Picture your neighbourhood.
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Picture your neighbourhood. Your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers. Your local community. The local shops that feed all of you.
Your neighbourhood relies on a simple balance. How much each household consumes can be predicted with reasonable accuracy.
Which means that supplies in malls and local shops can be programmed to match demand, and, unless there are major external disruptive events in the supply chain, prices can be reasonably stable.
Now imagine that a greedy and very wealthy family moves in your neighbourhood.
They soon start consuming more than half of the supplies in your local stores. They drive to malls with trucks and vans and load all the bread, fruit and vegetables that they can put their hands on. They start disrupting supply chains and drive prices up.
This is exactly what's currently happening in the hardware world.
Demand for RAM to run fast #AI models is so high that prices have gone up 500% from September 2025.
Hosting companies so far have tried to absorb the shocks, but if prices keep high for so long at some point they have no option but to pass those higher costs to the consumers.
#Hetzner has now joined a long list of other companies that have been affected by this.
Prices for hosted servers are up by +30%, and +3% for auctioned servers (and now I feel lucky that mine is an auctioned server).
This impacts the ability of people to self-host their own services, and, since many Fediverse instances run on Hetzner too, it may mean a big impact on the Fediverse as a whole too.
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Picture your neighbourhood. Your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers. Your local community. The local shops that feed all of you.
Your neighbourhood relies on a simple balance. How much each household consumes can be predicted with reasonable accuracy.
Which means that supplies in malls and local shops can be programmed to match demand, and, unless there are major external disruptive events in the supply chain, prices can be reasonably stable.
Now imagine that a greedy and very wealthy family moves in your neighbourhood.
They soon start consuming more than half of the supplies in your local stores. They drive to malls with trucks and vans and load all the bread, fruit and vegetables that they can put their hands on. They start disrupting supply chains and drive prices up.
This is exactly what's currently happening in the hardware world.
Demand for RAM to run fast #AI models is so high that prices have gone up 500% from September 2025.
Hosting companies so far have tried to absorb the shocks, but if prices keep high for so long at some point they have no option but to pass those higher costs to the consumers.
#Hetzner has now joined a long list of other companies that have been affected by this.
Prices for hosted servers are up by +30%, and +3% for auctioned servers (and now I feel lucky that mine is an auctioned server).
This impacts the ability of people to self-host their own services, and, since many Fediverse instances run on Hetzner too, it may mean a big impact on the Fediverse as a whole too.
@fabio @janriemer Back in my day “Selfhost” meant running an old/secondhand pc in the basement.
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@fabio @janriemer Back in my day “Selfhost” meant running an old/secondhand pc in the basement.
@lil5@social.last.nl @janriemer@floss.social same here. Started with my uncle's Pentium 1 running Slackware installed from floppy disks and running a LAMP stack under my bed. But nowadays I guess that the definition is more flexible and there's a wider spectrum. Sometimes I also involuntarily converge on the wider definition - "if I've got a shell on a box and I can install whatever I want then I'm self-hosting"
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
