>When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases

You said you are on older infra? So why did they increase your costs 1.25x?

That old hardware has long depreciated and paid itself back many times over and you run a higher risk of an outage due to components wearing out over time.

You should be asking for a discount!

Certain things went up more severely than others. CPX VMs went up by close to 3x, for example, whereas CX VMs didn't. Which is strange, because the justification they gave was about RAM/Disk prices, not CPU.

My frugality had made me found cheaper options than Hetzner (at the cost of my sanity /jk)

But, hetzner was a really solid deal especially for larger specs, literally nothing could compete with it as I used to make literal lists of providers in my head that can compete against Hetzner/ovhcloud and there were none. They were so good, too good in fact and I had actually felt like they were so giant that they would be able to survive the ramflation and it would be the small shops who would be hurt the most but turns out that although yes small shops are hurt, even the largest of giants like Hetzner couldn't resist the Ramflation and were (forced?) for price increase whereas incredibly I have found small shops to still somehow be more resistant/competitive than the larger beasts.

Pardon me if I am wrong, which I usually am, but aren't there price differences between pre-existing customers and new customers as well, atleast if I am remembering it correctly.

@AussieWog93's comments also make sense in terms of somethings going up by 3x. There seems to be a general consensus online from my limited understanding that some if not many products have increased their prices quite substantially.

I understand that and I am not denying that but it would be now unfair to say that Hetzner belongs in its own category as there are now other alternatives who do compete with Hetzner in its pricing, who also I suppose weren't able to magically buy cheap hardware but I suppose some of them might've lucked out with good deals beforehand and spare-capacity.

Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.

I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.

OVH is one

If you want very small servers: either get a 7$/yr vps or (upcloud if all you want is 1gb ram/1core esq server for very lightweight purposes)

The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:

if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.

If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.

Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.

Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io

I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/11$ yr servers respectively as I am idling them. You might be amazed by what 7$ servers can achieve as I usually code in golang/rust which work extremely good, I also host my own mail server on Tnahosting as it has port 25 enabled (though I do this just for fun) and in my lifetime, I also had a Netcup vps for 10$ for 3 months which had 8gb ram and 4 cores and 500 gb HDD.

I use cloudflare tunnels in front of my vps to prevent DDOS, not that my website has a lot of traffic anyway and have previously made custom scripts to manage it easier and I sometimes use zed and zed's remote server to connect to my server especially when I was on my netcup server and I also use micro-editor quite frequently on my vps's.

Oh can't forget xhosts.uk if you want UK vps's. I really feel like they are a good host and I have said their story on HN earlier as well but they sadly had some disabilities but instead of taking the disability check, they wanted to earn and make their own way and so have operated a vps servers because they like doing this. I really have a lot of respect for them.

"instead of taking the easy option and claim all kinds of money from the government for my disabilities I work as much as I can and hope I strike it lucky with the right customers one day."

This is a comment that they had written with me in personal discussions.

Ethernet servers is a good provider if you want port 25 access/mail access from what I've heard about them as they don't usually allow it. Skrime.eu can fit in some of my criterias as well. H4F.net(Riyad) is a respected provider as well.

Advinserver is good as well as they provide the stats of all servers so you can find the amount of steal and other factors and I have heard some people say some good things about them.

Hosting is one of the few businesses which is cooperative and competitive between many of these players and especially on the lower side of things run much on goodwill. There are always some cases of complaints but its a comfy space. You can almost find a specific host which can be best for your use case and it can be worth finding them out. I have tried to give the limited knowledge that I have.

but lets face it, what i have written is probably a brain fart and Its mostly information overload and I dont expect people to change their providers with this but my point is to be more aware about the provider space in general and to find the best provider for your own specific use case.

Feel free to e-mail me (mail in profile) if you have any specific use case and if I could help optimize the bill or give a more specific list of providers who can help in your use case. Price itself isn't the only factor as there are of reputation, steal factor, long term sustainability and many others.

I have spent too much time on such forums (to even a detrimental cost indeed) and I just like sharing the few things that I know. Perhaps I can get someone to save some money as some of these providers have affiliate programs and I can then spend that money to buy more french fries :-D

Have a nice day and take care. Domains are much more simplified though than servers and I recommend people to look at https://tld-list.com if they want to find out about domains.

Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.

I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.

It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.

Not _quite_ in this case, since the free plan improves everyone's experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/