Posted by dabinat 6 hours ago
I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
edit:
Actually I had completely missed the most recent price update. I made this comment referring to April 1st pricing.
I did not receive a communication about the June 15th update, because it did not apply to existing resources.
This gives the breakdown:
https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.
Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time
Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.
I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
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.
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!
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.
Not everything is good though and some providers are in fact dead-pooling as well and shutting down or raising prices but not to the degree of 3 times. They don't have the leverage that Hetzner does and people would simply migrate but both Buyvm and netcup are notable examples of price increase at the levels of 18-20% for most usecases which was still comparatively high back when they were done but understandable because of ram crisis, which is why my understanding of hetzner's price increase stops being a little understandable.
Ram prices are already declining from its peak and its around 2028 when its mentioned to have a glut. So as easy as it is for me to say but the crisis is comparatively short and there have been other costs involved for hosting providers which is declining (cost of IPv4 is declining as AWS,Google and other giants have stopped hoarding/buying even more IPv4)
It's a tough space for hosting provider but I hope I have shown the how part of how they manage it, its not as easy as it was during the 2020's but it is managable with some smart price increases and other mechanisms or so I have heard. I have just recently bought a few 7$/yr vps's from such shared providers. They don't earn too much from the 7$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
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.
Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.
I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq
I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.
> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.
> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:
Monthly usage for May, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for February, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for June, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2022: $1
What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?
At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds
You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s
Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s
Most likely they are unwilling to let customers pay later without any guarantee that they're good faith and solvent. Maybe it is a cultural thing? It's only my personal opinion but it never struck me as unreasonable.
Similar US vendors = you're lucky to even get someone to talk to or is too far from the chain to actually know so you get a "generic" answer.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
I'm really sorry if it sounded like a GPT trope, but that came 100% from me.
Not that this is a guarantee of quality (actually it's not), but certainly
authenticity. Probably I'm using so many agents lately that I'm starting
speaking like them lol
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/
I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
But they are a private company with only one small $6m funding round back in 2022, so I think they are more focused on building organically and not chasing investor funded growth.
Good luck to Bunny!
>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.
> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)
>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Oh..kayy.
The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".
But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.
They've lost my trust before they even had it.
AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.
Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.
It literally explains this in the blog post
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.
If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.
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.
As far as I know, Bunny products are their own business units with their own goals and feature requests (Bunny Stream, in particular, lacks a lot of features) and the “block all requests after the bill becomes 50 EUR” ONLY exists for Bunny CDN, not for their other products.
The day Bunny starts treating all their products evenly (and listen to requests asking to implement basic features) will be the day I will switch all my nonprofit communities to their services.
AFAIK is the only provider in which you can have functional billing limits and not just alerts that still depend on you reacting on them in time.
That's one thing. The second thing, I'm happy for you that you have more information about their pricing system than their pricing page and terms of service page state.
I once had some pretty serious DoS attack, but fortunately, I didn't had to pay more than what was pre-paid.
If it's just some simple website, then LLM/crawlers probably won't get you anywhere near thousands of euros. The CDN costs $0.01 - $0.06 per GB
...
You can limit some of their services, like the CDN (which is the most important one in my opinion):
- Download speed limit
- Requests per IP
- Data transfer per IP
- Max connections per IP
And monthly bandwidth limit, which disables the zone if you reach x GB.
I'm really waiting for a streamlined static website hosting experience to move everything to Bunny. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages is still much more straightforward with one CLI command to deploy a website.
Also, we are using Bunny containers with our global API gateway with 16 worldwide locations and it is really crazy - the cost is $3.60/mo (Go backend + Bunny billing based on resource utilization, not provisioning). With a relatively small usage of 20k API requests/mo, it's still stupidly cheap.