net positive or negative, though. Even if both aspects are present, it doesn't seem far-fetched that someone with hindsight in the future would conclude that it was overall a bad thing in the middle of an energy/heating crisis. That would imo preclude the label 'great achievement', but time will have to tell (or we adjust how we use it before history decides on a judgement)
totallygeeky 13 hours ago [-]
Little bit of number crunching shows that the median increase is 112%, so a 2.12x increase. Median for GER/FIN region is 120%, USA region is 157%, and Singapore is 71%.
Worst of all increases is the Euro pricing for USA plan CPX41 with a 209% increase, or 3.09x.
Raw number comparison for those interested:
Tried to format it to be readable but its
[Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change]
I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service.
At that same time, I was reading about this story about WireCard. It was like Stripe for Europe and worth billions. Turns out it was run by a Russian spy network and was all a sham. That video alleged Germany’s bureaucracy is filled with Russian agents and this can be traced back to the East/West Berlin days.
To save a few bucks a month over DO didn’t seem worth it to me to send my passport to a foreign country.
crote 18 hours ago [-]
I actually sent them a picture of my passport, and they still denied my account.
Hetzner was widely recommended and I was more than happy to pay a premium for their supposedly-excellent service, but I guess they didn't want my money.
Oh well. Went with OVH instead, and haven't had any issues since.
asats 18 hours ago [-]
Same exact story here, they denied my account despite me sending them everything they requested, no explanation given. Went with OVH and had zero issues.
jacekm 16 hours ago [-]
Yup, I signed last weekend, they asked me for a passport and I deleted the account immediately. Scaleway also asks for ID. I am gonna try OVH next.
alpineman 18 hours ago [-]
I mean it's not great that Hetzner require this but it's a bit of a jump to assume that means they have links to Russian intelligence. This kind of thing is pretty common in Germany; not every private company is captured by Russian intelligence
theturtletalks 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, no connection to WireCard but reading about that situation made me pause about giving my passport. At that point, I was like I’m trying to save a few bucks a month and risk is not worth it. Now if you’re buying their huge servers and are saving thousands, I can see why someone would do it.
They also don’t ask every person for the passport picture so maybe me using a custom DNS and VPN might’ve triggered something on their end.
locknitpicker 18 hours ago [-]
> I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service.
I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference?
tengwar2 18 hours ago [-]
Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, with some legal safeguards for recovery, and the ability to get a replacement card with a different number. Passport carries an open long-term risk of impersonation and you can't just get a new passport because some company has a copy. Just the financial side of that risk can have much greater impact. Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag.
theturtletalks 18 hours ago [-]
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Even with payment processors, most they ask for is SSN and business EIN.
When I read about the WireCard scandal, the KYC stuff sent to them over the years is probably in the hands of foreign intelligence already. That’s what gave me pause.
mschuster91 18 hours ago [-]
> Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag.
Germany also has legal KYC requirements for web hosting and most other things relating to telecommunications.
tengwar2 14 hours ago [-]
And if those requirements include the need to supply passport information, that's a reason not to host in Germany.
locknitpicker 2 hours ago [-]
> Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, (...)
This belief is deeply misguided. Do you understand that credit card transactions are used to provide access to your personal information?
Some companies even employ small token charges as identity verification processes. Payment systems such as MasterCard even explocitly offer identity verification services built around their payment system.
But a photo of your id card with your mobile camera is where you draw the line?
jpalomaki 18 hours ago [-]
When many sites are collecting these photos, it increases possibility of them leaking. Since these are also used for KYC process in crypto sites etc, this in turn increases risk of identity theft.
nozzlegear 18 hours ago [-]
I'm a Hetzner user in the US, but I pay for it with PayPal and was never asked to give my passport or identity. Americans are very rarely asked for these documents online, and even then it's typically only for government or financial services. It's also drilled into us that this info can be used for identity theft, so it's only natural to be wary of any non-government entity asking for them.
FWIW, if Hetzner had asked for my passport when I signed up, I would not have given it either.
whywhywhywhy 18 hours ago [-]
If there isn't a difference shouldn't my credit card be enough?
kuschku 8 hours ago [-]
In Germany, Credit Cards are a relatively new development and not that common (especially for business transactions). Instead you usually pay post-facto with direct debit. But that of course requires that you verify your customers ahead of time, which is why processes are built around verifying identity first. (and with web hosting, KYC laws also come into play)
babuskov 15 hours ago [-]
If they are spies, they are taking their time to use the data for sure. I run servers with them since 2009 or so. That's 17 years.
I feel like the whole password thing was meant as a protection against SPAM or using servers for nefarious purposes as they know who's really behind every server.
Although, I can also see how real criminals would work around that easily by supplying fake identities. Sounds like one of those "why we can't have nice things". Well, at least the password I gave them 17 years ago has expired since.
mort96 19 hours ago [-]
I was doing the same here, trying to set up a Hertzner account. Getting away from US companies and buying European and all that. But after I had made the account (and wasting a lot of time on back and forth with their buggy sign-up flow), I got told that I needed to upload a picture of my passport to do anything.
Fuck no. I too decided to stick with DO.
misiek08 19 hours ago [-]
Nice work from DO marketing team! Prices are completely not comparable and Hetzner was fighting scammers and kiddies, because low prices worked like a magnet for those.
Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport.
mort96 18 hours ago [-]
Look I'm just a dude who happened to land on DO a decade ago due to podcast ads and now wants to move away from it. Not due to prices but because I would prefer a European alternative. I didn't bring up Russian spies and I don't know if there's any validity to that story, I just don't want to upload passport pictures to random services. Their competitors don't require it.
I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time.
kuschku 8 hours ago [-]
DO gave students $100 credit. Then required me to upload my passport, which they rejected. Then required me to pay $5 via PayPal just to verify me. Two weeks later they removed all the credit they had provided, without any warning period. I emailed them and explained that if something was provided without any stated validity period, EU law requires at least 3 years before it can expire. They suggested I delete my account if I don't like it.
After that experience (I've written about it multiple times in the past on HN), I really don't understand why people still defend DO.
mort96 7 hours ago [-]
That sounds pretty bad.
I don’t “defend DO”, I just use it for now; but as someone whose opinion on DO is at least neutral-to-positive, it is that way because I have never experienced what you did nor even read about similar experiences before. Your experiences don’t automatically impact my opinions without any form of communication.
theturtletalks 18 hours ago [-]
I encourage you to read about WireCard. It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding. I’m trying to dig up the video also I can link it. There is no connection between WireCard and Hetzner outside of both being German companies.
jacekm 16 hours ago [-]
And they're not just hiding, Jan Marsalek is allegedly actively managing FSB operations against European states.
kuschku 7 hours ago [-]
> It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding
I was an early wirecard customer, just using their prepaid debit cards, but I cancelled in 2017 because I didn't even trust them to keep a balance of 30€ safe.
Sorry, but anyone who didn't see that scam coming from 10 miles away was either gambling, complicit, or an idiot.
glenstein 17 hours ago [-]
Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both.
I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.
glub103011 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
baba_vanga 18 hours ago [-]
"And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator. And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today. Everybody has their own data center. And that's not gonna last. It makes no sense. You're gonna buy compute off the grid. That's AWS."
- Jeff Bezos
There are just 3 or 4 DDRAM manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron). They fully intend to make it impractical to purchase a server outside of the hyperscalers.
There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?
I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.
> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.
It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.
> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.
You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people forget that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
Lets go: https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
The vast majority of personal projects are not built by those receiving FAANG salaries.
If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.
Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.
They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.
Crazy stuff
For the exact same specs (CX23 vs VPS-1 2027), price is 6 vs 4.5 € and you can get a 15% discount on OVH if you order a full year.
So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability.
The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.
The peering announcement or did I miss something?
I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering).
Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.
1. https://sive.rs/ti
I have 5 app nodes, 2 background workers, 1 DB replica, and 4 dev/staging instances.
On new Hetzner US pricing:
5 x CCX23 (app nodes): $514.95/mo 2 x CCX13 (workers): $101.98/mo 1 x CCX23 (DB replica): $102.99/mo 4 x CX33 (dev/staging): $39.96/mo Total: ~$759/mo or $9,108/year
On 3HCloud with equivalent specs:
5 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $160/mo 2 x 8 GB 2 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 1 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 4 x 4 GB 2 vCPU shared: $24/mo Storage ~250 GB total (SSD smart): ~$7.50/mo Total: ~$255/mo or $3,066/year
I will let you do the math.
Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes.
They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the prices, lower demand and make even more money without additional risk.
That's what the post you're responding to was asking.
It is wrong to believe that a product's "correct" price is simply its cost plus a reasonable markup.
There's other factors that might limit how much a business can charge their customers. But an ideal business acts more like a monopoly and charges far far more than is 'fair'.
In theory competition keeps prices in check: in practice competition doesn't work as advertised.
Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized.
Hetzner keeps running the old machines as long as they can find customers for them, which means they have entire buildings of 10+ year old machines still running.
Yes? How else do you think it works? At scale, hardware breaks all the time and must therefore be replaced all the time.
This is true even at Hetzner's scale.
How long do you want to run something that uses 3x the electricity for the same level of performance when you're buying power by the megawatt? How about the even older ones that use 10x as much?
> The price adjustment applies to new orders and cloud instance rescales starting from 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST.
> For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I am surely/definitely happy that the price doesn't increase for me. If it increased for everyone, I'd expect a much smaller jump. Also I'm not sure how much flexibility they have to increase the price for everyone without notice, given that they are in EU.
It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this...
AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro.
Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner.
This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware.
The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers.
They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already.
Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers.
If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise.
Monthly costs have gone up as well. Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, construction has exploded far beyond inflation and, most importantly, electricity prices are still ridiculous due to merit-order and the refusal of splitting up Germany into multiple power pricing regions.
Guess what? I am paying as a consumer about the same price as before 2022. Did Hetzner change their price down? Remember, the industrial price also dropped (and they also build out a large solar plant). No ...
Ok, inflation? But those price increases already covered part of that... Just saying, its not been the first price increase that happened. There have been multiple ones that Hetzner did over the years. Some flew under people radars.
> Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany,
Yea, we have seen nothing of that increase... O, wait, they reduce our income because the social security increase their costs. Yay ..
So that's over 7.5x what it was when I (sadly) did not buy it. Totally not kicking myself for dragging my heels on that purchase...
Cheapest 2x48GB kit I can find here now is $1500, yay. That's 5200MHz CL48 stuff.
There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao
you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are:
A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity
B) raise prices by 100%
I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future.
So for every ~4GB of memory that you can produce in normal DDR5, you can only make 1GB of HBM. But you make multiple times the revenue.
The demand for HBM memory is not going to go away. LLMs are memory bandwidth hungry, and we are going to see production going to AI. But also to "lower end" like B200's.
That means, they are producing multiple times less memory (if we look for the normal market demand), but still need to produce more for the memory bandwidth hungry market.
We are seeing more products entering the "prosumer/business" market that are also memory bandwidth hungry. This demand will not go away. It will actually increase as companies move to more localized workloads. There is is a issue with data privacy that a lot of companies legally deal with.
The lacking ramp up is not a sign of them being scared of over production, its a realization that 3 companies hold the market in a strangle hold, and "slow" scale. If everybody plays friendly, they can milk this for years.
China is a solution but China does not have the HBM production levels, and will take years to scale and put a dent in the market. And China is ... allocating a lot to domestic production of AI > HBM ...
The reality is, that unless competition ( as in China ) does not start scaling beyond the expected levels, the big 3 have no reason to scale too fast.
And money is not the issue ... have you seen their revenue (and net profit!! ) numbers. A few billions is peanuts for them at this point. They simply do not want to scale too fast because that means less milking ... Memory demand is not going to away. When people talk about the AI bubble popping, its more in terms of the stock market. The product is here and not going away.
The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly.
(However, Hetzner did an earlier price increase 38 days ago. HN's submission logic sends posting the url to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066)
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944914
Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware.
This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase.
But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too
If I can get a same-spec EC2 instance at AWS for just 2x the price of a Hetzner box, I would never consider Hetzner. It had to be a "10x savings".
We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).
The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.
Old prices: https://web.archive.org/web/20260513201413/https://docs.hetz...
The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price?
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
(Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well)
EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax102-u/
Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...
https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#ram_from=256
Yeah mostly old CPUs, but considering RAM shortages gonna be much cheaper than colocation.
PS: link contains 256GB RAM filter since I guess OP need RAM.
Advertised prices for my setup are now roughly 2x what I'm currently paying.
That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while.
Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is.
For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
A couple of naive questions:
1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.
2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality.
How's that possible?
For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.
Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.
I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.
It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.
I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.
Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?
And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.
that is a 20T market
they dont need you to afford a subscription, they need your boss to replace you with their service
I've been using Hetzner for many years, both personally and for business use, and I've not seen any noticeable issues regarding the latency.
Granted, my use cases are webapps/backends that are not particularly latency sensitive, and are primarily used from a few European countries.
For what's worth, I've seen cases where download speeds from Hetzner are considerably higher than from AWS eu-central-1.
I have a few more or less idle VMs running at different providers, and keeping an eye on the european VPS market it seems that many struggled, while contabo is relatively stable. E.g. ovh at times limited the buying process to 1 instance (now it is at 5, not sure what was the default before) and also available locations were limited at one point a few weeks back.
The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.
If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)
Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234.
They'll probably wait for summer, the world cup finals, or whatever's last big US government thing is so it flies under the radar.
Americans:
I wonder if there are underlying component cost connections or just corporate politics and the cold hands of the profit-people.
And does the standardization mean that I can no longer buy extra hardware?
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/dedicated-se...
Those are some huge increases.
We are still around, enjoying fairly decent lifestyles for the most part, if you take away effect of politics, governance etc.
If not then it is only a matter of time before other providers are forced into similar price hikes.
I mean don't get me wrong, this for sure is a factor but like others said, other services don't see such drastic price hikes.
Edit: just noticed this is not retroactive. Still concerning looking forward.
But just like a low-interest rate mortgage, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for a long time, it seems.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
Only when the product is being given away for free or sold way below cost. It's still unclear how large the actual market is.
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.
I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.
Yes you absolutely can there are landlords that will rent you a crappy cheaper place that you can use to establish some identity chain within a month
Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.
But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.
Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?
It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).
I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?
Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.
As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.
They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.
Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Si...
Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.
But PP checks do happen in both cases.
The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.
People does still believe this shit?
Do you have statistics to back your assertions that disagree with this data?
Germany: https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol...
Total N = ~2.2M Germans = ~1.2M (~58%) Non-Germans = ~900k (~42%)
Population: Germans ~71M (~85%), foreign ~12M (~15%)
Per-capita, non-Germans show up ~2.8x more.
Approximate rates:
Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline) All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate) Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×) Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×) Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×) Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×) Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×) Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×)
---
Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same.
The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.
I was going to explain some of the others when I realized that in the context of this thread — namely comparing Europe to China in terms of ethnic diversity — these misleading statistics smell like a call to return to a ‘monocultural’ Europe. My grandparents have had pretty bad experiences with Germany’s last attempt at that; I therefore want to stress how dangerous it can be to present statistics like these as ‘neutral’.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_...
(edit: formatting)
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965
...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.
For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.
---
rate-limited, so:
> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
[1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week
(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
Your theory does not match reality.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?
Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.
Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.
I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.
And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
And then you’re fired.
This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Key factors for me:
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
/s
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.htm...
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.
It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.
So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.
Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.
Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.
Finding the right compromises is hard work.
You might want to read *A Market for Lemons".
There, fixed that for you.
Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.
And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.
RE marketing, highly recommend ublock origin and SponsorBlock if you don't have both yet.
But yeah we don't disagree. I don't mind investing time and effort into becoming an informed consumer. But I just wish I did not have to.
But wishful thinking is nearly done wasting my years and money. If it has to be done then it does get done.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
What’s your data source?
Keep in mind that the modern, mass middle class was created in the mid-20th century through government policies and post-WWII economic growth.
For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?
In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.
And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?
Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/real-estate-...
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
You just don't want that.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
;)
The next great American novels.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
https://www.netcup.com/en/server
CPX22 (2vCPU 4GB) seems to be the exact same price as Linode 4GB (24$/month).
Linode dashboard is really good.
big sigh of relief
So glad I got all I needed recently.
What's the next best option now?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307959
For example, their 'Regular Performance' cloud server tier has seen a 173% price increase.
I told ya about silent happiness…
It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp.
I built a homelab before the crisis started which might allow me to survive this for the next few years.
But man am I sad about folks trying to build new projects.
AX162 (256GB) went from €274 -> €844
If you just run some blogs, of course, this is not important.
If you have one product line where error will go undetected and another where it will be visible to the user (and result in returns) the manufacturer incentive is in the opposite direction as what you describe
Doubtful. With proper support, you get reports/counts per bitflip. Most people will swap out ram that has any detected bitflips or with a small number anyway. And if you have a significant number, the machine check interupts really kill perf anyway.
But why did the the CX33 only go up by €2 whereas the CPX32 went up by €21.50?
Both have 8GB of RAM, but the CPX32 has 80GB more storage and a bigger slice of CPU time.
You can see the same trend with CX23 vs CPX22.
In fact, CPX22 is now more than twice the price of CX23, despite having the same amount of disk and half the RAM.
Is there a CPU shortage now too?
Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end.
AI is great, but I think it got too big.
Just my thoughts, not backed by any data. I'm not even sure I'm right.
Outside of HN, this is all people are seeing. Gamers in particular aren't seeing a benefit. They are being priced out of their hobby. The recent DDLS 5 meme is what people think of when they hear AI.
But even pure software companies are hit by higher hardware prices. Their customers need to buy expensive hardware and have less budget left to spend on software.
I suspect this will soon follow and no fixed subscription model, which will enforce companies/developers to be moderate and thoughtful when using AI. Also I think Microsoft will do the same for copilot
Because the consumers won't upgrade to new hardware as fast as before. People who buy their first gaming PC in 2027 might even get a lower spec in average than people who bought in 2025. So new games might require even lower hardware specs than before, to sell enough copies.
A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long.
The last Hetzner box I leased I had to poll for availability as if I was Ebay auction sniping. It took me 2 days to acquire it.
Those aren't the only metrics, quality and efficiency is also important. AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average.
Is it? If by higher quality, you mean commenting properly, sticking to naming conventions etc. I can agree. But to me, AIslop looks like it lacks "intentionality" of code written by devs, no matter how bad they are at naming things and sticking to conventions.
i.e. people who are adequately good at their jobs usually do things for a reason, and they can explain it. Even if you don't find it agreeable, it usually is consistent.
Just remember we are comparing slops. If you care about your code it really doesn't matter if you write it manually or with the help of a glorified typewriter.
How did you come to that conclusion? That goes against everything I've heard from people who understand development. Every resource I can find about AI vs non-AI development comes to the exact opposite conclusion you did.
It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Given coding is only a small part of the developer's job, there's just nothing new to consume.
The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases.
Prices have increased for literally nothing.
Not fully true. AI is now often used to fix a lot of bugs in old and badly maintained software.
The quality of big and popular software probably decreased a bit, but the quality of niche products probably improved.
Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread.
The only thing that is clear is that measuring programming is just as impossible as it has always been. In all my years of projects they've either been resounding successes or gone down in flames. The difference between good and bad is a difference in kind. Most of the bad ones didn't even know what the hell they were building and built the wrong thing.
Like, the entire idea that some omniscient manager is looking at a thousand timelines and pondering over whether to pick the $11.5M successful one or the $9.5M successful one is literally laughable. Half of them are going to make the Hindenburg look like a bit of a whoopsie and the other half you would lock in sight unseen without a second thought.
Sorry, I meant 10-15% at most.
If it was by more than that then we'd see the effects in an obvious way. Since we don't those 15% are already generous.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers?
They are quite good at costs remaining predictable. However, a few years back they cut the low-end hosts 1Gbps unlimited data transfer down to a 20GiB/month cap, and wanted everyone to go full cloud/retard to fully leverage the hardware infrastructure.
If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not worth the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3
Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)
I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.
Indeed, never buy equipment unless all other choices were explored.
Note, we may be waiting till 2029 for GPU/ddr7/flash prices to fully normalize. =3
i'm currently using their hillsboro instances.
i'm not going to pay 3-4x more.
existing VPS will have the old price.
It get increased only if it is rescaled and for new VPSs.
but do you know any alternatives to Hetzner for US?
Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.
Having said that...
They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.
As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.
So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.
Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?
None of OVH, GCP, AWS, Azure wanted so much data about me, and I run my services in all of them successfully. Not in Hetzner.
Sorry Hetzner, you're too data-hungry. Nothing you say justifies that.
All of these price increases are going to get passed down to consumers eventually via increased prices.
2. Volatility creates uncertainty, which always increases cost. And we've seen extreme volatility in energy prices and tariffs under the current US administration.
But when Hetzner is priced like everyone else, it makes it harder to pick them over the giant AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean etc.
Tech is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts.
Then we'll be in a decade of drought again like 2001
Why? From what I understand, Ram production is not ramping up. Even if a bubble does pop, I don't think it's even guaranteed to drop to where it was.
Still - AI is a great achievement?
Raw number comparison for those interested: Tried to format it to be readable but its [Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change]
At that same time, I was reading about this story about WireCard. It was like Stripe for Europe and worth billions. Turns out it was run by a Russian spy network and was all a sham. That video alleged Germany’s bureaucracy is filled with Russian agents and this can be traced back to the East/West Berlin days.
To save a few bucks a month over DO didn’t seem worth it to me to send my passport to a foreign country.
Hetzner was widely recommended and I was more than happy to pay a premium for their supposedly-excellent service, but I guess they didn't want my money.
Oh well. Went with OVH instead, and haven't had any issues since.
They also don’t ask every person for the passport picture so maybe me using a custom DNS and VPN might’ve triggered something on their end.
I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference?
When I read about the WireCard scandal, the KYC stuff sent to them over the years is probably in the hands of foreign intelligence already. That’s what gave me pause.
Germany also has legal KYC requirements for web hosting and most other things relating to telecommunications.
This belief is deeply misguided. Do you understand that credit card transactions are used to provide access to your personal information?
Some companies even employ small token charges as identity verification processes. Payment systems such as MasterCard even explocitly offer identity verification services built around their payment system.
https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/cybersecurity-...
But a photo of your id card with your mobile camera is where you draw the line?
FWIW, if Hetzner had asked for my passport when I signed up, I would not have given it either.
I feel like the whole password thing was meant as a protection against SPAM or using servers for nefarious purposes as they know who's really behind every server.
Although, I can also see how real criminals would work around that easily by supplying fake identities. Sounds like one of those "why we can't have nice things". Well, at least the password I gave them 17 years ago has expired since.
Fuck no. I too decided to stick with DO.
Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport.
I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time.
After that experience (I've written about it multiple times in the past on HN), I really don't understand why people still defend DO.
I don’t “defend DO”, I just use it for now; but as someone whose opinion on DO is at least neutral-to-positive, it is that way because I have never experienced what you did nor even read about similar experiences before. Your experiences don’t automatically impact my opinions without any form of communication.
I was an early wirecard customer, just using their prepaid debit cards, but I cancelled in 2017 because I didn't even trust them to keep a balance of 30€ safe.
Sorry, but anyone who didn't see that scam coming from 10 miles away was either gambling, complicit, or an idiot.
I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.
- Jeff Bezos
There are just 3 or 4 DDRAM manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron). They fully intend to make it impractical to purchase a server outside of the hyperscalers.