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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

#171

Post by pixl97 »

zdragnar wrote: post #117
pixl97 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well luckily it's very obvious when I still have a car in my driveway. It's not obvious that a script got caught in a loop and decided to write up a $5000 bill overnight.

The previous post didn't say a script got caught in a loop overnight, it was that the engineer didn't understand the difference between stopped and terminated. Even so, I don't think it is AWS's fault that buggy code was left to run unattended overnight in the example you give.

Right, it's not AWS's fault that buggy code ran overnight.

It is absolutely 100% Amazon's decision to give you little to no tooling to prevent this in many scenarios other than going to their billing department and beg for a correction.

I do not use any service that can proceed to bankrupt me for personal use for what could be considered a normal use case. At work I'd pass the issue off to my manager who'd pass it off to a rep and deal with it that way, but there is no way I want to take that responsibility on myself to correct.

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

#172

Post by secondcoming »

tuetuopay wrote: post #150
secondcoming wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fuck that. I'm paying for time on an agreed amount of vCPUs as specified in the instance templates. I'm using them 100%, I'd be a moron not to.

It's also fraud because AWS get to charge me when I'm not scheduled, but they also charge the users who are scheduled on the contended CPU. They should bill by the CPU cycles I consume.

Anyway, we've moved from AWS. Lucky escape.

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

#173

Post by tomjen3 »

walrus01 wrote: post #48
corrral wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course advertising one thing then saying, "well, actually, no" means you lied. Even if you're "nice" about it. It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.

no, this is more like running a buffet restaurant with an all you can eat buffet. 98% of your customers show up and eat three gargantuan heaping plates, are totally satisfied, and can barely walk back to their cars. the other 2% show up at 3 in the afternoon, stay for six hours, eat ten plates of crab legs and roast beef. maybe you notice those 2% of customers and say nothing. if the same person comes back every week…

No. You accept those 2% as cost of doing business.

Yeah of course you made certain calculations when you started your business, including that most people would start loading up their (small) trays with the first items, which are the cheapest and so not cost you much, but you also accept that not everybody is going to do that.

A business is a business and social acceptableness has nothing to do with one another. One is a business and the other is a social situation. If I know you personally, it is a social situation. If I have paid money, it is business situation.

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

#174

Post by mort96 »

krn wrote: post #168
mort96 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

What does this have to do with anything? If the user if paying for a service, they should be getting that service. If the operator is offering a service which they can't afford to offer, that's not the user's problem.

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

#175

Post by qeternity »

zootboy wrote: post #145
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 shi…

> and you just have to accept it?

No, just as you said with your underpaying hypothetical, the customer is free to drop Hetzner. A rolling term contract protects both parties. If this person pushing 250TB/mo can find a better provider, then they should move.

If they can't find a provider willing to offer cheaper bandwidth than Hetzner...well, that tells you everything you need to know about this situation.

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

#177

Post by bobkazamakis »

arghwhat wrote: post #166
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.

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…

> It is only fraud if it is intentional deception.

Are you implying that this unintentional? That things like this are marketed without the full knowledge that such a service is impossible?

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

#178

Post by ctvo »

amluto wrote: post #130
Spivak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do see up front pricing. Please look harder, it’s there for every dimension they charge you for (instance type, network traffic, disk size, etc.).

Back to your analogy. You get charge for these other dimensions that vary when you rent a car:

- make, model

- miles driven

- toll usage

- driver’s age

- duration of rental

The more accurate analogy here for the GP is the person returned a rental car to the wrong lot and was charged additional days until they discovered their error.

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

#179

Post by whatshisface »

arghwhat wrote: post #166
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.

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…

So what you're saying is, if I offer 10,000 gallons of ice cream for $100, but deliver an ice cream cone, I can defend myself by saying that what I delivered was more in line with what a typical customer would want?

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

#180

Post by freemint »

marcosdumay wrote: post #99
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.

That's easy to solve; just don't promise unlimited bandwidth. Don't lie and people won't complain that you lied. Yes, they provided a very good service for the money they received. One would be hard pressed trying to find a better deal. Yet, they did lie.

How did Hetzner lie? They offered unlimited 1Gbit interconnect to this user every month they are subscribed. They did not offer "unlimited contract not subject to change you are entitled to the same conditions forever".
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