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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

#81

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.

> top 1% of bandwidth

Closer to top .1% in all honesty

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

#83
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More explicitly stating the limits would be good, but declaring “fraud” is rather exaggerating. You go with Hetzner knowing you’re getting bargain prices, so they’re cutting corners somewhere. This would be like saying Walmart are committing fraud when it turns out their ham is not “finest quality”.

Not even Walmart, hetzner is the ABSOLUTE bottom of the barrel on pricing for no-SLA dedicated servers, this is more like buying a kitchen knife from Dollar General for $1.75 and then complaining it doesn't stay sharp very long.

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

#84
It looks to me as if they know that the content is violating their terms and conditions.

>... We will routinely check your traffic use. If we continue to see such a high amount, we may choose to cancel your contract. (Please see 2.7 of our Terms and conditions ...

>2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among other reasons, if the Customer fails to meet its payment obligations or violates other important customer obligations. A further important reason which may result in us locking or terminating the Customer’s services or account without notice is if the Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product, or violates paragraphs 8.1. - 8.3. of these Terms and Conditions.

>8.1. The Customer is obligated to check and comply with the legal provisions arising from the use of the contractually agreed services, in particular the Telecommunications Act, the Telemedia Act, as well as national and international industrial and intellectual property rights, personal rights, and the requirements of competition and data protection laws on their own. The Customer indemnifies us against all claims of third parties arising from infringements of these obligations.

>8.2. The Customer is obligated not to publish any content that infringes on the rights of third parties or otherwise violates applicable law. This includes in particular, but is not limited to, pornographic or obscene material, extremist content or content that offends common decency, gambling, material that could seriously endanger the morals of children or young people or violate the rights of third parties (copyrights, name rights, trademark rights and data protection rights). This also includes the publication of defamatory content, insults or disparagement of persons or groups of persons.

>8.3. The transmission of spam mail is prohibited. This includes in particular the sending of unauthorized, unsolicited advertising to third parties. When sending emails, it is also prohibited to provide false sender data or to disguise the identity of the sender in any other way. The operation of applications for mining cryptocurrencies remains prohibited. These include, but are not limited to, mining, farming and plotting of cryptocurrencies. We are entitled to lock the Customer’s access to their Hetzner services or account in the event of non-compliance.

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

#85
post #75

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…

This behavior leads me to disregard any advertising of "all you can eat" as a lie, and the speaker of that lie as a dishonest business. American Airlines dealt with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwQr3VcoUvM

yarrr, tis not a man, tis a relentless eating machine

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

#86
post #65

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.

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.

that is the problem with oversubscribing though. making it possible to say "you have a guaranteed bandwith of X% of the total capacity" is a hard problem to solve, especially inside the core layers of the network, where traffic gets aggregated.

How are you going to make sure every tenant gets its share of bandwith equally? It requires traffic engineering (like RSVP-TE, which in term requires an MPLS network.) and a proper QoS setup. both of which are not trivial to implement at scale.

Going further down the network towards to aggregate layer is far more doable (between switches etc), but doing it across core links it is actually quite difficult to guarantee bandwith.

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

#87

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.

Why not say that you guarantee 50TB of bandwidth and use above that is subject to AUP or throttling on the pricing page? If I buy "unlimited" something, I do expect to use it without limits.

This is not to say that I don't think 250TB is excessive, but sales transparency is important.

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

#88

The autobahn also has no general speed limit. That does not mean you are welcome to go 300 km/h all the time. Unfortunately some peoples stupidity makes it necessary to impose fixed rules for everyone.

Sorry but that's a really bad analogy. Autobahn speed limit is related to safety and a lot of factors.

Here it's simply a matter of money. If more than 200TB/month triggers an angry email, then just state they have a limit of 200TB instead of stating unlimited. It's not so complex.

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

#89
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…

"Unlimited 1 Gbps" should be unlimited. Otherwise it's downright fraud to label it "unlimited".

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

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More explicitly stating the limits would be good, but declaring “fraud” is rather exaggerating. You go with Hetzner knowing you’re getting bargain prices, so they’re cutting corners somewhere. This would be like saying Walmart are committing fraud when it turns out their ham is not “finest quality”.

Eh, the customer should get to know where they are cutting corners aka what they are paying for. A better example is a Walmart selling spam as ham. How does your example make false advertisement okay?

“We’ll of course they are cutting corners!” doesn’t seem like a defense at all to me.

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