Adriano

I've been a big fan of Hetzner, but their price increases don't make much sense.

I'd love to see a better explanation for why prices are increasing _so much_ while bandwidth is decreasing so low.

https://adriano.fyi/posts/hetzner-raises-prices-while-significantly-lowering-bandwidth-in-us

Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US)

Hetzner raises prices This morning I received an email from Hetzner stating that they are raising prices in the US while significantly reducing bandwidth. The largest price percentage increase is 27.52% for CPX21 servers, and the smallest is 4.17% for CX3+ servers. Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average, across all products, 88.19% from previous allotments. I’ve been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they’ve made a feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of “fairness”.

Adriano Caloiaro's personal blog
Nov 28, 2024 at 4:23pmWeb
Show threadAdrianoNov 28, 2024

> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. The new prices will give our customers the best possible price for the resources they use.

This line is pretty comical. "Good" users have been subsidizing "bad" users, so to make it more fair, we'll charge both the good and bad customers much more in exchange for much, much less. Mission accomplished!

Show threadGeoff BeierNov 29, 2024

@adriano Yeah, I was pretty disappointed to see this. My bandwidth usage was like yours.

It won't make me hurry to move anything I've got on Hetzner to a different host, but it might make me spend more time seeing what's out there next time I need to spin up a new VPS.

Show threadAdrianoNov 29, 2024

@petard I won't be moving anything immediately either. The pricing was and still is pretty decent.

What got under my skin was Hetzner calling the change one of fairness. They appear to pretend not to see the incongruence in telling light bandwidth users they've been subsidizing heavy users while simultaneously telling them they also have to pay more for what they already use very little of. If it was about fairness, only the bandwidth allotments would have changed, affecting only heavy users.

Show threadGeoff BeierNov 29, 2024

@adriano I very much agree on both fronts.

The letter did inspire a thought experiment. (**Only** a thought experiment, because the kinds of things I use the VPS for just don't use very much bandwidth at all.)

I've been working on automated setup of VPS with their API and Ansible, and have been playing with some silly stats monitoring.

Mightn't it be interesting, when my VPS reaches X% of its included quota for data transfer, to spin up a new VPS, point my DNS to the new VPS, wait for my DNS TTL to expire, then delete the old VPS? I wonder how that would interact with the quota.

I certainly won't bother, but my recent experiments with automation of DNS, provisioning, and deployment made me think about it and wonder while I was processing this price increase.

Show threadJonas ZürcherDec 1, 2024
@adriano I think the new pricing is absolutely fair. What more could we want than fair pricing when compared to other customers around the world?