Hetzner announcement: Price changes for servers ordered via the Server Auction
"Unfortunately, energy prices in Germany have been increasing dramatically, and electricity plays a big role in the operating costs for servers. We have always calculated the prices for the Server Auction to be as low as possible. The current prices for many Server Auction servers do not cover the increasing operating costs."
In my case, server price is going from €26 to €35, a 35% increase(!!!). Still cheap for what I'm getting but quite a price hike, new pricing starts in March in my case.
Received via email, no article on their website yet.
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I've started a thread on twitter about this: https://twitter.com/vikgl/status/1484500546358845442 ↗
and somebody from Hetzner decided to answer some of my questions. One of which is mind-blowing: apparently they are going to re-adjust the prices once the electricity prices go down: https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/1484522103521124354 ↗
I wonder why this wasn't at all mentioned in their initial email... note i don't remember signing a contract for hosting where the price is dynamically calculated on commodity prices...
Latvia, not far from Germany.. you may want to read this: https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/bizness/biznesa_vide/2021-gads-latvija-iezimejies-ar-elektroenergijas-cenu-kapuma-rekordiem.d?id=53976060&_x_tr_sl=lv&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp ↗
Tldr: 2021 avg electricity price 88,78 EUR/MWh, 2,6x higher than 2020. December 2021 had highest avg price: 206,40 EUR/MWh (January had ~50+ EUR/MWh), with peak price for 1 hour: 1000,07 EUR/MWh
Hetzner is a wonderful provider, and as transparent as possible, with exceptional prices/value.
I've recently decided to stop renting a machine - I've had 3 server auction machines across 10 years - with 2x3TB enterprise (internal ecc protected) HDD, Xeon, 16GB ECC RAM, etc. The hw is aging, the disks were reasonably new, and it all just works, for practically pennies compared to cloud providers (no IO, no internal bw cost, fully dedicated CPUs, and so on). My reason to leave it was lack of need; I decided to move my backups and archives offline and my services to a tiny home "server".
In a few minutes of Googling, I can't seem to find a decent time series of average German electricity prices (€ct/kWh) by month. What has the increase been? [1] reports 54% (!!!) increase since 2020. Why?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/euro-zone-consumers-shock-power-bills-soar-2022-01-18/ ↗
I'm going to convert to USD for a minute (since I'm in the US) ... that's a price jump from ~$29.50 to ~$40. Or less than two trips through a drive through of a [cheap] value meal at a fast food place (maybe one trip through some places).