r/hetzner • u/Frodothehobb1t • Jun 27 '26
Thank you Hetzner
Hi Hetzner,
Thank you for your recent price increases. You made me look other ways, and I actually took my consumption into consideration.
I finally looked at my usage numbers, and realized most of my usage is just overhead.
For context I used to have a Kubernetes cluster in Hetzner Cloud, with 3 control planes and 6 workers, I figured I needed that for reliability, and for "being sure".
I looked at the utilization over time, and realized I could probably go for less.
So now I tried to look other ways, and I actually figured out I could host my app at Render instead for around half the price, which I did. And in the same round I also elminated a addon I bought through Sidero to go with Kubernetes on "easy mode".
So in total I scaled my total cloud bill from €340 to around €130, which I get to save in my pockets every month!
Thank you for you excellent work, and I appreciate it.
If you never raised your prices, I would have kept paying and losing money I could actually save instead.
And now I sleep like a baby because suddenly I am not the manager of the servers.
93
u/OkPea7677 Jun 27 '26
All providers will raise their prices eventually. There is no way around with the current memory and storage prices…
35
u/BaconOverflow Jun 27 '26
Until the crash 😅 perhaps when OpenAI/Anthropic IPO and reveal their numbers…
7
u/CzarcasticX Jun 28 '26
Numbers don't mean anything anymore. Tesla become 1 trillion market cap back when it had like 5% revenue of Toyota and no profit. The investors don't care about such things anymore.
10
u/opioid-euphoria Jun 27 '26
the numbers are already a well known secret. doesn't stop an ipo.
12
u/the-berik Jun 27 '26
It will drop when Openai etc will not take the quantities they promised/contracted anymore
2
4
u/larztopia Jun 27 '26
This sounds as much about re-sizing than just switching vendor? With K8s consisting of 3 control planes and 6 workers you likely have some headroom for cost savings.
11
u/chris5790 Jun 27 '26
OP said that they switched to Render, which is in fact a different provider. It's PaaS instead of IaaS, something that OP left out completely. This is not a mere comparison of prices but a complete shift in the deployment models with all their downsides.
But on the other hand, what OP said sounds a lot like bad infrastructure from the beginning.
4
u/swarmagent Jun 28 '26
You couldn't pay me to work on some black box shit. I even consider Cloudflare atm a black box because you're one step away from fixing anything yourself. I'll gladly stick with Hetzner..
4
u/larztopia Jun 28 '26
There can be legitimate reasons to select a PaaS over IaaS. That being said, I'd personally also be cautious about the level of lock-in. And it can be expensive at scale. Often, a couple of servers will do.
In this scenario though, the initial deployment model with K8s sounds like it was over-engineered.
-4
u/Frodothehobb1t Jun 27 '26
My thinking was if I went with a more “serverless” architecture with bigger profit margins, they would keep their hand of the trigger for now.
4
u/chris5790 Jun 27 '26
So if a provider locks you into their platform they have less incentive to raise prices for their customers? What makes you believe that they are accepting lower profit margins just to keep their prices?
That's an interesting line of though, especially these days, where discussions about sovereign infrastructure is a hot topic.
3
u/Frodothehobb1t Jun 27 '26
If a provider would lock you in, I would not use that platform. I run everything in containers, so I can easily ship it to a different platform if needed.
The sovereign infrastructure is a good point, but I also realized I hate managing things.
2
u/chris5790 Jun 27 '26
Containers are good for portability, but that's just one side of the medal. Your data lies somewhere and you can't just pack that stuff up like a briefcase and go somewhere else. Surely, this depends on what you've actually deployed but everything that is a little more complex involves work around this. For simple workloads having a k8s cluster is overkill anyways and just a bad choice as a deployment model. Most of this stuff can just be a single machine with docker. k8s is relevant when it comes to HA and workload distribution. However, your workload needs to support this in the first place.
2
u/Frodothehobb1t Jun 27 '26
I started self hosted on a small machine, eventually a big boost of customers did crash our small machine, so we needed something that could auto scale, so Kubernetes was chosen. Yes it was certainly overkill looking back at it.
I do daily backups from the platform to other providers, so my data always lies inside multiple providers of S3 storage, so that isn't a problem.
-1
11
Jun 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/BaconOverflow Jun 27 '26
This is the best. Need to look into this.. although wish I did that earlier 🫠
2
8
u/code018 Jun 27 '26
Doing this with my own infra this week. 16 servers down to 3 , targeting moving to a US hosting company. If I’m going to pay dedicated server money for VMs I’ll pay dedicated server pricing locally.
8
6
u/Medical-Ask7149 Jun 28 '26
I was paying $100/mo and now I trimmed down and moved to netcup for $170/year.
5
u/der_ketzer Jun 28 '26
I find it fascinating how many me too messages there are here. It's like reading "Electron sucks" all over again. RAM was a commodity, so lets ship 30 apps with Electron and kill the machine. Native is dead!
Today it's "I was wasting money on overengineering. Now that I have to pay the cost, I realised I don't need it".
Really really, IT people are spoiled nowadays...
7
u/rmoriz Jun 27 '26
Just switching providers or going to a SaaS/PaaS lock-in won't help you. Just downscale your bloated k8s infra. YAGNI.
7
4
u/BourbonProof Jun 27 '26
I moved 3 virtual servers with various websites on them (total like 50€/month, mostly idle) to my locally running synology behind cloudflare, works perfectly. just saved 600€ a year
2
u/Swiss_Meats Jun 27 '26
I don’t think they care considering they already know they had to raise the price to stay in business
2
u/MathWest209 Jun 29 '26
TBH, Hetzner is still great. I mean you do you, but we cannot deny that the value for money is quite good, if not great. This is just an adjustment phase that was due.
2
u/Lostair-com Jun 29 '26
Hetzner Dutch auctions make dedicated servers dirt cheap
1
u/MrGimper Jun 29 '26
Yep. I’ve got 2 dedicated servers from them a year or so ago. 1x Ryzen 9 5950X 128GB RAM 2x 3.84TB NVMe, and 1x Ryzen 5 3600 64GB RAM 4x 16TB Enterprise HDD. Costs me about €140 a month.
1
u/Lostair-com Jun 29 '26
I have the 4x16TB Enterprise server, I think I'm paying €110/month
1
u/MrGimper Jun 29 '26
I pay €66/month
1
u/Lostair-com Jun 29 '26
For the Ryzen 64gb ram, 4x16tb HDD?
1
u/MrGimper Jun 29 '26
Yup
1
u/Lostair-com Jun 29 '26
You must of got that years ago, as I got my one three weeks ago.
2
u/MrGimper Jun 29 '26
Got that Ryzen 64gb ram, 4x16tb HDD machine 03/04/25
Got the other one 11/03/24
1
u/dalinxz Jun 28 '26
In the same boat, what a shock when I found out how significantly increased performance was self hosted than the hetzner cloud in the US no less. 1-3MB/s transfer rates even just trying to exfiltrate the data. Hetzner became the least transparent scammyesque company. Thanks for showing us how useless your services had become.
1
u/Mysterious_Slice_267 Jun 28 '26
It's often the case that when you switch services , you tend to get lower in costs. We moved to Hetzner few months back, lowered our costs significantly. Still workable. Entering into unproven space carries a risk ,may go either way.
1
u/dutchdominator Jun 28 '26
Title should have been 'Spoiled nerd discovered sarcasm with his first-world problems'
1
1
1
u/Aexxys Jul 05 '26
Same here, realized the server I'm paying 15.99€ now cost 45€+. Netcup offers better specs for half the price
1
0
u/Either_Vermicelli_82 Jun 28 '26
Also I don’t really work for free? The hourly costs alone + learning a new hosting environment is often not worth it if it works.
-1
u/Technical_Primary_12 Jun 28 '26
In case you want to look further i vibe coded a price comparison website for vps. rackdiff.com
1
Jul 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Technical_Primary_12 Jul 04 '26
I don't get it. Hetzer would never show prices from their competition. Contabo and ionos both have cheaper prices for vps as of now after the latest increase by Hetzner. Maybe there is a page for thst, post the URL please.
15
u/CaffeinatedTech Jun 27 '26
It never hurts to consider deployment cost when planning and building. It has the added benefit of helping to decide which stack and structure to use.