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/


How are you combatting the web crawlers / AI shitfest?
My small repos were getting smashed for a while. Was using cloudflare tunnels, have had to put up some barriers via cloudflare to curb the traffic. Probably will investigate some wifu defence but it’s just another thing to do.
Last 30 days images below.
My git isnt anything special, just mirrored from my Codeburg.
I block huge data-center cidr ranges. Whole cidr yes. Not a single ip. But tens of thousands, most like more in the millions of IPs by now.
Then I also have rate limits installed. So it block users when a threshold is reached in Angie/Nginx via fail2ban.
Finally, depending on your software. I know that Forgejo and gitea can block access or limit access for non-registered/logged-out users. So visitors can only view the repos and some files. But maybe not scrape all the git commit hashes etc.
The latter I would call server hardening.
But it first starts with decent logging and displaying the data. Easy to drill down or filter. This is needed to identify the source /sources of the bad actors.
These are the basics. Even before I consider cloudflare or Anubis.
Interesting on forgejo I’ll investigate as that’s the container I use.
Cloudflare was easy enough as I already use cloudflare tunnels to expose some internet facing services I run. But reducing the reliance on providers is something that I want to achieve.
Anubis still does a pretty good job
Yeah was thinking that will be the next step.