Hetzner is one of the go-to server providers for Fediverse instances, in part due to its cheap offerings while still providing high quality service. However, Hetzner has announced a price adjustment, which has increased the prices of some servers as much as 3-4 times the original. This kind of ruins the point in using Hetzner, as the main appeal was Hetzner’s cheap server prices.
Some of their servers haven’t increased an insane amount, for example, the CAX41 offering has gone from €31.49 monthly to €40.99 (30% increase). Others are much higher though; CPX41 has gone from €38.99 monthly to €120.49 (209% increase)!
To any Fediverse admins using Hetzner, how would you see this affecting your instance? Will you be migrating to a different service or sticking with Hetzner even with the price hike?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe existing servers will be grandfathered in to the old price point, so that will certainly buy some time to find a potential alternative.
I personally am using Hetzner for my Mbin instance, but the price increase doesn’t seem completely unreasonable for the specific server I am currently using. I do not see myself needing to rescale the server any time soon, so I should be able to keep the old price anyway.
Hacker news discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
Hetzner price adjustment table: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/
I left Hetzner after the price increase a couple of months ago, expecting that hike not to be the last.
Now I run my own hardware. It feels good to ‘own the means of federation’ and not rent it!
I think it would be nice to be able to completely self-host (on my own hardware), but I’ve always wondered what you are supposed to do about power/internet outages? It’s not frequent at all, but there will be a few days out of the year where power is completely out (due to a storm for instance). Similarly, internet gets a bit spotty after a heavy storm. Maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about 100% uptime too much though, as I am offering a free service. Still, if I can help it, I’d prefer people not to have a 5-day period when they can’t access the server at all.
Yeah it’s not great. I could have a PSU blow out any time and it’ll take me days to sort it out, probably. I have a spare server (these things are < $100 so why not) but getting it ready for prime time wouldn’t be quick either.
Anyway the resiliency of the fediverse is in the network - people can just use another instance for their fix of shitposts until their main comes back.
Hmmm. There is probably room for a client-based smooth switch-over here. That sort of thing would really make Lemmy more noob-friendly.
I’ve been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer… And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I’m completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can’t sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I’ll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they’re now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn’t too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I’m gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.
Power going out depends a lot on where you live. I can’t remember the last time I lost power at home (in NL), probably a decade ago? And it only lasted 30 minutes I think. Depending on how common it is and how long it tends to last it could be worth it to invest in a UPS or even a generator.
Internet going out is more common over here, which is easily mitigated with multiple uplinks and some kind of dynamic DNS if you feel that’s worth it.
How do you handle security of your home server? (like open ports etc)
That’s a secret. But the selfhost community has lots of advice, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/2146191/safely-exposing-services-to-the-internet
There was a big price increase a month or two ago that affected existing servers. I think this is recognizing that Hetzner just can’t acquire new servers (particularly memory) at anywhere close to what they could before. RAM prices are up about 400% in the past year and rising, and I think even server chassis and CPUs are being largely soaked up by the mesoscale datacenter builds.
Net net, this sucks. And my expectation is that Hetzner will still be the cheapest game in town by about the same percentages as before. It the costs keep going up, I think we will see the fediverse starting to struggle.
Between the absolute crush of bot registrations and the spiraling costs, I have been contemplating moving to a required donation for new accounts.
Or we could talk about how wildly inefficient Lemmy is.
A long-time mastodon contributor is shutting down their instance - https://vmst.io/@vmstan/116757564108266599
Small instances close down all the time but in this case it’s not just anyone’s instance.
This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform’s storage and CPU usage.
This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform’s storage and CPU usage.
We wish! Honestly this kind of stuff should be done in, like, C. Maybe in Fortran. Not in a “framework of the week” language.
The next shoe to drop will be when S3 object storage prices double or triple. That’ll really thin the herd.
For sure, there are a LOT of conventional services that only exist because of cheap storage.
Object storage at Hetzner already went up by a lot, but for us peons, who really cares? Object storage was always stupidly expensive and most of us have just used the local storage on our servers, or else the very cheap (but somewhat slow) Storage Box product for backup.
My instance runs on a dedicated server at hetzner, from their server auction. My price only increased like 3%, which is honestly lower than inflation given how many years we’ve been at that price point. So I’m completely fine with it. I’ve not heard of these enormous price hikes before.
Pretty much the same here. I have an old AX41-NVMe for applications (including mail server, mastodon and lemmy) and an even older one from the server auction for files (running Nextcloud with their storage boxes as the backend seems pretty fiddly). Both have increased around 3% so I’m fine.
They did send out emails with the new pricing a couple of months ago and I saw that some newer servers and especially cloud stuff get massively expensive, though.
I host on my own hardware. Hopefully said hardware will continue to last for a long time.
This also calls for more optimisation from the developers, meaning less use of resources on the hardware.
Kinda shocking what you can do with your own R720
I’m running my server on my own hardware, so all of my sevices will be fine
I have one of their auctioned servers, so the price increase was just three percent. Since the auctioned servers are all legacy hardware, I don’t expect any sharp price hikes in these.
Several admins had moved away from Hetzner because of some of their policies, so they impact may be smaller than expected
I’d be curious to know what those admins switched to (if you have any idea).
I don’t remember, it was a while back
You might be thinking of vultr
The prices for my servers basically increased by 30% I thought about consolidating my 3 VPSes in one big VPS for all 3 instances, but I have not gotten around to it, and I am not sure if I will actually go through with it…
They’ve hugely increased the prices for the higher priced virtual servers. Dedicated server prices have also gone up but not anywhere near as much. I’ve had a lower-end auction dedi for several years and it’s a few bucks more per month now than when I got it way before the shortages. In fact after I got it, prices of comparable servers dropped by quite a lot, though I didn’t bother migrating.
Fucked me. Their explanation was super reasonable, but I’m still hosed.
Mine lives on my shelf so… not?
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I switched from Hetzner to Netcup last year and took the yearly deal just before they increased prices as well, so I’m safe until 2026-12-09. After that, I’ll have to figure out what to switch to, if anything at all.
