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Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

lowendtalk.com

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

#61
post #6

To hit 250TB in a month, the person would need to do 809Mbps (assuming a 30 day month). I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better. That would be $16,691 worth of transfer from AWS (US East pricing for 250TB to the internet). I'm not arguing that AWS isn't overcharging, just putting up a comparison. Even at $0.01/G…

IMO hetzner is missing a golden opportunity to offer a dedicated or more powerful colocated data center solution to this client. being able to service the tenants needs should be their only concern. throttling just leaves sour grapes for everyone, and might mask hetzner having capacity issues supporting their workload..cost clearly isn't the problem here.

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

#62
post #6

To hit 250TB in a month, the person would need to do 809Mbps (assuming a 30 day month). I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better. That would be $16,691 worth of transfer from AWS (US East pricing for 250TB to the internet). I'm not arguing that AWS isn't overcharging, just putting up a comparison. Even at $0.01/G…

> Even at $0.01/GB, that would be $2,560.

That's still overpriced by a factor of 10. Hetzner overage price for the 10G link is 1 euro / TB or about $0.001/GB. That seems pretty reasonable.

So we're really looking at something more like $250/month.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic

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

#63
post #57

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.

> if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo. At least in my experience, gigabit fiber is usually $100/mo in fiber markets. I would definitely pay $250/mo if it meant I had a guaranteed line rate, but I can’t. I think a lot of people would take $250 for guaranteed truly unlimited continuously saturated gigabit, actually.

unless you are on an active ethernet fiber last mile circuit, an ISP can't really sell "dedicated" business 1:1 capacity on a GPON circuit.

if you found yourself operating a small regional bank branch or similar and wanted a business circuit in some suburb of a major city you'd more realistically be looking at $700-800/mo for a 1Gbps dedicated business DIA circuit on a 36-60 mo term.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is probably paying ~$300/mo/Gbps for their transit capacity. While I’m sure this particular account isn’t profitable for them, they’re not losing a boatload of money from it either. Hard to blame the user if they advertise it as unlimited.

at the size and scale of hetzner an individual 100Gbps IP transit circuit is considerably less costly than $30k a month. more like 5-6k max at a major IX point. this also ignores how much of their traffic is settlement free peering to other adjacent ISPs.

From what I remember; FDC has 100Gbit/s for $4,999/month.

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

#65
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.

It wouldn't be that hard for them to sell connections as something like "guaranteed 20Mbps, peak 100Mbps" and, if they have to impose limits, impose them at the point where the "guaranteed" would be running constantly.

The problem is they don't want to do that, because it's much snazzier to just market the peak speed.

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

#66
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honest all-you-can eat buffets do not cut people off, they post time-limits.

https://blorg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bacchanal-buffe...

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

#67
post #6

To hit 250TB in a month, the person would need to do 809Mbps (assuming a 30 day month). I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better. That would be $16,691 worth of transfer from AWS (US East pricing for 250TB to the internet). I'm not arguing that AWS isn't overcharging, just putting up a comparison. Even at $0.01/G…

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity Why ever not? If you sell someone something but only let them use less than 80% of it, that feels like fraud.

That's more than a feeling. It's literally bait and switch.

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

#68
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If you rent a car and it’s still in your possession but turned off they don’t stop charging you.

Well luckily it's very obvious when I still have a car in my driveway.

It's not obvious that a script got caught in a loop and decided to write up a $5000 bill overnight.

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honest all-you-can eat buffets do not cut people off, they post time-limits. https://blorg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bacchanal-buffe...

to extend this analogy, the posted time limit at the entrance of the buffet is similar to what's in their TOS/AUP that the customer agreed to before ever starting the service in the first place.

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

#70
post #6

To hit 250TB in a month, the person would need to do 809Mbps (assuming a 30 day month). I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better. That would be $16,691 worth of transfer from AWS (US East pricing for 250TB to the internet). I'm not arguing that AWS isn't overcharging, just putting up a comparison. Even at $0.01/G…

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better.

There is in fact a very clearly stated limit. It's unlimited.

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