My experience with Hetzner VM pricing has turned me off of considering them for anything else. Maybe the experience in other world regions is not the same but this is what happened to us:

I started to use Hetzner's VM options in the Virginia, US datacenter. They had a great performance to cost ratio when I compared them to Linode/Akamai and Digital Ocean about a year ago. At that time, 4vcpu / 8GB server cost $24.99 per month.

Now, to get a VM like it, it's quoted $73.49 a month. Almost a 3x change.

I understand data center economics are changing due to LLM usage. But the Hetzner jump has not been mirrored by their competitors. I'm disappointed I made the switch from Linode. We still have some older VMs there and we'll likely continue to use them instead of Hetzner moving forward.

You may have just caught the wrong end of it timing wise. They used to be super stable and cheap but being a low cost provider they have no real buffer to absorb even minor hikes let alone the shitshow we saw in ram/ssd.

This has been my experience too. I migrated a few dozen projects from DO to Hetzner, and my monthly bill went from about $80 to around $162. The only thing that changed was Hetzner's rate hikes.

Now I'm in a weird spot. I could downgrade some servers, but changing them would immediately move me onto the new pricing. So I either pay more for less hardware, or pay a lot, lot more if I ever need to scale back up.

Yeah, RAM shortage has caught up with them. Send a thank you note to Anthropic and OpenAI.

They're the first, I strongly doubt they'll be the last to adjust prices that much. The big cloud providers might have enough margins to eat the cost increases, especially since bare VMs are only a small part of their offer. But I don't see how the smaller, more VM-focused providers will be able to absorb the high hardware prices.