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Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

lowendtalk.com

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

#161

Post by gernb »

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.

You should try that at your local fast food place that has free unlimited refills. Drive up a tanker trunk and trying filling it up with unlimited soda.

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

#162

Post by freemint »

corrral wrote: post #27
walrus01 wrote: post #24

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. This person is probably paying like 50 bucks a month or less and is in the top 1% of bandwidth users as measured by individual ethernet ports from a top of rack aggregation switch or similar.

> 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.

How does Hetzner lie here? They provided unlimited 1-ish GBit/s sustained for every month they were in contract. It is their right to choose to not do business with that user as laid out in the short ToS.

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

#163

Post by gfaster »

blowski wrote: post #132
short_sells_poo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cheap is not a license to lie. I don't understand why people are defending this, if these companies weren't lying about what they're selling then nobody would be complaining. "1gbps for 250TB" or whatever it is simply the honest way to sell a product.

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

#164

Post by foobiekr »

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…

The traditional solution to this problem is to sell a fractional circuit with bursting and average billing for overage to let the economics work things out. It actually is quite a bit harder to run a network _well_ at 80% than at, say, 60% because you have to deal with reboots/etc. in your network as well as routing issues if your peering changes and the excess capacity hides a world of sins. Lots of issues.

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

#165

Post by nZUC2qDyxDA3Kpe »

250TB/month means this person is, basically, saturating a 1Gbps link 24/7. It's 761Mbps, which probably accounts for some overhead/latencies (f.e. downloading many pieces of a torrent or many articles of an NZB).

This is blatantly NOT fair use. I doubt that they in fact have a specific limit (having worked for large hosting companies with "fair use" policies in the past, it was "you'll know it when you see it"), but whatever limit you might choose is frankly well below this.

Yes, calling it unlimited is a bit misleading, but they truly can't compete with everyone else (who do the same thing!) if they don't. At this point, with how widespread it is, you should frankly assume that unlimited = fair use, and be working for it to change politically, not getting mad at companies.

I would also note that it sounds like their use has been consistently high over several months, which (IMHO anyway) lends some credence to calling it unlimited (as opposed to f.e. AT&T where "unlimited" means a set number of GB each month...).

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

#166

Post by arghwhat »

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.

It is only fraud if it is intentional deception.

In this case I suspect they assumed reasonable interpretation and customer interest: No realistic hosting provider can have the capacity to have every server utilize network 100%, but despite this the customer still benefits from increasing the uplink speed.

In my opinion, their limits are perfectly reasonable, the configuration is in the interest of the customer, and what is provided seems to be a reasonable interpretation fitting with existing definitions. It is only lacking documentation or unclear policy (one rarely plans for the unlikely, and I don't think they expected this), and something that should just be resolved by their customer service department.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

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/

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by krn »

mort96 wrote: post #152
krn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Maybe because the limits are not fixed and completely depend on the spending of the customer? If a customer is among the top 1% of the biggest users and – at the same time – among the top 1% of the smallest spenders, that simply raises the costs of the service for everyone else. There are only three choices here: a) get rid of the customer; b) make them pay more, or c) raise the prices of unlimited plans for everyone.

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

#169

Post by NavinF »

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…

That says more about AWS than anything. It’s not hard to get wholesale transit under $0.1/mbps 95%ile.

809Mbps costs $81/mo for a small provider.

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

#170

Post by foobiekr »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #19
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…

And this would be fair to your customers how? Where you draw the line who is who? How would you feel if your services started to be less responsive for no apparent reason, even though you paid for them and did nothing wrong?

Imagine the AWS EBS bursting/credits applied to networking. It would be awful.

(It's also awful with EBS)

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