Hetzner Price Adjustment
In this technical retrospective (2022), @gmemstr 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 282 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 302 comments
While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling.
The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal) cost of cloud computing basically means that:
1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds.
2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next few years where we can expect energy prices to continue rising.
3) Building more power-efficient chips is a big deal, and I'm glad to see more general ARM deployment, given their efficiency gains.
Server pricing, potato pricing, I suppose every product has some energy component baked into the price. Probably more than I might even guess…
High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face.
Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods that households purchase.
New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
I have a bunch of servers in an apartment I use as a secondary office space. Monthly electricity cost increased by 230%. It’s like that since January. Hetzner’s 10% seems too low, although the increase is calculated on the total price of the server, so I guess it could be sufficient. I won’t be surprised if they further increase their prices in the near future.
Love Hetzner great to see a hosting company thats being upfront and transparent about its prices.
So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it like you will pay that month to month.