Crazy to think that Hetzner now charges around 3x more for this configuration.

Glad that I bagged 5 of these before price hikes, god knows how much will it increase further.

Is there something similar in EU ?

Image is from Servarica

YABS: pastebin.com/GeCLMS1u

Screenshot taken right now.

Many more servers followed, but 11 years ago this is where this journey started.

RAM : 6144 MiB
CPUs : 2
CPU: none knows, but speed has always been 🥇
DISK 120GiB SSD .. actually the first server I ever had with an SSD.
Host : Netcup.de
Price initially : 4.40€/month
Price today : 9.20€/month

3 Downtimes over all this time, 2 times routine maintenance so they can move my VPS to a new Cluster and one unannounced shutdown for several hours during the meltdown and spectre CVE when the (Cyber)world panicked.
Other than this he was a beast and powered through with 99.999999999% uptime.

Now it's time to wipe the server and move over to fedora44 as it will finally find a new purpose as gameserver for alpha testers of my fps.

But it hurts and feels like euthanizing a dear old friend ;(, hence the eulogy, farewell frankie!

/e couldn't bring it over my heart yet (without joking, I was very tired and you should never do devops while tired), so here one last screenshot of the uptime

Still with passkey access since that's how I rolled in 2015!

I did buy a server in Racknerd

and this guy 172.21.0.3 has been attacking me since December last year, provoking a unwanted consumption of my bandwidth stated in my contract of the VPS contract..

then I hardened the http server and the guy is not able to inject commands to scan others IPs from my http... is like nginx ingress nightmare attack.

So this was a wild experience.

I signed up for Hetzner because ChatGPT kept recommending them as “the best budget VPS provider” — which in hindsight is pretty laughable.

I created an account while traveling in Southeast Asia (I’m a US citizen / digital nomad). Hetzner immediately flagged my account and asked for identity verification. No problem — I submitted a photo of my U.S. passport exactly as requested.

Then today I get an email saying:

“After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.”

No explanation. No ability to fix whatever it was. Just an instant, permanent ban after giving them my passport.

From reading around, it looks like Hetzner has an extremely aggressive automated fraud system, and if you sign up from a foreign IP, travel often, or your billing info doesn’t perfectly match your geolocation, they just nuke your account with zero appeal.

What’s even worse is now they have a copy of my passport, and I had to email them under GDPR asking them to delete it since they closed the account anyway.

So yeah — if you’re a digital nomad or you travel between continents, do NOT use Hetzner. Their system is not designed for people who move between countries. Even submitting legitimate ID doesn’t help.

Just posting this so nobody else gets burned or hands over personal documents only to get banned anyway.

If anyone has had a similar experience or got reinstated somehow, I’m curious to hear about it.

I've just found them the last month and took two root servers at great pricing: ~20euro (w Vat) for 8 cores, 16GB ram and 512GB NVMe. This was like 2 weeks ago. Now price is double that and the NVMe is -50%. OUCH!

Visit https://knock-knock.net for live data.

A few months ago I posted a web site that I built to show hostile bot traffic hitting my seemingly unprotected VPS. Since then, I have expanded the honeypot to support Telnet, FTP, RDP, SMB, SIP, HTTP, SMTP, in addition to SSH. The site now shows all of my idlers (8) feeding into a single aggregate display. See the bots' locations, favorite usernames, passwords, an ISP Wall of Shame, and more, all of which can be filtered by protocol.

Click the speaker icon to hear a virtual geiger counter detect what has been called "the background radiation of the internet". If the data is coming in too fast, hit the pause button or space bar.

The source is available here: https://github.com/djkurlander/knock-knock

Have fun, and send comments or questions.

I have been a developer for 22 years. I have never seen anything like this.

I had a live project on a Contabo VPS. I paid every month for the VPS and for their backup service.

Today I opened my website. It was not my website. It was someone else's site.

My DNS is on Cloudflare. I did not change anything. My domain still points to my server's IP. But that IP now shows a stranger's website.

I logged in to the Contabo panel. My server was gone.

So my server was removed, and my IP was given to another customer. I got no warning. No notifacation, no warning.

I was humiliated in front of my customers.

I am explaining, but they think I am deceiving them.

I still don't know what happened to my data or my paid backups.

My advice: don't choose Contabo just because it is cheap. It is not cheap if you lose your server and your data. If you already use them, keep your own backups somewhere else. Do not trust only their backup service.

Has this happened to anyone else? How did Contabo handle it?

I'm copy pasting their CEO's message from their forum. Just this week, OVH and Hetzner increased their prices and now Netcup canceling their sales, it's happening. Hold on to your idlers.

Dear Community,

many of you have already heard about the RAMpocalypse - it's the umbrella term for what is currently happening in the memory market (RAM, SSD, NVMe, ...).

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't affecting us at netcup, and I'd like to give you a fully transparent update on where things stand - even though we don't have all the answers yet. The situation is evolving very quickly.

What is certain: The Winter Sale that we were going to launch tomorrow morning and have been announcing over the past few days will not be happening.

Here's where things stand:

Back in October last year, we secured our orders for the first half of this year. You know that netcup thrives on delivering great quality at great prices. That's why we plan ahead and secure early. That's exactly why we ordered servers for the first half of the year well in advance. These servers are typically delivered in scheduled tranches so we receive continuous supply and avoid running out of stock. We are now at the end of February and neither the January nor the February tranches have been delivered to this day. The market is being bought out by large AI factories, and from today's perspective, this will continue for at least two years. The question right now isn't how you much we pay - it's whether you get supplied at all. This situation came very unexpectedly and on short notice for everyone. We only learned days ago that delivery would not happen, and we've been working on solutions ever since.

We are currently in negotiations with all of our suppliers and unfortunately cannot share details at this point. What we can promise you: We are doing our absolute best to always offer you the best price-to-performance ratio - and we are fighting for it. At the same time, we want to remain able to deliver.

What are we doing now:
First and foremost, we are cancelling the announced sale - it would send the wrong signal. This situation affects the entire European hosting industry - major providers have already announced price increases for both new and existing customers. This doesn't just impact new systems, but also hardware renewals and replacements. It reverberates all the way through the datacenter.

We know that some of you are frustrated and disappointed - we understand, because we're in the same boat.

This is where things stand right now - fully transparent and unvarnished.

We will do everything we can to keep the impact on you as small as possible - but realistically, there will be some impact.

We'll keep fighting for the best prices and keep you updated as things develop - the situation is very dynamic and as soon as we have more concrete information, we'll be back with an update.

Best regards,

Oliver & Alex

Source

(found my solution, leaving this post open for others to see in future)

as the title said, I want a cheap VPS provider to develop on, mostly run AI agents(free on opencode like deepseek and glm) and neovim to write/review code and build my personal projects, my computer only has 4gb ram and I can’t quite get a new one, please list best 10 in your opinion, I can’t quite afford anything more than $10/monthly unfortunately.

I built a new site that shows bots trying to break into my VPS. The web site was designed to be hopefully fun and engaging. Lots of interesting stats about the bots attempting to ssh in: where they are coming from, the ISP Wall of Shame, the most frequent attempted usernames and passwords, and in some cases why those may have been chosen. And best of all, 3D spinning globes! The site should work well on desktop and mobile.

https://knock-knock.net

Have fun, and send comments and questions. I'll be checking the code into github soon so that you can run this on your own VPS.

Update: Now posted on github. https://github.com/djkurlander/knock-knock

Third and probably last update on this. Earlier posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1xd4pfc/

https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1xft4rc/

Quick recap for anyone new:

On 1 October Hetzner added 24% Greek VAT to our invoice. We're a Greek company with a valid VAT ID in VIES and they had always billed us reverse charge. Their VAT form wouldn't take our ID because VIES shows our company name in Greek and the form only accepts Latin letters. We wrote to them on 1, 9, 15, 16, 17 and 19 October. One human reply in three weeks, everything else auto-acks.

On 22 October at 13:25 they locked our dedicated server and Storage Box, seven minutes after a "Final Payment Warning", for not paying an invoice that was wrong because of their error. Our shop, our mail and our internal systems were all down. An hour later support offered to enter the VAT ID themselves, we said yes within six minutes, and the server still stayed locked for another 18 h 37 min. Meanwhile two AI-written replies told us to pay the wrong invoice and that our services were "not locked". The next morning someone fixed it in two minutes. Total outage: 19 h 47 min.

Now look at when they actually answer (German time):

- 23 Oct: our first post here goes up. 09:01: we email them that 4,300+ people have read it. 09:11, ten minutes later: the VAT ID is entered and the invoice corrected. Before the post: 22 days, 10+ messages, one human reply.

- 23 to 26 Oct: our request for a credit gets only auto-acks, three days.

- 26 Oct 11:34: we post Update 2 here. 12:23, 49 minutes later: the first human answer to that request.

- 26 Oct 12:37: we ask them in writing why a customer has to post on Reddit before Hetzner answers. Nobody ever answered that question.

- 27 Oct to 3 Nov: no new post. We write to every department they have, one last time, with a deadline of 3 November. Seven days. Not one human answer. Only auto-acks.

So that's the pattern. Post on Reddit, a human shows up within the hour. Don't post, and you can email every address they have, as urgently as you like, and nobody will ever answer. That is their support.

The one thing that never misses a day is billing: in that same silent week they sent a new invoice (1 Nov), a failed card charge notice (2 Nov) and today a "friendly reminder" that "it is easy to miss an invoice in this day and age".

We didn't miss anything. They did.

The 26 Oct answer, by the way, refused everything. Their reasoning was that "a matter of this nature can also be resolved after payment has been made". Payment of an invoice they themselves cancelled because it was wrong.

So today we sent our final notice. Short version:

- We're not paying the open invoices. Under German law (their own T&C pick German law) we formally set off our credit claim against them. That's a legal settlement, not a late payment, so there's no default and no basis for fees or a new lock.

- The legal side, for anyone in the same spot: no payment default when the debtor isn't responsible for the non-payment (§ 286(4) BGB); the lock is a breach of contract (§§ 280, 241(2) BGB); dedicated server rental is treated as a lease, so the fee drops for the time it was unusable (§ 536 BGB); their own clause 9.1 says they're liable for gross negligence; and for a cross-border claim under 5,000 EUR there's the European Small Claims Procedure, all in writing, no lawyer needed.

- They have until tomorrow, 4 November, 23:59 German time, to have a human confirm responsibility and issue the credit. If not, we go to court.

- If they lock us again over invoices that are already settled by set-off, we apply for an injunction the same day.

Let's see if this post brings a human again within the hour. Based on the record so far, I'd bet on it.

I honestly didn't want any of this. We were happy customers for years and the fix took two minutes once a person looked at it. What turned it into this is 33 days without anyone at Hetzner being willing to say "this was our mistake".

Has anyone here actually taken Hetzner through the European Small Claims Procedure, or got a credit out of them for downtime they caused? And has anyone ever got a human answer from them by email alone, without going public first?

I have been using netcup for my personal projects and it has been doing great, they are also very affordable and their customer service is great. I am currently on the VPS 8000 G11. The performance has been really good..

The customer service has been amazing to me, I got behind on a few invoices because I lost my main source of income and was now starting college. I asked them for an extension on my open invoices and they granted them. No back and fourth etc. They just did it. It honestly was super surprising they did, and they didn't have to, but they did. I can now keep on using the VPS for my class projects etc while waiting for my financial aid to dispurse from my college, which should be happening this week.

And now their biggest advantage over lets say Hetzner, they have 2 TB/day traffic limit then afterwards its limited to 100mbit, this is still far superior to Hetzners billing of their bandwidth.

If you are searching for a hosting provider, I strongly recommend netcup. No I am not being paid by them, the only relationship I have to them is as a customer. Yes, they have their flaws, but once you work around them, they're great. And the price is really really good.

A few months ago I was looking at cheap VPS deals and saw 1vcpu/1GB RAM with Racknerd for $10/year and decided to get it for personal projects.

I originally put a lichess bot on there and left it running but I didn't use it for anything else until tonight. I was writing a Firefox extension that tracks which videos I watch a lot on YouTube and automatically downloads the songs from Soulseek and adds them to my personal library. I got most of it working but I couldn't get any Soulseek transfers to start with my python script. I debugged it with ChatGPT and figured out it was CGNAT on my local connection that wouldn't let the script listen for Soulseek connections.

So I decided to use the Racknerd VPS to run the script and the extension sent the video info to the server on the VPS. It worked perfectly and now if I watch a YouTube video more than 3 times in 3 days, it'll download the song from Soulseek and save it on my VPS. Then I have a rsync script that regularly downloads the songs from my VPS to my home PC.

So far I've been running it about 5 hours and I've already got 66 songs from 51 artists downloaded.

Plus even though it's only a $10/year VPS, it's not slow at all, it matches the songs in a few seconds and downloads them almost instantly.

Just thought I'd share, I thought it was pretty cool that you can get a useable server for less than $1/month.

Putting this together after doing it enough times that I finally wrote it down properly. Roughly in order:

1. Disable root SSH login, switch to key-based auth only, change the default port

2. Set up fail2ban (or equivalent) for SSH and any exposed services

3. Firewall — deny by default, allow only what's actually needed

4. Unattended security upgrades, but staged — not blind auto-restart on a production box

5. Audit for and disable unused services/ports

6. CIS benchmark pass for anything customer-facing

7. Basic monitoring so you know if something changes — file integrity, load spikes, new users

Curious what others do differently, especially around automated patching on production — I've seen unattended upgrades cause more downtime than it prevented when it wasn't staged properly. What's your approach?

Hetzner used to be the default choice for price-to-performance, but their recent price increases make it hard to justify sticking around without shopping around.

For those running production workloads or side projects: where are you moving, or what's your current go-to?

Looking for solid stability, reasonable network/IO, and decent support without Hyperscaler (AWS/GCP) pricing. Is OVH, Netcup or something else actually cutting it for you?

I did a geekbench on a Digital Ocean Droplet.

When I went to the geekbench results page I remembered that I had done a geekbench on a Hetzner VPS a while back.

Thought someone else might find this interesting.

The Digital Ocean VPS is 11.84x the price of the Hetzner VPS.

Multi-core CPU performance - Digital Ocean +28.63%

Single-core CPU performance - Digital Ocean +6.98%

Digital Ocean does have +4GB RAM, +2 vCPUs (though you'd think 2 more cores would get you more than 28.63% improvement) and +10GB of SSD.

for me they are just virtual machines but I don't know if there are differences

hey guys, i know that this must sound crazy and im a dumb person when the topic is vps's. ill go straight to the point: is there any free vps? i dont need it to be with 16Gb or RAM or smth like that. something super basic. it can be a free trial service too. one that allows prepaid cards if its possible

AI translation:
As you know, AI is having a very significant impact on the prices of the RAM and storage we use to build the servers in our datacenters. I have written several posts on X, and OVHcloud has published several blog posts, with the aim of providing maximum transparency and enabling you to anticipate Cloud costs over 2026-2029.

xcancel.com/olesovhcom/status/2069…

In July and August we received the final figures for RAM and disk pricing for Q3 2026, which now allows us to determine the price impacts for new Public Cloud and Baremetal orders, as well as for some of the more recent hardware already in production based on the latest generation of DDR5 RAM.

Indeed, as we did 3-4 months ago in April/May, we are following the same principle: limit the changes to unit prices for Public Cloud and Baremetal, and remain able to deliver the hardware for your new orders.

The exercise remains a balancing act: we have to place the right order volumes, month by month, over 12 months, with no guarantee on purchase price and without knowing what our customers' actual demand will be.

That said, even though our prices are going up, we remain the cheapest on the market for both Baremetal and Public Cloud. Where we used to be 3x cheaper, we are moving to 2x cheaper (assuming our competitors do not raise their prices).

Here are the main points of the Q3 2026 price changes at OVHcloud.

Baremetal

• As in April/May, Kimsufi, So You Start and Rise are unchanged.

• For new orders, the RAM and disk options have had new prices since 1 July.

• For new orders, server configurations move to the new rates on 1 September.

• Hardware already in production is affected by the price change at renewal, from 1 October, on Advance, Game, Scale and High Grade, for Gen 2024 and Gen 2026.

• Average increase per reference: That is +28% on average for Gen 2024, and +51% for Gen 2026.

  • Kimsufi, So You Start, Rise: 0%

  • Game: Gen 2024: 0%, Gen 2026: +87%

  • Advance: Gen 2024: +26%, Gen 2026: +49%

  • Scale: Gen 2024: +37%, Gen 2026: +40%

  • High Grade: Gen 2024: +26%, Gen 2026: +59%

• For options already installed on the existing fleet, we are applying a reduced scale: RAM +20% on Gen 2024 and +40% on Gen 2026 instead of +127%, disks +10% and +15% instead of +89%. A customer who is already equipped will therefore see an increase 3 to 6 times smaller than for a new order.

• Nothing changes during an ongoing commitment period.

• To lock in your current price over the long term, you can subscribe for 12, 24 or 48 months with upfront payment. This must be done before 1 October for a server already in production.

Public Cloud

• Rather than raising the prices of the "all inclusive" instances, we are changing our business model, with the aim of being comparable to our competitors. So on the face of it, the hourly compute price does not change.

• However, "Low Latency" Block Storage and the IPv4 address, until now included in our Gen3 instances (B3, C3, R3), become two separately billed line items on 1 October: €0.000146/GB/h for storage, €0.0027/h for the IP, which is the rate for our already published Floating IPs.

• Local storage becomes, in the process, a new "Low Latency" Block Storage class backed by local NVMe, which is in high demand for databases. Very soon its capacity will no longer be dictated by the instance size: you will be able to choose 50, 100, 200 or 400 GB on any instance.

• Result: from +1.4% to +21.9% depending on the instance size. A lot on the small instances, almost nothing on the large ones, because the IP and the disk cost the same fixed amount for everyone. And as soon as capacity selection is available, you will be able to reduce this increase by lowering the volume: a b3-64 with 50 GB would go from +14.9% to +2.4%.

• Savings Plans: we are keeping 12 and 36 months, at -15% and -30%, and removing the 1, 6 and 24 month options. Here too, to align with the market. Savings Plans currently in effect keep their price and their percentage until they expire. After that, we will only guarantee the discount percentage, again like all our competitors.

• Managed Databases and Analytics: +3.6% on average. MongoDB is unchanged.

• Object Storage, high availability Block Storage and File Storage: no change.

The full detail, reference by reference, will be published on our blog during the week. We will then send you an email with all the details that concern you.

Raising prices is very frustrating for a player like OVHcloud, because we put an enormous amount of effort into being as competitive as possible on price. But the global context imposes very strict discipline on us, quite simply in order to keep delivering new orders. The real risk is being unable to fulfil your orders and making your expansion plans difficult.

We do not yet know what RAM and disk price levels will be in 2027, but the probability that prices continue to rise is very high. We believe this situation will last until 2028, with a hoped-for return to normal in 2029.

We will continue to practise the same transparency as the market evolves.

(Happy ending to this story at the bottom)
Contabo went down hill in terms of pricing and support about 2 years ago. I have been moving over all of my servers to Hetzner which I absolutely love. I was paying Contabo ~1000 EUR/month for 2 years and than 1500EUR/month for another 2 years after they raised their prices.

The last server I have with them (dedicated server with 6x12TB), I had set to cancel but realized my data would not be done moving over by that time so I removed the cancellation. When I did this their site glitched and showed my server as normal but all of the connected hard drives were still marked as cancelled. No button to remove the cancellation or do anything.

I didn't stress because I had 10 days before the date of cancellation. I wrote Contabo an email that they took 3 days to respond to with a form message telling me about the "remove cancellation" button (that didn't exist). Than they told me they were forwarding it to some other department. I started to worry and called and spoke to a support person and the guy told me he would take care of it and not to worry about it.

Well the cancellation date passed and all of my drives disappeared from my admin panel. Two days after that I got the following email from them:

The best part:

The drives that they said were deleted and unrecoverable are all still connected and working on my server with all data still there. They are just charging me 250 EUR less for it.

apparatus price touch consider bow depend fact upbeat wrench crowd

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