[voidwtf]

Real estate.

There is a constant battle to increase performance per watt and increase density. Think of it like performance per watt per sqft. Once the hardware improves significantly enough you’re losing money by not putting new hardware in that space utilizing that same power.

To make an extreme out of it, imagine an entire datacenter full of pentium 4 powered servers. Which could be replace by a single 42u rack. Nobody would want to pay what the electricity would even cost to run those servers.

Often times the oldest hardware running in data centers is hardware that has been running the same workload from the same customer for a decade.

[justsomehnguy]

> entire datacenter full of pentium 4 powered servers

> Which could be replace by a single 42u rack

Way, way less. A couple of nodes on EPYC with 2TB RAM already would have more capacity than that.

[ijnnndi]

While you are correct, this is not what Hetzner said. If the highest cost in the TOC would be acquisition an not floor space over time, then OP would be right

[voidwtf]

having worked in this industry previously, i can confidently say that hardware has a lifecycle. towards the end of that lifecycle the hardware is no longer affordable to even have powered on.

if the server costs $46 a month to have racked up and powered on, and is less powerful than a $15 vps we’re offering in the same location then what sense does it make to continue offering that server?