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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

#141

Post by krn »

teej wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly. In my country, an "Unlimited 4G LTE" data plan costs 12 EUR. But without any "fair usage" policy that would be simply impossible. Nobody would expect to use tens of TBs per month without ever being contacted or heavily throttled.

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

#142

Post by snoopy_telex »

purplerabbit wrote: post #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 hav…

What is being renegotiated? The contact isn’t being rewritten. It still states they have unlimited bandwidth. They’re just being told to not make use of contracted resource or the contract will be terminated. That’s not a renegotiation.

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

#143

Post by foobiekr »

nimbius wrote: post #61
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…

IMO hetzner is missing a golden opportunity to offer a dedicated or more powerful colocated data center solution to this client. being able to service the tenants needs should be their only concern. throttling just leaves sour grapes for everyone, and might mask hetzner having capacity issues supporting their workload..cost clearly isn't the problem here.

Combining statistical multiplexing, fixed WAN bandwidth and SLAs with penalties are basically a recipe for massive losses.

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

#144

Post by walrus01 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #64
walrus01 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at the size and scale of hetzner an individual 100Gbps IP transit circuit is considerably less costly than $30k a month. more like 5-6k max at a major IX point. this also ignores how much of their traffic is settlement free peering to other adjacent ISPs.

From what I remember; FDC has 100Gbit/s for $4,999/month.

fdc is not a transit provider specialist with POPs in every major global city (as measured by CAIDA ASrank size) similar to Cogent or Telia or level3, which a hosting company like hetzner might become a customer of, rather, it's a hosting company

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

#145

Post by zootboy »

purplerabbit wrote: post #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 hav…

I think part of the frustration is the asymmetry of the situation. Good luck telling Hetzner that you'll be paying "up to $20 per month" for your server. The moment you under-pay, they drop you. But somehow it's OK that they can arbitrarily cut back on the service they promised and you just have to accept it?

Whether or not something is technically allowed in the fine print is different from whether or not it's a shitty thing to do. Having secret, unpublished limits on a supposedly-unlimited service is shitty. They'll be getting no empathy from me.

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

#146

Post by the_biot »

walrus01 wrote: post #112
the_biot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run an ISP network, and I feel their pain. But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract. The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. That's a pretty lame way to resolve what is basically a marketing problem -- they want to sell a bandwidth-limited service as unlimited i.e. lie about it. Say what you will about fa…

> have no fair use policy you think an ISP the size of hetzner or OVH or similar has no TOS/AUP that they put a lot of time and thought into before publishing, and putting in the customer new-order workflow?!??!

Perhaps you could point to the document that spells out their fair use policy? Hetzner certainly didn't.

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

#147

Post by icehawk »

walrus01 wrote: post #112
the_biot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run an ISP network, and I feel their pain. But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract. The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. That's a pretty lame way to resolve what is basically a marketing problem -- they want to sell a bandwidth-limited service as unlimited i.e. lie about it. Say what you will about fa…

> have no fair use policy you think an ISP the size of hetzner or OVH or similar has no TOS/AUP that they put a lot of time and thought into before publishing, and putting in the customer new-order workflow?!??!

There are terms and conditions and, there's no "fair use" clauses for bandwidth in the terms and conditions.

It feels a bad-faith interpretation of the "Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" portion of section 2.7.

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

#148

Post by istinetz »

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…

> 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'.

It's not a "loophole" to use 80% of the capacity that was advertised and sold to you. If they want to sell "unlimited within reason" capacity, they should advertise "unlimited within reason", instead of "unlimited".

I really don't understand your viewpoint.

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

#149

Post by istinetz »

turtlebits wrote: post #118
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.

It's not a lie, it's marketing (.. well I guess that is a lie then). Unlimited plans exist because demand isn't consistent, and shared bandwidth provides a way to lower prices. If I was guaranteed max bandwidth on 5G all the time on my cellular plan, I'd pay a lot more than $40/month.

>If I was guaranteed max bandwidth on 5G all the time on my cellular plan, I'd pay a lot more than $40/month.

Okay, so the ISP expects that people won't use what they're sold. That sounds like their problem and their bad planning.

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

#150

Post by tuetuopay »

secondcoming wrote: post #125
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.

It really depends how wide your impact is. When you have a lot of instances with this behaviour, you generate a lot of CPU steal for the neighbors on the same hypervisor (depending on the mitigations they put in place). If you happen to impact too many customers (many performance issue tickets), then the CSP will be more than happy to reach out to you to "upgrade" you.

It really boils down to the business impact you have on them. Sure, you pay for the resource, but they are not guaranteed. And it is up to their discretion to de-prioritize your VMs on the HV, so that you're the last to get scheduled when the host's CPU is starved. This is the whole 'CPU credits' thing on AWS that they document in [0] where you can burst above the baseline. Interestingly, note that the baseline is in the 30% ballpark in their illustration on the bottom of the page :)

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...

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