"Unfortunately, energy prices in Germany have been increasing dramatically, and electricity plays a big role in the operating costs for servers. We have always calculated the prices for the Server Auction to be as low as possible. The current prices for many Server Auction servers do not cover the increasing operating costs."<p>In my case, server price is going from €26 to €35, a 35% increase(!!!). Still cheap for what I'm getting but quite a price hike, new pricing starts in March in my case.<p>Received via email, no article on their website yet.
Hetzner is a wonderful provider, and as transparent as possible, with exceptional prices/value.<p>I've recently decided to stop renting a machine - I've had 3 server auction machines across 10 years - with 2x3TB enterprise (internal ecc protected) HDD, Xeon, 16GB ECC RAM, etc. The hw is aging, the disks were reasonably new, and it all just works, for practically pennies compared to cloud providers (no IO, no internal bw cost, fully dedicated CPUs, and so on). My reason to leave it was lack of need; I decided to move my backups and archives offline and my services to a tiny home "server".
In a few minutes of Googling, I can't seem to find a decent time series of average German electricity prices (€ct/kWh) by month. What has the increase been? [1] reports 54% (!!!) increase since 2020. Why?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/euro-zone-consumers-shock-power-bills-soar-2022-01-18/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/euro-zone-consumers-...</a>
I've started a thread on twitter about this: <a href="https://twitter.com/vikgl/status/1484500546358845442" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vikgl/status/1484500546358845442</a><p>and somebody from Hetzner decided to answer some of my questions. One of which is mind-blowing: apparently they are going to re-adjust the prices once the electricity prices go down: <a href="https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/1484522103521124354" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/148452210352112435...</a><p>I wonder why this wasn't at all mentioned in their initial email... note i don't remember signing a contract for hosting where the price is dynamically calculated on commodity prices...
My monthly electricity bill went up by ~29%, so sounds about right. In fact, my electricity provider raised everyone's rate, even those with a contract, but giving an option to leave and find another provider, and shortly thereafter went bankrupt.
>In my case, server price is going from €26 to €35, a 35% increase(!!!). Still cheap for what I'm getting but quite a price hike, new pricing starts in March in my case.<p>I'm going to convert to USD for a minute (since I'm in the US) ... that's a price jump from ~$29.50 to ~$40. Or less than two trips through a drive through of a [cheap] value meal at a fast food place (maybe <i>one</i> trip through some places).
It's crazy, some energy providers like EWS Schönau (<a href="https://www.ews-schoenau.de/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ews-schoenau.de/</a>) don't even take new customers currently because of the volatility in the energy market.
Same in a small German regional hosting provider where I have a server: price costs raised so much that they have stopped taking in new customers for now, and will have to increase the prices for 2023 for “15 to 40 Euro net per month, depending on server contract”.
I’m going from 20.99 to 29.00. 38% up.<p>Like, energy prices over the past year have gone up from €20 per MWh to €120 per MWh, so I sort of get it, but still.<p>Who would have thought the cost of the hardware would be irrelevant compared to the cost of the energy (or hell, the IPv4 address space)
What is crazy is, with the increased cost of my two 32gb servers, it is now a better deal to drop those and replace them with a single, new, 64gb server with new hardware (compared to the two old robot servers). All because of energy costs o_O
Looking at Twitter seeing a few people cancel. I'm really curious to see what fallout there will be from this. Will it not really impact Hetzner or will it be a major segment.<p>I previously had a server with Hetzner a few years ago despite being from Canada. The main reason I picked them was their pricing over other competitors.
I've been able to get cheaper and cheaper servers every few years since 2012, each with better CPU and RAM than the previous. This is the first time in that decade I see a price increase. Only +4% in my case, for my fairly cheap machine.<p>What type of server do you have?
Latvia, not far from Germany.. you may want to read this: <a href="https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/bizness/biznesa_vide/2021-gads-latvija-iezimejies-ar-elektroenergijas-cenu-kapuma-rekordiem.d?id=53976060&_x_tr_sl=lv&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp" rel="nofollow">https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/bizness/biznesa_vide/202...</a><p>Tldr: 2021 avg electricity price 88,78 EUR/MWh, 2,6x higher than 2020. December 2021 had highest avg price: 206,40 EUR/MWh (January had ~50+ EUR/MWh), with peak price for 1 hour: 1000,07 EUR/MWh
I got one too, only for one of my two servers though:<p><pre><code> The monthly prices will change for the following servers you use:
Server name new price old price Starting on
SB42 #xxxxxx 43.20 Euro 40.31 Euro 2022-03-15
</code></pre>
Doesn't seem so bad to me.