Hetzner Isn't the Cheap Default Anymore — And the AI Boom Is Why

Mon, 18 May 2026 20:30:00 -0300

I’ve been running personal infrastructure on Hetzner for the better part of a decade. Cloud VMs for side projects. A couple of dedicated boxes for the things I didn’t want to babysit on AWS pricing. The calculus was always the same: pay a third of what the hyperscalers charge, manage it yourself, accept the lack of a managed-service safety net. The deal was very, very good.

On April 1, 2026, that deal got noticeably worse.

Ollama in 2026: The Boring Choice for Open-Source LLMs (And Why That's the Whole Point)

Mon, 18 May 2026 17:30:00 -0300

There’s a particular kind of project I love: the one that takes something new and weird and turns it into something you barely have to think about. Docker did this for containers. Hugo did it for static sites. In 2026, Ollama is doing it for open-source language models.

You install one binary. You type ollama pull <model>. You type ollama run <model>. Your application talks to localhost:11434 over an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API. That’s the whole user manual. The fact that this is now boring — that nobody has to argue about it on Hacker News anymore — is the point of this post.

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Hetzner Isn't the Cheap Default Anymore — And the AI Boom Is Why

Ollama in 2026: The Boring Choice for Open-Source LLMs (And Why That's the Whole Point)