This is starting to feel a bit like universal paperclips to me, and we are on the verge of the next stage of industrialisation multiplication.

I guess its either quantum computing or the hypnodrones which will get us out of this mess one way or another...

The ones I'm affected by seemingly:

  Product -> previous price -> New price as of 1 April 2026
  EX42-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.65 -> € 51.13
  AX41 (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.22
  AX41-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.18
  Server Auction -> € 65.22 -> € 67.18

Here is the full list of the updated prices: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

Seems it's because of increased cost of hardware, and they seemingly tried to avoid increasing the prices but they couldn't. From the email:

> The underlying causes of the increased costs are, among others, the exploding demand for AI-related computing power and for cloud services. In addition, raw material prices and production costs have also generally risen for manufacturers. The costs for RAM and SSDs especially have risen by a large amount. For example, the cost for DRAM memory has increased up to 500% since September 2025. And according to market researchers like TrendForce, this price trend will continue throughout the year.

> We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.

In EU there are: Hetzner, OVH and Seeweb.

* Cloud (VMs): 38%

* Bare metal: 15%

* Memory add-on for bare metal: 575% (effective immediately)

It feels like memory add-on is intentionally set high to discourage customers from adding more memory.

AX102 (128 GB RAM) costs €124, AX162 (256 GB RAM) costs €244, but the 128 GB memory add-on alone costs €264. If we ignore the setup fee, it’s more cost-effective to provision additional servers instead of adding RAM to bare metal instances.

Here's the link to cloud and bare metal pricing changes: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

"Hard drives already sold out for this year" - https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ai_blamed_again_as_ha...

Time for an AI tax on the hyperscalers.

The worst counter example of this was Mercedes sending me an email saying "the terms and conditions have been updated, please read them at this link". It linked to the 52 page document I was supposed to read through in its entirety and manually diff against previous! Good thing they started adding a change log in the emails after some customer push back.

The 1 GB RAM replaces one Forgejo runner that was in Hetzner. With €5 per month, I will earn this investment back in less than two years. After the price increase, this period will only shorten!

I also wrote about this at https://huijzer.xyz/posts/148/raspberry-pi-as-forgejo-runner

I wonder how many of Hetzner's customers are like me. I hope DRAM doesn't kill off cheap VPS providers like this one.

What concerns me more than the price hike itself is the trend. Memory prices spiking, hard drives selling out, and now this. If you're running anything with serious storage or RAM needs, it's worth locking in what you can now. I grabbed an extra auction server last month just because the specs were good and I figured prices were only going up.

For anyone panicking about alternatives: OVH and Netcup are decent in Europe but have their own tradeoffs. OVH's network has been flaky for me, and Netcup's support is basically nonexistent. Hetzner's support has been solid every time I've needed it, which is worth something.

It's all a bit barebones and primitive but I don't mind. I spent yesterday tweaking some ansible scripts with codex to setup stuff like bastion hosts and nat networking. I expect I have most of the rest ready in a few days.

The benefits of having an uncomplicated docker compose and boring tech stack. No microservices. Just a monolith.

One issue that I don't have a solution for yet is disk encryption and encrypted bucket content. Probably solvable but not natively supported. Might trigger compliance issues with some of our customers.

Is there any collocation space from which you can actually buy and own a physical machine without going there, and pay only the rent and traffic? I miss calling a server "mine".

OpenAI can't keep losing investor money forever with nothing to show for, at some point the first domino will fall, then the rest of the industry will go too from investor panic.

Even if you have an unbelievable PUE of 1.00, you are still affected by the energy cost increases. There's no running from that.

Edit: I misremembered the PUE formula. This comment has been edited to correct my mistake.

Used to be every VPS refresh cycle you'd get more server for less money. This is miserable

What happens when an unstoppable force (building everything in Electron because hardware is cheap) meets an immovable object (oh no hardware is expensive now)?

> It feels like memory add-on is intentionally set very high to discourage customers from adding more memory.

Memory prices are so stupid now that 575% is pretty close to their actual costs.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

DDR5-6000 2x32GB: ~$200 -> ~$1000

I don’t see this anywhere, source?

At least where I live there’s a stupid amount of red tape for these things.

If you just want to pilot a 747, drive your car really fast at a skate ramp.

My ISP has a static IP option for £5/month, but I reckon I can save £30/month+ on server costs even before any rises.

Ofc it does mean I have to do my own sysadmining, but a combination of my general knowledge + an LLM should make that relatively easy.

Like the purchase price + increased cost? The thing is that these parties are sitting on billions and billions of investor money, they don't care that hardware is 400x as expensive. Which companies like nvidia have capitalized on a few years ago, they were already able to price their hardware at a 400% markup compared to pre-crypto times, and shift their focus from consumer graphics chips to datacenter compute chips, causing their revenue to go up 6x (if my interpretation of [0] is correct)

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/revenu...