168 * 12 < 4562

  If we assume that Hetzner's spending cap *doesn't* apply...

If I were saying that, I would have said it. Unless "XXX max/mo." doesn't mean what it means in plain English, I _very_ strongly expect that it's very rare for colo customers to suck down all available power 24/7 and that Hetzner has a Stern Talk with customers who do but didn't disclose their intent to do so up front. I mean, you tell me... if you've ever lived in an apartment where your power and water was included in the rent and was metered with a whole-building meter (rather than per-unit meters), did you consume every amp and gallon that could be delivered to you, or did you use just a bit more than what was useful to you in the course of everyday life? [0]

I worked the math the way I did (even doubling or tripling the expected lifetime of the server hardware) to make the numbers as favorable for the "electricity is almost 100% of the cost of computing" side of the argument as they could reasonably be.

Are you saying that I fucked up my math?

[0] And if you're never lived in such an arrangement, ponder instead how you would behave if you did find yourself in one.

Fair. Your argument is that the price of the hardware dominates the price of electricity in cloud computing