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Energy prices in Finland flipped negative - is Aleksi, CEO and founder of PulsedMedia onto it?
FranzVonVirMach
Barred
Energy prices increase in Finland if well known especially due to Aleksi, CEO and founder of @PulsedMedia accompanied by the drastic price increase for existing LET customers by PulsedMedia, but it seems like the tide is turning.
Quick refresh:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/181223/pulsedmedia-35-price-increase/p1
But things have changed:
While much of Europe was facing an energy crisis, the Nordic country reported that its spot energy prices dropped below zero before noon.
“Now there is enough electricity, and it is almost emission-free. So you can feel good about using electricity,” Fingrid’s CEO said.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Finlands-Electricity-Prices-Fall-Below-Zero.html
For consumers of spot price electricity, the subzero price means a really affordable price, even after transmission fees.
Finland is now making rapid progress towards self-sufficiency. Ruusunen stated this as important for investment in the green transition.
"We have a very good chance of building on this with industrial investments for the green transition. Finland is truly competitive; emissions are close to zero and everything is working fine. The prospects look great," he said.
- What will Alexi do now?105 votes
- Restore old pricing for the existing clients.25.71%
- Say FU and continue to count the money.74.29%
Comments
Of course he will create some BS excuse wall of text and will continue to rake money. Don't like? Vote with your wallet.
PulsedMedia should reduce prices if electricity price is now lower.
I suspect pulsed media made deals to fix their electricity price for while so overheads are predicable and a sudden jump doesn't wipe out your margin. Therefore prices will probably remain the same
And energy prices still go up and down a lot so best to stay profitable instead of having to worry about energy pricing fluctuation.
That's quite possible, but usually work in both ways, not just when price goes down.
Here is that BS excuse
. What type of syndrom is that? When you just want to pay more.
We have a global market and some countries will attract more businesses than others, depending on how they are fixing their infrastructure. Some people will still want to pay more for ideological reasons.
Countries like South Africa, Pakistan or India, heavily reliant on fossil fuels and with collapsing grids will experience capital flight and countries like Finland, Sweden, and many others in the EU will get more investments.
China is also on the good path of decarbonization, albeit that is in preparation of their wars, not because they actually care about the planet. Xi doesn't want MbS or Putler to suddenly cut the oil flows when he is invading Taiwan or Outer Manchuria.
In the end, the transition is unavoidable and that spells disaster for the petro-economies and whoever delays it.
The only unknown is how long the agony would last, I would think about 10 years at different intensities but the worst will be over after 5 years when even South Africa and India would understand they can no longer afford rolling blackouts.
It was made artificially negative, so that the power companies won't pump more watts into the overloaded grid due to nobody using that electricity, and if they do, they need to pay for that.
As for the companies here, they are locked in some contract based on existing price 100% sure.
No business here is insane enough to agree on real time prices after last winter.
Not to mention, even with negative price, everyone has transfer contracts separately since national grids were sold to foreign companies decades ago, which now extort us regardless of actual electricity prices. For most places, the transfer costs alone are well over half of the bill.
Google Caruna for example.
Nobody bothered enough to figure this out before accusing Aleksi/PulsedMedia?
Lol its kinda obvious, if there's a massive price spike your business just becomes non profitable, it makes zero sense to follow the market, even if you may at some point be paying more than the market rate.
We did already lower some prices since we came off the absolute peak:
- MD series dedis: https://pulsedmedia.com/minidedi-dedicated-servers-finland.php
- Storage Seedboxes: https://pulsedmedia.com/storage-seedbox.php
- SSD Seedboxes: https://pulsedmedia.com/ssd-seedbox.php
----- WALL OF TEXT STARTS FROM HERE ------
Energy price is one component. On top of that is grid fees (transfer of energy ~1.5-4cnt/kwh), energy tax (~2.25cnt by itself).
We are not the ones who can make these deals, it's the building owner, a big bank: Nordea.
They have made some deal and our energy prices are still ~double than what they were just 1 year ago, just before the big ramp up started. They swapped to only green energy last winter i believe, spent big on new metering etc.
We have zero negotiation power over what deals they make, to best of my understanding they have all their buildings under the same deal.
Spot prices of single hour being negative does not make the full year negative pricing. Long term averages are what matters, and the monthly average is right now 2.61cnt/kWh but last month was like 10cnt/kWh. Now it's rather low, but as far as i can remember, quite normal summer time price, not unusually low average. Peaks are above 8cnt/kWh. See: https://sahko.tk/?vat0=true
2.61cnt energy + ~2.25cnt tax + grid fees, if i had to guess atleast around 2cnt/kwh mark (it's very hard to know for this type connection) - so let's call it 2cnt/kWh.
TOTAL: 6.86cnt/kWh + Nordeas margin probably 5-10%, at 7.5%: 7.37cnt/kWh -- that's the ultimate best case for today, absolute minimum.
Grid fees see: https://www.helensahkoverkko.fi/en/services/electricity-distribution-prices
I will need to double check that if my memory serves right on historical prices, but i believe 2.61cnt/kWh for energy is not actually special but was the norm. We should not expect the full year to be at that level, ever. The true yardstick is the winter pricing when energy demand grows a lot and the sun does not shine. Up north, no sunshine for months.
We are currently paying in the ~15cnt/kWh range still. That's non PUE adjusted reading, so add cooling, routers and other infrastructure to the actual cost per unit of production capacity. Some people are still paying in the 50-70cnt/kWh range. New contracts are in the ~13-17cnt/kWh range (+grid fees +taxes!)
Any change on the energy prices we pay is expected to take months, and supposed to take months. Yet last fall, prices increased like rocket, but they are coming down by the stairs. Opposite of what it was supposed to be. Maybe the green agenda since Nordea has made the decision on behalf of their tenants to pay extra for electricity? Who knows.
Other costs are also still very high, like diesel is +50% as an example, food is according to some as high as +100%, but average seems more like +50%. These costs extends to every single other cost as well. Energy cost was only part of the equation, albeit big one.
Does this include also drastically increased prices for the existing customers?
@yoursunny will be thrilled.
I switched to iHostART that is €5.50/year, compare to PulsedMedia €18/year before the increase.
The €18/year isn't coming back because the whole product line is discontinued.
LowEndSeedbox has much smaller diks (50 GB only) but it's enough for a few TV episodes.
Those 4k content are useless: I have to re-encode them down to 720p, or they won't play on my tablet.
Yeah, that is always a problem...
For a LowEndSeedbox, the smallest diks I would take is 25 GB.
Each episode is up to 700 MB.
Sometimes I need to download a whole season that is up to 20 GB.
Since it's VPS there needs to be room for the OS.
Why download when you can stream from sites like Goku?
NVM, I won't be explaining the joke.
Why is this in the News section? it is about a specific company.
Realistically it would be nice for businesses to have these fluctuations built into their prices, but that makes it hard when established business tries to compete with competitors that are willing to bet on low energy prices to offer lower prices to customers (even knowing they may have to raise them again later to compensate). It's a tough position really, and things like that are often a good reason why you don't see established business competing at the lowest end: because price stability is of more value to their customers than prices which change with global markets.
There's certainly room for companies to exist that change pricing continually based on external factors, and companies that price to compensate for future unknowns but in turn have higher consistent pricing.
Whole world is getting more expensive, or currency loosing value, however you wanna put it. Electricity is not that big of concern on these small servers I would imagine.
yea we made a big big big oopsie trying to offer those ridiculously low prices. I guess we got a bit carried away and should have never made those mega crazy deals.
Seedboxes are very very expensive to produce compared to VPS. It makes absolutely no sense trying to compete against VPS pricing on the absolute lowest possible cost.
A fellow VPS provider indulged some stats to us, their average customer only uses like 1mbps of bandwidth, barely any IOPS, low CPU usage etc. they have rather high end offers, theirs could do much more, but people simply do not use it. They idle them.
Seedbox idlers? Doesn't really exist, even the lowest usage people tend to have some torrents running, with some upload going on, therefore IOPS utilization as well (IOPS is main bottleneck).
On a VPS you might have 40 users per HDD. Seedboxes start bogging down after 4 (yet some providers put 8-12, absolute shite experience, think 300kb/s max throughput level, not reaching advertised 10G because a HDD physically cannot do that etc.)
Seedbox users also need an order of magnitude more support, even with us where we have streamlined A LOT, automated a lot etc. and have fairly low ticket quantity per user, still on average an user makes almost 2 tickets per year, and on average a ticket resolution costs like 3€ in labour, that is 6€ a year just in support by itself.
VPS On the other hand? Probably closer to 0.2 in aggregate annually. So another order of magnitude difference there.
I know of seedbox providers who have like 10+ tickets per customer annual average. One of our competitors expenses are like 60% staffing due to all the support they have to provide. Only 30% or so goes to hardware, and it really shows in their service offers.
Seedboxes also don't have good control panels and all around solutions for hosters like VPS, Dedis etc. have, everything has to be custom made to work at scale. Sure there are some "setup a seedbox" scripts etc, but to work for a hosting provider? That's just the tip of the iceberg, 80% of the work is in the backend.
So you can add huge amounts of dev time compared to VPS. This is infact our primary bottleneck these days.
People also tend to have many VPS instances, 1 per task, where as Seedbox users expect that single seedbox to do everything and anything, without a single performance hiccup or need for multiple seedboxes to spread out their load.
Often a Seedbox user paying 5€ a month expects the same performance as one paying 50€ a month. Way too often we see people paying 5-15€/Month expecting dedicated performance for their 10G service, with Plex 4k transcoding multiple streams.
All around, single Seedbox user is guaranteed to use orders of magnitude more resources than average VPS user. This could be solved with a hybrid approach, with very strict resource controls, but then you would also loose the bursts capabilities which is one of the main selling points of a Seedbox.
Yet, people expect seedbox to cost less than a VPS.
We really should be doing VPS rather than seedboxes. Maybe we shall once we get further on these 3 big development projects we got going on (New DC, new HW dedi platform, and some big advancements again in the seedbox field if it works!)
For something like 18€ a year (more like 16€ after TRX costs etc.) we would barely be able to provide the support, let alone the experience people expect from a seedbox.
Why can a 18€ a year VPS then work as a seedbox? Because your neighbors are mostly idlers, or run very very very light loads like a DNS server, email proxy, personal VPN etc.
At something like 5.50€ year (more like 4.50€ after TRX), we couldn't even provide the support time required or even the bandwidth utilized probably, let alone rest of the service.
To add insult to injury, seedbox market has been shrinking for the past 7-8 years and seedbox niche in general has very high turnover, a competitor (now bankrupt) held a public celebration when they reached their record low: 7% a month (presuming 7-8%, closer to 8%). That's our typical maximum after sales events.
Meanwhile, demand for features and performance in seedboxes have expanded exponentially to the point our seedboxes are nearing to be a VPS (!!) or AppHosting.
In summary, we should be at minimum be charging close to 10€ a month for any level of seedbox of the types we currently offer. Different kinds of setups / targeting might allow for lower target price point, but would be risky and potentially cause huge losses.
Shillers gonna shill.
That is something to dig into further and expand on to find the sweet spot. For me, the concept of idling a service translated into something interesting. For example, let's say I could sell 25GB for $2.5, but I can't sell 100GB for $10. The dollar amount being an example, not necessarily correct or meant to be the interesting part. The interesting part is that 25GB is more likely to sit idle than 100GB. The lower price of one triggers more impulsive purchases, whereas the other more consistently attracts people with intent to use it.
So I could sell 25GB promos all day and only have to provide service to a fraction of the ones that purchased it. Of course, obligatory "I will provide service to everyone who purchases it," but realistically, only a fraction of the ones buying it ever actually took me up on that. That's where overselling and promotions thrive: The impulse but low use threshold.
Where that threshold exists for a seedbox, if it does at all, would be an interesting experiment.
No wonder after Finland's accession to NATO.
While you were in vacation, things changed. Now the prices are lower than before the Russians cut the gas. They even went negative for a bit.
Urgently go to the closest meeting to be informed on the latest trends and directions regarding trolling. Also, this is the place where your work on this board should happen:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/177624/the-russia-vs-ukraine-thread-lets-not-derail-other-threads#latest
In all fairness to any provider, be it, pm, hs, or any other provider, a decrease in power prices is not always directly passed to the business, nor the other services that increased their prices due to the power price crisis, at least not immediately. So I would not expect to see any change until I have proof that they're receiving lower monthly bills (for example, you know the prices for their building, you know other providers in the same Building who reduced prices, etc),
Right now the argument is: Energy is cheaper in Finland, but do you know what are X provider's bills, are they lower? if so, I would bash that hypocrite provider, if not, I would just have to wait and give the provider the benefit of the doubt
I do have idling seedboxes, so yes, seedbox idlers do exist. You barely reply to support tickets (Which I haven't used much). And the quality of your seedboxes is getting much worse ever since you started cutting corners and consolidating. I suggest you stop talking so much because you are actually not making your situation better. My argument above is more than enough to defend you, your own wall does not IMHO, the first one is ok, but the second one isn't, it makes you look worse... I am not complaining about your prices, I am just not satisfied with the arguments you made, I am still satisfied with what I get for what I am paying and compared to other providers the price is still cheaper (at least for the offers I have).
There is none, all it takes not to stop / remove torrent and resources are being used.
Yes, went negative, but prices are not lower than ever before yet, also a few weeks for very low cost energy does not make a trend.
Infact, this is what i came to say for OP @FranzVonVirMach and everyone: Few weeks cheap electricity makes NO difference. It takes months to take an effect at the end user level unless direct on spot pricing, even then month+ because billing is monthly.
So true! Prices always skyrocket, but come down very very slowly. Energy price is only one component, everything else is still up.
Inflation already happened, prices are not really coming down, historically no government let's deflation to really happen. Prices are permanently up more or less, to get back to same absolute numbers (with less and less buying power), new efficiencies has to be found.
You have zero torrents active seedboxes? :O You are very very rare in that case. Very few people even have multiple, let alone leave one without any torrents.
We reply to every and each ticket, no ticket gets dropped other than by accident.
Stats show much much higher performance than before btw, perhaps you are still on one of the old opterons? We've been doing a few reprovisionings here and there on per user basis, but number of capacity to retire rest of them not sure of the ETA. We've been busy on other projects lately.
interesting id
@PulsedMedia @jar
I think Jar is right generally but not in the case of seedboxes.
On a VPS, if you don’t care about it, things will crash and usage will likely over time go down, or at least not be very high.
I’ve never had an idle VPS have constantly high usage.
BUT, in a seedbox, say you download the latest Avatar, and then you have to do other stuff.
Damn that torrent will be using bandwidth ..
I didn't say that, I said they are lower than before the Russians started the latest phase of their wars and invasions.
That is 7.4 cents per Kw. Regular, pre-pandemic prices, stood at about 5, during the pandemic dropped at 2 and then went up as Finland reopened as well.
In July 2021 they were 0.4 cents higher than now.
I absolutely agree that the wholesale prices do not reflect immediately in the monthly bills, if that would have been so, when the wholesale prices were at their peak at 26 cents per Kw, the bills would have been enormous, but they are coming down for some time and earlier drops are already reflecting in the bills.
Conclusion?
Finland has very low power prices, in general, but they went up a lot, 5 times at their peak compared to normal levels and 13 times compared to pandemic levels and in March they were about 50% higher than prepandemic levels still, however they came down a lot since then.
It will take time for that to reflect in the bills, even more time to reflect in the general (not energy) retail prices but we are getting there.