The value of efficient and thoughtfully designed software is going to continue to grow. What I never expected was for the “AI” data center to be the catalyst that could help many organizations understand that argument!
Today Hetzner, a major cloud services provider in Europe announced
There have been drastic price increases in various areas in the IT sector recently. That is why, unfortunately, we must also increase the prices of our products.
The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically. Therefore, our price changes will affect both existing products and new orders and will take effect starting on 1 April 2026.
Last year for Earth Day I wrote on the Buoyant Data blog
Time is money. In the cloud time is measured and billed by the vCPU/hour and the most efficient software is always the cheapest.
Nothing makes the case for more efficient software like more expensive hardware!
In the past five years I have repeatedly seen success in taking a system written in a less-efficient platform, redesigning and rebuilding in Rust, and reaping the rewards in lower operational costs.
For a simple exercise, imagine a service which costs $100,000/year to operate, that’s roughly $1,900 a week. Assuming a developer’s time costs roughly $6,000 a week, taking a month to rebuild the service might cost $25,000. The efficiency needed is then only about 25% to pay off that rewrite in a year, but what I have consistently seen is an order of magnitude change in efficiency.
Instead of costing $100k, these newly deployed services tend to cost less than 10-20% of their predecessors. Recouping the cost of conversion in a couple of months, freeing up money to go towards different investments.
The biggest cost to contend with is opportunity cost and that one is much harder to model, and also much less subject to changing prices by your vendors.