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Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

lowendtalk.com

101–110 of 311 posts

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

#101
I don't understand why everyone in this thread is being so pedantic, accusing Hetzner of "lying", etc.

If you are subscribing to something and the subscription price changes, that's not "lying", that's one party renegotiating. Furthermore, Hetzner's legal agreement allows them to do this.

Sure, Hetzner could publish "up to X TB / month" (and it sounds like it should considering their apparent audience). But let's have a little empathy here, sheesh.

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

#102
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you buy ham from a bargain supermarket, you are effectively buying spam. I’m ok with that, yes. As a consumer, I should my use my judgement as to why the price is what it is.

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

#103
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

I would personally assume that it would include 100% 24/7 (barring reasonable service outages). That's what "unlimited" means.

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

#104
I work for a cloud provider (not hetzner), and sorry, but this is normal behaviour for them.

Every infrastructure is based on the principle that nobody will use all of their ability at the same time. Road network? Good luck with a whole city in their cars at the exact same time. Power distribution? Tell that to the british grid when all of britain turns on their kettles at the same time during sports events (live broadcasts are out of phase from regions to the next to alleviate this issue). Or to their sewage system, where all toilets flush at the same time once the human byproduct of said kettles is produced.

So yes, this is a hosting provider where the bandwidth is shared, they overcommit it, otherwise they would not be able to do them for that cheap (in case of hetzner), or at all at a profit (for other providers that are not bottom-end). Here they tell it is unlimited, because there is no data cap. The same goes for virtual machines in a cloud environment, those too are overcommitted, and I can guarantee you that if you spawn AWS instances and use 80% flat of CPU 24/7/365 you'll get the same kind of email directing you to the cpu dedicated instances.

Actually, they even did you a favor for not kicking you out due to "trust and safety" flagging you as fraud (like sending spam or ddos, which they 100% should have btw).

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

#105
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fine, but getting back to the analogy, you have to specify how your bandwidth is limited from the outset, you can't just offer it as unlimited and then say, "Nooooooo, you obese whale, not like that!" once it disadvantages your business.

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

#106
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 not how anything in the consumer world works. If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

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

#107

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.

>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.

That just means that almost everything in world has a level of dishonesty and fraud. And just because it happens, it doesn't mean we should just accept it.

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

#108
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…

If some large American ISP did this people would be at pitchforks. Hetzner gets a defense

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

#109
post #9

"Unlimited" really should mean fully unlimited. I also take issue with "up to" and other vagueness. There should be clear metrics and sizes that are precise and not abbreviated in all ads and offers; and offers should also be public and non-discriminatory. A 'service check' for an address should also constitute a 'binding offer' (I.E. the ISP had better be very sure service can be provided at that address!)

"Unlimited" is a marketing gimmick. There is no way to provide unlimited of anything. In most cases, "Unlimited" means you won't be cut off at a specific threshold, but the limits are to the provider's discretion.

The other case is that you buy a specific usage tier, but that is probably going to cost a lot more, which is why "unlimited" plans exist.

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

#110
post #76
post #9

"Unlimited" really should mean fully unlimited. I also take issue with "up to" and other vagueness. There should be clear metrics and sizes that are precise and not abbreviated in all ads and offers; and offers should also be public and non-discriminatory. A 'service check' for an address should also constitute a 'binding offer' (I.E. the ISP had better be very sure service can be provided at that address!)

Not using 'up to' is opening up all kinds of other cans of worms. Ok, 100mbps.... to where? The switch you're plugged into? The router at the data center? Some other random host in the network? Some other random host outside the network? So yea, everything on almost every network without a dedicated circuit is 'up to' simply because you can make no other guarantees.

also, what do you count as bandwith?

Simply sending packets down a wire usually limits one to the physical speed of the interface, but even then some kind of packets might get dropped by various filters/mechanisms along the way.

For instance, should i be able to use my full bandwith of my connection by sending purely BUM traffic down the link? Somewhere in the network, some policer is going to start dropping BUM traffic to protect the network against flooding.

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