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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

#91

Post by macspoofing »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43
walrus01 wrote: post #29

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.

>An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud

'Fraud' is too strong of word. Almost everything in the world has some level of over-subscription. I don't know for sure BUT if every person and business turned all their water taps on full blast, I think we may have a problem.

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

#92

Post by johndough »

walrus01 wrote: post #35
corrral wrote: 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…

> reaching out nicely to a customer

Threatening termination for using what was advertised does not seem very nice to me - especially when they specifically removed traffic limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500

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

#93

Post by jabbany »

danaris wrote: post #65
walrus01 wrote: post #29

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.

To be fair most, residential ISPs I've used do only advertise something like "up to X Mbps" [https://imgur.com/a/Qvp8i61] and some will have asterisks that further lead to documentation about things like "soft data caps" after a certain amount of TB transferred per month etc.

Also residential ISPs generally don't even have SLAs so you could have days without Internet... probably also why they do not try to even hint at any guaranteed bandwidth. Depending on the situation, you might have none :)

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

#94

Post by cbozeman »

walrus01 wrote: post #35
corrral wrote: 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…

What part of, "Don't advertise something as 'unlimited' if it isn't unlimited" is difficult for you?

It seems pretty damn simple. Hetzner used to have transfer limits. It was 20 TB for cheap servers when I was using them (2017-2019). It was bumped up to 50 TB in 2020.

I don't disagree with you that a user consuming 250 TB of transfer should be paying for that transfer, though. I'm disagreeing with the marketing. It's deceptive, and it causes problems that are the genesis of this post. You know what's supremely simpler? Just commit to a hard limit on transfer and be done with it.

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

#96

Post by kube-system »

walrus01 wrote: post #69
kube-system wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the biggest difference is that "Please don't stay here more than 2 hours" clearly means that you can't sit around and eat all day.

"[don't do things that] impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" doesn't make it very clear that there are data caps.

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

#97

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

blowski wrote: post #73
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43

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”.

Fraud is when you tell a lie to get business. It doesn't really matter if the victim can be blamed because they should have totally known better. Yes, if Walmart advertises ham for an impossibly low price and then proceeds to sell a product that's labeled ham but is actually 95% chicken by volume it's still fraud even if the customer should have known something was up.

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

#98

Post by altairprime »

walrus01 wrote: post #29
cglan wrote: 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.

And we would term the users who did max out their circuit at near line rate 24/7.

If you bring a world eating champion to an all-you-can-eat buffet, they'll end up being refused service and banned from eating there after a few visits.

Attempting to apply a dictionary-literal reading of 'Unlimited' to a business advertisement of 'Unlimited' is unlikely to get very far in a court of law: such a literal interpretation attempts to create and exploit a loophole for one's own benefit at extreme cost to the provider, by refusing a common sense interpretation of 'Unlimited within reason'.

Saturating 1G ethernet continuously for a month exceeds what I consider reasonable, and I would not expect a court to be convinced otherwise.

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

#99

Post by marcosdumay »

walrus01 wrote: post #24

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.

That's easy to solve; just don't promise unlimited bandwidth. Don't lie and people won't complain that you lied.

Yes, they provided a very good service for the money they received. One would be hard pressed trying to find a better deal. Yet, they did lie.

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

#100

Post by short_sells_poo »

blowski wrote: post #73
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43

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”.

Your analogy is just flat out wrong. This is like Walmart saying their ham is 100% pork and then it turns out there is 20% chicken in there. And then there are apologists going around saying "oh but if it was 100% pork it would be more expensive, you really should expect your counterparty to be dishonest and cheat you at that price point."

If the sales page says "1 gigabit unlimited", I don't care about any other considerations. It either is or isn't "1 gigabit unlimited". If any part of that statement is untrue, then the the provider should be honest and say so.

I'm so fed up with the normalization of this slimy behavior.

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