EU datacenter efficiency rules pass, what's your plan?

I have a dedicated server at Hetzner Helsinki and one at a local provider in Istanbul. The Helsinki machine is colder, cheaper to cool, and the electricity is nuclear+hydro. The Istanbul machine is warmer, more expensive per kW, and the datacenter has a diesel generator that runs every Tuesday for "testing" that you can smell from the street.

The EU rules do not apply to my Istanbul box but they should. The diesel testing alone probably violates ten directives. Good hosting is not just about the CPU.

Yes But The Price Is Different. My Friend Says The Contabo Is Cheaper For The Same Power And The Pue Is Not His Problem Because He Rents The Single Server Not The Whole Room. This Is The Point I Am Making. The Little Guy Does Not Care About Pue, He Cares About Euro Per Month.

Also I Am Tired Of The Capital Letters But I Cannot Stop Now. It Is A Habit From 2012.

This is what I mean about the email angle. When your host passes through compliance costs, they do not call you. They update the billing system, which triggers an invoice email, which hits a spam filter because the invoice domain changed SPF records last month. I have seen this exact failure mode at three different hosts this year.

Check your DMARC. I am not joking. The cost increase is the second problem. The first problem is not knowing about the cost increase because the email is in quarantine.

This is already happening. Hetzner sent a compliance survey in March to all colocation customers. The subject line was "Action Required: Energy Profile Update." I know three people who missed it because it matched their filter for fake urgent messages.

The actual PUE reporting is straightforward if you are already metering properly. The heat reuse plan is the fiction. My contract says I lease space and power. It does not say I lease a relationship with the district heating authority of Falkenstein. RR

Exactly. Your "cloud" is just someone else's computer with marketing, and now the marketing includes "sustainable heat reuse roadmap" that means a PDF and a handshake with a municipal office. I worked at a place where the "heat reuse" was a single pipe to the parking garage snow melt system. It ran twice in five years.

The big clouds will do what they always do: buy RECs, publish whitepapers, and pass the cost to enterprise customers who do not read line items. AWS already bills "regulatory compliance" as a separate line in some regions. Wait for it in eu-west-1.

I am watching this from Zurich where electricity costs 0.35 CHF per kWh and nobody blinks. The PUE rules are irrelevant if your power is already expensive enough to force efficiency. My colo provider published their PUE last year: 1.18. They are already compliant for 2028 and they raised prices 8% anyway "due to market conditions."

The IPv4 market is more predictable than EU energy regulation. At least with IPv4 you know the price only goes up.

This is what I expected. The compliance is the excuse, not the reason. In Lyon my EDF bill at home went up 15% last year and there is no datacenter in my apartment. The hosts will blame Brussels, the electricity company will blame the war, and my Proxmox cluster will keep running either way.

I checked and Online.net is owned by Iliad now. Same company as Free. If anyone can navigate French bureaucracy it is them. I am not moving.

Wey I do not even have dmarc, I have a 2u server and a letsencrypt cert and that is it. My host sends me invoices by email and sometimes they arrive and sometimes they do not. If the eu rules make them send MORE emails then I will miss MORE invoices and then my server gets suspended. This is the real problem.

Also I looked up PUE and I still do not understand how they measure it. Is it like the electric meter divided by something? Whatever. Mi servidor, mi problema but also THEIR problema now.

Total facility power divided by IT equipment power. So if your datacenter uses 1.2 megawatts total and your servers use 1 megawatt, PUE is 1.2. The 0.2 is cooling, lighting, losses, the security guard's kettle.

Under 1.2 by 2028 is aggressive for older buildings. Most London facilities are at 1.4 or worse. The ones that will struggle are the converted warehouses in Slough, not the new builds in Iceland or Finland.

Finland is not Iceland. Helsinki is 1.15 in summer because they still need chillers. Reykjavik is 1.03 because we do not. The difference matters if you are choosing between Hetzner locations. Falkenstein is 1.18, Helsinki is 1.15, and the price is the same. Pick Helsinki for the PUE if you care about such things. I pick based on latency to my users.