[rglullis]

I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud.

Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.

[hirako2000]

VPS business is very different than the "cloud" space.

Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different.

For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.

[rglullis]

Of course they are not in the hyperscaler space, but they are far from being "just" a VPS provider.

Their cloud always had on-demand, per-hour billing of servers and block storage volumes, all very easy to manage and provision via their API. Recently they got into object storage space. They even provide a switch to connect their cloud servers with a dedicated one, so you can have, e.g, a beefy GPU server running a LLM model and your web service auto running on the cheap.

I believe that the only thing that really holds Hetzner at their price levels is that the price-sensitive people can always threaten to move to OVH.

[hirako2000]

OVH or to hundreds of other less known infra providers.

The barrier to entry for these providers is simply, "low". So margins got to be low.

The thing that holds Hetzner and the likes is you can't purchase a package, follow the setup instructions to make cross disciplines engineering departments. It is no wonder Amazon, Google and Microsoft built a comprehensive cloud. They were in the engineering business.

It doesn't imply Hetzner aren't doing a stunning job at what they do or that running an infrastructure farm is a walk in the park.

[iruoy]

They did the calculations for Hetzner themselves and came to $4258.33/mo.

[rglullis]

They must be adding a ton of storage and/or memory to those servers, then.

[justinclift]

Hetzner does co-location as well, which would probably be even cheaper?