Hetzner increased dedicated server prices 3-4x
A few months after raising prices ~30%, Hetzner has increased bare metal pricing again, this time by 3-4x:
AX102: €124 -> €454 AX162 (256GB): €244 -> €844
In this technical retrospective (2026), @enescakir shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 7 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 0 comments
New prices: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/ ↗
Old prices: https://web.archive.org/web/20260513201413/https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/ ↗
"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.
The new prices are here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/ ↗
(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 ↗)
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.
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?
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/dedicated-server-hardware/price-server-addons/ ↗