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Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

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Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. Raises hand The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.

reaching out nicely to a customer that's probably in the top 0.02% of your bandwidth users for their package/plan and asking them to move to a more serious/expensive service is not a lie... i should also note that a very common reason for a dedicated hosting company's server to go wild on upstream bandwidth is something misconfigured or compromised, and being used maliciously by some external 3rd party. not actual ba…

Of course advertising one thing then saying, "well, actually, no" means you lied. Even if you're "nice" about it.

It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#42

I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. This person is probably paying like 50 bucks a month or less and is in the top 1% of bandwidth users as measured by individual ethernet ports from a top of rack aggregation switch or similar.

Assuming they are in the top 1%, that means 99 other customers are happy to overpay and subsidize them (and the provider pockets the difference).

What's the problem, exactly?

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#43
post #21

I don't get it. If you're paying for 1Gbps then why does it matter how much you use up to that amount? If they're overselling their capacity then they should just stop doing that. If they can only handle 80% of the sustained capacity, only sell up to that amount. You pay for pipe capacity, you don't pay for usage according to sales page. If they want to change their business model they can. It's not my fault that I'm…

every isp ever since the dawn of the commercial internet oversells its capacity, you rely on 98% of the users not actually trying to max out their circuit at near line rate 24x7. if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud, and doesn't make it okay. If you can't actually sell that capacity, just say up front what you're actually selling people.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#44
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and their systems are designed to make controlling it difficult to impossible while locking people in to their ecosystem.

How are their systems designed to make controlling cost difficult? I've found it exceptionally easy to find places where things are suboptimal and it's always quite clear to me how much something will cost before I do it.

I had an engineer run up a $5k sagemaker bill because they didn't realize "stopped" was different from "terminated".

You also can't set a max billing limit (or a soft limit).

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#45

Slightly OT: Suppose you want to deliver a couple of 100’s Mbps to people in EU on the cheap, how would you do it? Assume it’s static files, so the server doesn’t need to be that beefy. Hetzner would probably be my first choice. Even though I’ve hade some strangely slow connections there sometimes. Other more enterprisey providers like Datapacket seem to be significantly more expensive.

Cloudflare is an option, unless there’s a reason that it’s a bad idea in the EU?

I front my Hetzner instance w/ then, works great.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every isp ever since the dawn of the commercial internet oversells its capacity, you rely on 98% of the users not actually trying to max out their circuit at near line rate 24x7. if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud, and doesn't make it okay. If you can't actually sell that capacity, just say up front what you're actually selling people.

there are plenty of much more expensive dedicated hosting companies that are totally upfront about real costs.

heztner and OVH and other bottom of the barrel pricing hosting companies are their own special breed of thing.

you're not going to get for $40-50/mo what you would get for $250/mo.

their TOS/AUP almost certainly covers this (you think that a company the size of hetzner didn't run this by real legal experts first?). it's not fraud.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#47

I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. This person is probably paying like 50 bucks a month or less and is in the top 1% of bandwidth users as measured by individual ethernet ports from a top of rack aggregation switch or similar.

If there's a limit, just post it. Don't lie and say unlimited. What's hard about that?

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reaching out nicely to a customer that's probably in the top 0.02% of your bandwidth users for their package/plan and asking them to move to a more serious/expensive service is not a lie... i should also note that a very common reason for a dedicated hosting company's server to go wild on upstream bandwidth is something misconfigured or compromised, and being used maliciously by some external 3rd party. not actual ba…

Of course advertising one thing then saying, "well, actually, no" means you lied. Even if you're "nice" about it. It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.

no, this is more like running a buffet restaurant with an all you can eat buffet.

98% of your customers show up and eat three gargantuan heaping plates, are totally satisfied, and can barely walk back to their cars.

the other 2% show up at 3 in the afternoon, stay for six hours, eat ten plates of crab legs and roast beef.

maybe you notice those 2% of customers and say nothing.

if the same person comes back every week and loads up on ten plates of crab legs, you nicely remind them of the socially acceptable use of an all you can eat buffet.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#49
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. Raises hand The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.

reaching out nicely to a customer that's probably in the top 0.02% of your bandwidth users for their package/plan and asking them to move to a more serious/expensive service is not a lie... i should also note that a very common reason for a dedicated hosting company's server to go wild on upstream bandwidth is something misconfigured or compromised, and being used maliciously by some external 3rd party. not actual ba…

Yes — the “lie” was before that, when they told the person untruthfully a cheap instance would have a certain bandwidth and unlimited traffic.

Lying to close a deal is fraud: they should have disclosed the limits upfront.

If they want to charge for high utilization of bandwidth, they should bill for traffic — like everyone else.

I’ve also never had a buffet try to restrict “unlimited” in the way you’re suggesting — they’ve been quite upfront about their restrictions.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250TB/month is still way, way below "unlimited" though.

It's not "way, way" below when pegging the link is 320TB/month.

I feel fairly comfortably describing 250TB as far, far below 350TB.
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