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.
Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
191–200 of 311 posts
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#192I 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…
This is a pretty significant claim that I think we're going to need evidence of. I would be flat out shocked if any of the major cloud providers gave you this sort of notice.
All of them have burstable instance types with various mechanisms for limiting that burst, but I have never heard of anyone ever getting this sort of email just for heavily and consistently utilizing CPU on a regular instance.
However, I will agree that this sort of thing around "unlimited bandwidth" is normal in the hosting industry. People talked all the time on webhostingtalk about all of the different dedicated server and colo providers that advertised "unlimited" bandwidth and would cut you off if you actually tried to use eit.
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#193Earlier 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.
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#194Earlier 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. 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.
For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1].
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#195Earlier 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…
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#196The autobahn also has no general speed limit. That does not mean you are welcome to go 300 km/h all the time. Unfortunately some peoples stupidity makes it necessary to impose fixed rules for everyone.
Sorry but that's a really bad analogy. Autobahn speed limit is related to safety and a lot of factors. Here it's simply a matter of money. If more than 200TB/month triggers an angry email, then just state they have a limit of 200TB instead of stating unlimited. It's not so complex.
Lol, as if that is unimportant.
> then just state they have a limit of 200TB
They don't have a limit of 200TB. They take issue with sustained saturation over a long period of time.
> It's not so complex.
Can you imagine how complex it would be to publish a schedule of every single consideration? They certainly won't take issue with 250TB of internal traffic. So now they need to start differentiating egress. Would they take issue with 250TB of ingress? It's less likely, but they would probably have higher tolerance for that. So now you have another schedule. What about cross-datacenter traffic? Boom, another policy.
Have you seen AWS bandwidth pricing? How in the world is that less complex than just addressing abuse on a case-by-case basis.
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#198Earlier 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.
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
#199To 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.
There are so many ways in our society where there's unwritten expectations. In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate. Likewise, I'd interpret it to mean that if I had a heavy month, I'd be fine.
If I'm a student paying for a dorm in college, should I be allowed to set up a mining rig pulling 10 kW and costing around $720/mo to run? Electricity is included in my dorm fee! I'm paying for it and I'm going to use it!
This is kinda why AWS nickle-and-dimes customers for every little thing - they had people who would find any area of weakness in their pricing model and go after it. I'm not even saying that people did it maliciously. Jungle Disk was a really cool idea: a mountable disk that used S3 to store the files. The problem was that it started doing loads of S3 operations. At the time, AWS didn't charge for operations and now there's this popular program doing a lot of operations compared to its storage and transfer charges.
As someone that has created SaaS software, some customer always comes along and finds an interesting use of your software. Sometimes it's a customer not really understanding the product. Other times a customer has found a weakness in the pricing model and they want to exploit it.
I get it the attitude. It's a war between you the buyer and the company selling a product to you. Personally, I'd rather have a more amicable relationship in my dealings. Yes, that means having realistic expectations about offerings including what might be marketing "puffery" (whether it meets the legal definition of puffery or not; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery). I'm not going to say that you're wrong to want 100% of the link 24/7, but then you're just talking about being in a situation where the company exercises their right to terminate your account (which you would have agreed to when signing up). Looking at Hetzner a bit more, it looks like they charge €1 per TB or $0.001/GB on their plans that have overages - 10x better than cheap places like Digital Ocean.
Yea, there's lots of places in this world where you can cause headaches for other people by using something in a way it wasn't intended that you're entitled to do - but you're going to have an unhappy time fighting for what you're due all the time. Instead, I'd rather focus on using things the way they were intended such that I don't create adversarial relationships with those I work with. Yes, in this case it would mean that I'd probably buy a few servers or just offer to pay them €200 for the extra bandwidth. Or I could fight, they could give me 30-day notice, and I could find another "unlimited" provider until they see me as a toxic customer and I start it all over again. Again, you're not wrong. You're just going to have an unhappy time trying to enforce your rights and get something better than the company expected to be giving you.
And of all the scummy things out there, Hetzner seems to be pretty decent. €0.001/GB overage on their limited plans is really cheap even compared to good deals like Linode and Digital Ocean (which charge 10x that). Their servers are really cheap. Their pricing is mostly very straightforward - maybe with this being an exception. I'll take a nebulous "it's unlimited, but don't push your luck" over what most hosting providers are offering. I could probably do 250TB for a month and they'd ignore it if it wasn't consistent. I can transfer way more than I get Linode or Digital Ocean and they'd ignore it. Maybe you just want me to say that you're right and that Hetzner is being evil and the person is due their 250TB of transfer every month, but I'd rather go through the world thinking that things are run by humans who want to do the right thing and sometimes don't anticipate all the consequences and then something like this happens - especially when the company doesn't seem to be doing evil stuff. Like, we've all seen surprise AWS bills in the tens of thousands without enormous usage. In this case, we're talking about a pretty small bill compared to the usage.
Yep, that person has the right to use that bandwidth - and Hetzner has the right to terminate a customer for any reason with 30 days notice. I'd just rather try and work with a company in a reasonable fashion if they're willing to work with me in a reasonable fashion. The alternative is becoming the customer that the company hates.
Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
#200Earlier 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.