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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

#151

Post by walrus01 »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #142
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.

they're not obligated to keep anyone as a customer. saying "we don't want your money anymore" is a form of renegotiation.

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

#152

Post by mort96 »

krn wrote: post #141
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.

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.

Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits.

Obviously that's not as good marketing. Products usually look better if you lie about them to make them look better. But lying in marketing shouldn't be legal. And this shouldn't be controversial.

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

#153

Post by randunel »

krn wrote: post #141
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.

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.

I've got unlimited 4G/LTE/5G for €2/mo with reduced bandwidth after 55GB but still unlimited, and true unlimited for €5/mo without any bandwidth restrictions.

I'm proxying traffic through mobile proxies and expect nothing less than unlimited.

What herzer do amounts to false advertising when compared to the mobile traffic examples.

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

#154

Post by romwell »

krn wrote: post #141
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.

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.

Well that's nonsense.

Words have meanings for a reason.

The meaning of the word "unlimited" is not, in fact, "limited, but we won't tell you what the limit is — you'll get to find it out the hard way".

Whatever the terms of the "fair usage" policy are, that's what should be in the description.

Otherwise, is plain old lying and misreading — which for some reason you are OK with.

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

#155

Post by SahAssar »

walrus01 wrote: post #83
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”.

Not even Walmart, hetzner is the ABSOLUTE bottom of the barrel on pricing for no-SLA dedicated servers, this is more like buying a kitchen knife from Dollar General for $1.75 and then complaining it doesn't stay sharp very long.

While they are very cheap I have never had a problem with the quality of their service. Just saying that comparing with dollar general cutlery might not be fair.

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

#156

Post by Spooky23 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #38
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…

> 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.

Gigabit Ethernet usually lands around 80% fully utilized due to overheads and such. That’s not fraud.

Even in a private data center, you’d typically move a workload like that to avoid disruption to neighbors.

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

#157

Post by romwell »

foobiekr wrote: post #138
lazide wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and that's better than lying about the guarantees.

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

#158

Post by toast0 »

googlryas wrote: post #12

Do usage limitations actually affect the bottom line vs throttling? Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine it doesn't cost much more to run a network that is 80% saturated vs a network that is 5% saturated? Basically, why can't they just fairly throttle high usage users when utilization ramps up, and then unthrottle them when usage lowers? Edit: I'm not talking about them reneging on their guarantees, which they've already d…

Traffic prioritization is expensive, but traffic accounting isn't.

It's a lot less work to bill on usage (or cancel accounts for high usage) than to throttle high usage users to keep the network responsive for all users.

The operators are likely paying for usage as well on their paid connections, or indirectly in that as connections fill up, they need faster or more ports and that comes at a cost. It's one thing if your peak traffic comes at their off peak times, but it's more typical to have peaks around the same time as everyone else.

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

#159

Post by mort96 »

cmdli wrote: post #126
worldofmatthew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

But they also have a responsibility not to lie in their marketing, don't they?

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

#160

Post by _tomcat_ »

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…

So you basically read that as nobody would actually mean "unlimited" or "1Gbps".

Do you live your day-to-day telling people lies or what?

None of that behavior sounds rational to me.

I can only imagine 'what? you thought I was going to paint the ENTIRE house!'

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