ugh.

@jerry I foresee a 25% to 50% price increase in the next 2 years for everything requiring hardware, including servers, cloud but also laptops and phones. This will have a *huge* impact.

@jerry

Do we need to contribute some funds to the cause?

If so what amount would be helpful?

@renchap @jerry we already have 500% increases in ram?

@melroy In RAM yes, I was talking about the total price. RAM (and storage) is only a part of it, so a 500% increase in RAM prices do not raise the total price by 500%.

@jerry

@simonzerafa @jerry I have the same question! How can we help?

@renchap problem is like you said, storage is basically nvne today, which is also made by the same machines.

Same with GPU, which also has ram on board. And recently China also has a high demand on cpus. So overall, CPU, GPU, Ram and storage prices increased. These are all essential components. Maybe GPU in a lesser degree on servers that only host websites. So as long as the Ai bubble doesn't burst, I predict more like a 100% to 200% price increase for a total machine.

@jerry

@WXQ4987 @simonzerafa I'm not sure yet. I need to figure out the overall change in costs given the number of servers I have, and figure out what I can replace with something smaller, then figure out what the funding gap (if any) will be. I'll do that this evening after work.

@WXQ4987 @simonzerafa @jerry

https://patreon.com/infosecexchange

@melroy @renchap @jerry

I bought last year an external SSD for 40 €.
Wanted to buy the same one for my daughter last week, it is now 120 €>

@jerry @WXQ4987

Please let us know how we can help. I'm sure we all want IE to continue and be successful and less of a burden to you also

@jerry That is really terrible. I guess the "all important" data centers are busy consuming everything.

Well, perhaps they'll be able to use all that compute to sell ads to me in a more precise way. That seems important.

@tmaher

I was thinking more about additional funding, over and above the regular contributions we make.

@jerry Is there any public info about this ?

@eingfoan They have a detailed page with the pricing changes here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/

@renchap @jerry You might be on to something here. There are a vast number of smaller orgs whose websites are getting positively swamped by all kinds of content scraping activity, much of it to build out LLMs. There are real and direct costs, and this is an important and seldom highlighted one.

@briankrebs @renchap I can objectively say that AI scrapers are a massive problem for me and a drain on resources. Everyone and their dog is trying to scrape the internet continuously with badly designed/vibe coded crawlers that don’t seem to keep track of what they’ve already crawled, let alone the context of what they are attempting to crawl or honoring robots.txt etc

@jerry Maybe you already know this, but I heard Iocaine is pretty good blocking scrapers.
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
Don't know if it would work with mastodon.

@renchap Interesting trivia from the refurbished server market: more and more offerings are now bare-bone (meaning without RAM, SSD/NVME) at the same price. They are now removing those parts to sell separately. Capitalism at work. @jerry @glynmoody

@jerry Good luck.

I just replaced my old desktop with a new unit. Little mini HP PC. Bought w/ minimal RAM/disk, then bought new RAM separately. The RAM cost 1/2 the price of PC. About $230 for 2 @ 16 GB DDR4 SODIMMs.

Thanks, "AI."

I'm also trying my best to self-host what I can, because 99.9% of what I want to run is just for me/my wife, and I can absolutely get away with it on my limited hardware.

This is truly the worst timeline.