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Hetzner is awesome. I wish they would go public. Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH. We need more public
by ArtTimeInvestor 10mo ago
Hetzner is awesome.
I wish they would go public.
Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.
We need more public cloud companies in Europe.
- progbits 10mo agoWhy would you want a company you like to go public? To keep chasing profits to the detriment of everything else?
- moooo99 10mo agoWhy in the world would one want a company like this to go public? They are a very stable, established and profitable private entity. Based on what Hetzner is doing right now, it seems like the current way of operating that is intended by the leadership is closely aligned with what their customers want. This is often the first thing that goes out the window once a company becomes public
- Freak_NL 10mo ago> I wish they would go public. I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
- sdoering 10mo agoThis. I am a happy paying customer. Recommend them to my clients whenever it makes sense (more often than not). And hope they just keep running like they do as profitable business, like you said.
- philipwhiuk 10mo ago> I wish they would go public. If they go public they will be bought by foreign private equity.
- baxtr 10mo agoYes I agree, we need more public companies in Europe. Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth. In this sense, they’re selfish. PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
- bell-cot 10mo agoAt least in America, "a successful private company went public" often translates into "ordinary people got a bit of gold, selfish vulture capitalists butchered the goose, and there was precious little success or growth for anyone after that". (Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate" sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in your own financial affairs?)
- baxtr 10mo agoYes, exactly! Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture capitalists". After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon, Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that included every day people like you and me.
- bell-cot 10mo agoNo - the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who purchase a private company which has been successful for many years, then butcher it. There is no IPO - it is "you own X, and we are offering you $Y million to sell it to us". After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
- Gooblebrai 10mo agoI don't understand your comment. You are both talking about public companies, and suddenly you are now talking about private equity?
- jeffbee 10mo agoThe comparison with OVH is a good one. For some reason OVH has much worse PUE, self-reporting 1.24 vs. Hetzner's 1.11. Operating costs are basically just electricity for these places, so their margins are that much worse. For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
- arcanemachiner 10mo agoI don't understand anything in your comment, so I'm shamelessly posting some info from an LLM: > PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
- moffkalast 10mo agoDamn Americans, can't think of anything other than "I wish I could make a buck off this, idgaf if it gets destroyed in the process".
- riku_iki 10mo agoHe personally unlikely will make buck off this. Going public usually means unlocking funding, so they could grow business, build more services, compete with say OVH or if some hyperscaler will decide to step into this niche.
- Anarch157a 10mo agoThe last thing we need is more enshitification on this space. I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
- zelphirkalt 10mo agoCompared to IONOS, it is day and night. IONOS in my experience is just worse in every category that matters. IONOS has buggy and bad wannabe SPA web frontend, broken OS images, bottlenecks in their provisioning API, that they don't care to fix, and 10x the costs. If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.