Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by tomjen3 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

mdasen wrote: 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…

AWS is overcharging badly. I wouldn't even take them seriously if you want to do something with e.g video. Charging per GB is a joke in a world where my (expensive) ISP doesn't even offer anything less than 30/30mb.

IMHO Hertzer is the only hosting company that get what business it is in. AWS makes a ton of sense if you need to rent serious iron to do OCR on 100+ GB of scans of corporate documents, you need GPU power to train your AI model, or you are a startup that needs to grow 50% a month.

If you are an established company with a normal demand model, AWS will rip you alive.

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

#132

Post by blowski » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #100

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”.

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 con…

Then don’t buy from cheap providers! Those who won’t use anywhere near the traffic cap get cheaper prices, you get more certainty from your supplier. Everybody wins.

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

#133

Post by jabbany » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #129

jabbany wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Hah. If only corporations were that nice lol.

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

#134

Post by walrus01 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

altairprime wrote: post #98

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.

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 a…

plenty of hosting companies WILL sell you 1G dedicated to saturate and will be totally happy about doing so, if you're up front about what you intend to do and pay for it accordingly.

it's a very common thing these days to buy something like a 1.5 Gbps average commit of traffic on a 10G 1310 LR hand off port to the ISP, and move traffic in a daily sine wave pattern that varies anywhere between 500 Mbps at 0300 in the morning and 1.5 to 2.5 Gbps in the evening peak.

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

#135

Post by zdragnar » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #28

This feels a bit like a case of "this is why we can't have nice things".

It's the same reason why one of my jobs switched from unlimited PTO to limited PTO. 98% of employees took sane amounts of time off. 2% (if that) abused it rather extensively.

It might just be a tale as old as time.

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

#136

Post by jeroenhd » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

filleokus wrote: post #33

Slightly OT: Suppose you want to deliver a couple of 100’s Mbps to people in EU on the cheap, how would you do it? Assume it’s static files, so the server doesn’t need to be that beefy. Hetzner would probably be my first choice. Even though I’ve hade some strangely slow connections there sometimes. Other more enterprisey providers like Datapacket seem to be significantly more expensive.

I rent a VPS with Leaseweb. Their prices aren't the lowest, but their performance is better than many cheaper alternatives.

There is no unlimited data. Either data centers are lying to you, or they're going to end your contract the month after you start sending hundreds of TB.

Their data plans clearly state the traffic limits and their terms state the overcharge you can expect. If you need more network traffic than the 15TB they offer VPS servers, you can probably just ask, set up some dedicated , or set up a CDN (listing price: "contact us", though Cloudflare is likely cheaper) or rent yourself a full colo rack.

Other VPS providers are similar, but always check the uplink speed (I've noticed German and French providers tend to stick to only 100mbps) and the data limits; anything that sounds like "unlimited" isn't and should be avoided if you're worried about data cost. Your only real option is to avoid the cheap market and go midrange or high end because data is expensive, especially at over 800mbps consistently.

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

#137

Post by altairprime » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #134

altairprime wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

plenty of hosting companies WILL sell you 1G dedicated to saturate and will be totally happy about doing so, if you're up front about what you intend to do and pay for it accordingly. it's a very common thing these days to buy something like a 1.5 Gbps average commit of traffic on a 10G 1310 LR hand off port to the ISP, and move traffic in a daily sine wave pattern that varies anywhere between 500 Mbps at 0300 in the…

Correct, but "1G saturated commit" and "1.5 Gbps average commit" are not marketed as "unlimited", since they are quite specific and offered without the human judgment call about whether the "unlimited" usage is reasonable.

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

#138

Post by foobiekr » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #113

teej wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet, that’s not how data center bandwidth is typically sold. Weird huh? It’s total bait and switch, and probably false advertising/fraud.

A lot of colo and DC bandwidth is sold as port speed for the connection with no guarantees at all as to sustained bitrate to any other port including egress.

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

#139

Post by toast0 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

> If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.

Well, they could put that in the policies or the offer. Or be more specific in the email.

But 1G isn't really that much. I don't have a use for that much bandwidth at the moment, but it's not like you need that much compute to pump out 1G, so pick the offering with enough compute and enough bandwidth, and there you go. You don't always need an SLA, especially if you can load balance over multiple bottom of the barrel hosts. Unmetetered 1G for not a lot of money is a credible offer, so I'd take an established provider at their word; lots of hosting offers have a port speed and a traffic limit and overage fees listed.

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

#140

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

> Here they tell it is unlimited, because there is no data cap

There literally is a data cap...and it is one which Hetzner refuses to specify. The unspecified data cap is "drastically lower" (in Hetzner's own words) than even the 80% usage which the customer was hitting.

If you have to use drastically less than 100% usage, then those numbers should absolutely be published and using the term "unlimited" instead of publishing the limits is highly unethical.

The "other companies do it too" argument is silly since the behavior shouldn't be normalized in the first place.