Hetzner Cloud offers IPv6-only or no public IP at all
In this technical retrospective (2022), @evilc00kie shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 39 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 16 comments
This title suggests that Hetzner's new policy is EITHER you take an IPv6 address OR none at all, and that IPv4 is completely off the table.
This is incorrect; everything remains the same but you now have the option to get a cheaper instance by not getting an IPv4 address:
It's not only their cloud offerings. If you check out the dedicated servers you will see a single IPv4 IP listed but it is marked as optional in the details. This was communicated to customers a while back. All IPv4 IPs costs are unbundled from the server costs now (even for existing customers).
Or if you want to look at it from the other side, there are no free IPv4 IPs anymore.
I'm a small user of them. Happy so far with their communication around this. I wasn't hit too hard work the price hike.
I wonder if we'll see a rise in people using a gateway server for ipv4, but use ipv6 directly. Would be nice to see ipv6 users having some benefit latency wise.
It's great you don't have to configure any public interface at all (and can basically have an internal only VPS). Reducing cost by removing or not configuring public IPv4 is also a good development - there are so many things that can work IPv6-only now even access from outside.
I will quote from their actual pricing page. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Removing public IPv4 gets you a discount of €0.50 / month on the server.