Hetzner is one of the go-to server providers for Fediverse instances, in part due to its cheap offerings while still providing high quality service. However, Hetzner has announced a price adjustment, which has increased the prices of some servers as much as 3-4 times the original. This kind of ruins the point in using Hetzner, as the main appeal was Hetzner’s cheap server prices.
Some of their servers haven’t increased an insane amount, for example, the CAX41 offering has gone from €31.49 monthly to €40.99 (30% increase). Others are much higher though; CPX41 has gone from €38.99 monthly to €120.49 (209% increase)!
To any Fediverse admins using Hetzner, how would you see this affecting your instance? Will you be migrating to a different service or sticking with Hetzner even with the price hike?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe existing servers will be grandfathered in to the old price point, so that will certainly buy some time to find a potential alternative.
I personally am using Hetzner for my Mbin instance, but the price increase doesn’t seem completely unreasonable for the specific server I am currently using. I do not see myself needing to rescale the server any time soon, so I should be able to keep the old price anyway.
Hacker news discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
Hetzner price adjustment table: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/
I think it would be nice to be able to completely self-host (on my own hardware), but I’ve always wondered what you are supposed to do about power/internet outages? It’s not frequent at all, but there will be a few days out of the year where power is completely out (due to a storm for instance). Similarly, internet gets a bit spotty after a heavy storm. Maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about 100% uptime too much though, as I am offering a free service. Still, if I can help it, I’d prefer people not to have a 5-day period when they can’t access the server at all.
I’ve been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer… And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I’m completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can’t sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I’ll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they’re now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn’t too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I’m gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.
Wrt dns there are better ways. Like auto updating a dns record that regulary checks what your public ip is. And then automatically update it. Services like ddns.
I myself also host everything at home. But since 3 years now I went to an official business account which allows me to have a static ipv4 and ipv6 ip address from my isp.
I have a business internet connection as well. I’m going to cancel it though, eventually. It’s a bit pricey. And they don’t do IPv6 for longterm customers, I just got my static IPv4 and that’s it.
Yeah, what I meant with DNS: I run a DNS Adblocker. And the big German ISPs do some silly DNS censoring, mostly for movie piracy websites. So I run my own DNS server. I had that configured on all my devices. Which is kind if great, I’ll get a good amount of ads and trackers blocked without any additional effort. But it’s a huge single point of failure. So now I have some services like DNS run on a VPS.
Yeah it’s not great. I could have a PSU blow out any time and it’ll take me days to sort it out, probably. I have a spare server (these things are < $100 so why not) but getting it ready for prime time wouldn’t be quick either.
Anyway the resiliency of the fediverse is in the network - people can just use another instance for their fix of shitposts until their main comes back.
Hmmm. There is probably room for a client-based smooth switch-over here. That sort of thing would really make Lemmy more noob-friendly.
Power going out depends a lot on where you live. I can’t remember the last time I lost power at home (in NL), probably a decade ago? And it only lasted 30 minutes I think. Depending on how common it is and how long it tends to last it could be worth it to invest in a UPS or even a generator.
Internet going out is more common over here, which is easily mitigated with multiple uplinks and some kind of dynamic DNS if you feel that’s worth it.
I run servers since 2007 in the Netherlands. Back in the days we had way more outages then today.
Today it was mainly planned outages of people working on the infrastructure. I still need to buy a UPS. But even without it it’s fine here (Tiel, Gelderland).
I’m hosting mbin and tons of other services and websites at home.
(hoi)
Honest it’s fine here. Even without ups. But you can buy a ups to avoid short term downages.