Hetzner policy changes, regret?
Timing is everything. One month ago, we moved to Hetzner for our core infrastructure. Days later, Hetzner announced what was received by the tech space as a big change. There’s a whole Hacker News thread on it. Some folks asked me if this made me regret changing to Hetzner or commented that I probably regret the move. Well, let me tell you about the changes, then I’ll share my thoughts.
What changed
Hetzner was including 20 TB of traffic with each of their virtual machines. The change is to reduce that to 1 TB for the most base machine and then level it up as you increase your server size. Something like:
Bandwidth included = 1 TB * #CPUs / 2, rounded up
Additionally, they raised the price by about 20% for servers.
Is this a big deal? I guess it depends who you ask. A lot of people on the Hacker News thread were talking about how they had been taking advantage of this extremely plentiful bandwidth and running effectively free CDNs and other types of systems on top of Hetzner. It sounds like maybe those people are now going to look somewhere else.
But that’s not us here at Talk Python. We’re running web apps with much more normal usage. For example, we’re using a CPX41 server (8 CPU, 16 GB RAM). That gives us 4 TB of included bandwidth per month. Even with that lower limit, we still use less than or around 1 TB a month (25% of the allowance). This is primarily because all of our large content is served over a CDN. This is not to save money, but to make our apps faster and the experience better for our users around the world.
How has it affected us?
Our prices skyrocket from € 24.70 / month to € 29.99 / month for our server.
I’m being facetious, of course. But this controversial change means that we pay about five euros more per month. So no, it doesn’t really affect us. And it probably won’t affect you either. Hetzner is still an insanely better deal than a lot of the other options I’ve compared in the article about choosing Hetzner.
If this change is what’s needed to keep Hetzner healthy and successful in the US, I’m fine with it. I just paid last month’s invoice for all the services we’re using. The month prior at Digital Ocean it was $143. This month at Hetzner, it totaled €30.75 ($32.54 USD). Acceptable.