True but this is probably because now they have much more demand as other competitors got to expensive and now people are going for the smaller ones even with low service levels
Right, instead of using a managed serverless platform where you pay a premium for proprietary cloud provided services to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers, you can… pay a premium for proprietary cloud-hosted AI engines to take away the overhead of managing and patching servers for you and let you just deploy containers.
That's what I'm doing for my personal stuff. It's all running on a pair of Raspberry Pi's. There's an automation in Codex to, once a week, run a ton of health checks, updates, make sure backups are running, etc., and let me know the outcome. Tailscale acting a little wonky? One quick prompt (from my phone! don't even need to sit down at the keyboard any more) and it's sorted out.
It's lowered the threshold for homelab style projects dramatically. It's not doing anything I couldn't have, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze before compared to, say, Pikapods. Now there basically is no squeeze, just juice.
Using AI to manage self-hosted servers is completely different from using AI to manage VPS servers.
VPSes are usually compared to full-service cloud hosting and especially to serverless offerings, with proponents usually claiming that the costs of self-management of a VPS are vastly less than the premium AWS or Google charge for providing managed compute.
I’m mostly pointing to the irony of eliminating the ‘advantage’ of a VPS (that you can self-manage it like a grown-up, you don’t need a cloud provider to babysit you) by outsourcing management to a stochastic sysadmin who charges by the keypress.
I don't think any VPS provider has come close to raising their prices this much. There's absolutely not enough people flocking to Hetzner to justify this.
That's all true, but this seems disproportionate even to the hardware market. They already raised their prices recently as hardware got more expensive, and now they are quadrupled. Maybe I am just misreading the hardware market right now.
If you see photos/videos of Hetzner datacenters, their servers are essentially plain, low-end motherboards (1G network, few slots) sitting on shelves (don't mean that as derogatory, it's an efficient design). What it does mean is that their per-server costs are absolutely dominated by the very components that are exploding in cost right now: RAM, SSDs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs.
OVH still seems cheaper here for smallest VPS (what's needed to host a personal website), especially when you consider that you have to pay your IPv4 1.7 € with Hetzner.
For the exact same specs (CX23 vs VPS-1 2027), price is 6 vs 4.5 € and you can get a 15% discount on OVH if you order a full year.