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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

#121

Post by blowski »

NullPrefix wrote: post #114
blowski wrote: 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”.

Is it still ok if the ham is made from cats and dogs? It's not like you're paying premium for it, so can you complain? Please note that nowhere on the packaging it says anything about cat and dog meat.

You’re rather stretching the analogy in a way that wasn’t there. I said a lower level of quality, not an entirely different product.

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

#122

Post by NullPrefix »

walrus01 wrote: post #46
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.

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 f…

Blessing from legal team doesn't mean it's not fraud. Blessing from legal team means they are willing to defend this position in court

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

#123

Post by williamscales »

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.

> if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

Sure? I want stuff that works, damn if it’s cheap lol.

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

#124

Post by dietrichepp »

Whenever I see that some resource is "unlimited", my take is that the company either doesn't know what the limit is, the company is gambling that users won't run into the limit, or they are just pretending that the limit does not exist.

Oversubscription is normal and I am happy to pay for a service that is oversubscribed. I just want to know what I am paying for. Am I paying for "guaranteed X GB/month, up to X+Y GB/month"? Cool, I love it. Are you gambling that enough users will sign up and pay you to subsidize unlimited bandwidth / unlimited storage / unlimited anything? I want to know.

A normal business relationship with a vendor should be profitable for the vendor. Yes, I have an interest in paying less money for services--but being able to use those services at all is usually more important than squeezing a few bucks in discounts out of the vendor. If my deal with a vendor is unprofitable for the vendor, it creates a risk that the vendor will in the future terminate the relationship, discontinue the service, or even go out of business.

It's up to the company to figure out what the right SLOs/SLAs/SLIs are. That's actually a core part of what I am paying for when I sign up for cloud services or colo services or whatever. There's a delicate balance where you figure out an SLO that is possible for the company to support, while still looking good in marketing materials, and understandable by technical end-users.

If your company provides infrastructure without SLOs, or if key SLOs are missing, then I'm going to be a bit hesitant. A missing SLO is a sign that your company hasn't done the work of figuring out how supportable a particular feature is (like "unlimited bandwidth").

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

#125

Post by secondcoming »

tuetuopay wrote: post #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 bro…

Some of our GCP machines use far more than 80% CPU 24/7/365 on both preemptible and non-preemptible instances. We've yet to be asked to move to dedicated machines. It was pretty much the same when we were on AWS.

I don't see how a cloud provider can complain about high CPU-usage if they bill by the machine and by the minute. Otherwise 20% of your bill is for idle CPUs.

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

#126

Post by cmdli »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #7
yread wrote: post #4

250TB/month is about 770 Mbps sustained. And you still only get a strongly worded letter!

Does not matter. Hetzner say Unlimited and Guaranteed traffic at 1Gbit/s with no fair use policy mentioned for that port speed.

True, but Hetzner has no obligation to serve every customer. I would say this customer has gotten more than their money's worth and Hetzner is well within their rights to no longer provide service.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1499/

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

#127

Post by blowski »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #97
blowski wrote: 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”.

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.

Ah if only law was so clearly black and white.

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

#128

Post by gcbirzan »

tuetuopay wrote: post #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 bro…

> 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.

Yeah, that's bullshit.

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

#129

Post by NullPrefix »

jabbany wrote: post #93
danaris wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hin…

"up to X Mbps" would imply "up to $y"

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

#130

Post by amluto »

Spivak wrote: post #53
vorpalhex wrote: post #44

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.

If I rent a car, I see the pricing up front. And the pricing does not depend on how often I open the trunk or how far I turn the steering wheel.
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