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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

#221

Post by jwlake »

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…

The correct thing is to just token throttle to the max you're willing to offer for the fixed price. Then when a small minority figure out 1Gbps really is like 100Mbps, then whatever.

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

#222

Post by woojoo666 »

istinetz wrote: post #149
turtlebits wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The actual limits are there and detailed in the terms and conditions, and often the marketing material will say that additional terms apply. It's the customers fault for assuming "unlimited" means actually unlimited, which is unrealistic and also not what a typical customer would think.

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

#223

Post by altairprime »

istinetz wrote: post #148
altairprime wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

In the UK, my viewpoint is prohibited: companies may not terminate service based on excessive usage on an “unlimited” plan. They may, however, throttle service.

In the US, it’s unclear if my viewpoint is prohibited, and good luck to anyone filing a lawsuit. I would expect my viewpoint to likely survive a US court case.

Hetzner is based in Germany; I am not familiar with whether DE or EU laws prohibit them from terminating service at will when they feel that “unlimited” service is being abused. If you do research into that, let us know what you find.

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

#224

Post by teraflop »

woojoo666 wrote: post #213
whatshisface wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? Yes, if that's truly what the typical customer would want. But I doubt a typical customer would want only an ice cream cone after seeing that offer. However, if you offer "unlimited* ice cream", adding…

The actual situation here is more like: you're told you can have up to a gallon per day, but if you actually try to take a gallon every day, you're told that doing so is harming their operations, because you're taking up too much of the workers' time and forcing them to buy ingredients too frequently.

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

#225

Post by de6u99er »

braingenious wrote: post #205
de6u99er wrote: post #84

It looks to me as if they know that the content is violating their terms and conditions. >... We will routinely check your traffic use. If we continue to see such a high amount, we may choose to cancel your contract. (Please see 2.7 of our Terms and conditions ... >2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among…

Wait, what? You’re confident that this person is engaged in spamming? Or wait no, copyright infringement? Or wait no, illegal content? Are there any legitimate use cases that might use a lot of bandwidth? I could imagine hosting 4k video. Or a software archive. Or image hosting. Or hosting podcasts, ML models, backup services, OS images, high traffic forums, public domain archives, adult content (which is not disallo…

I was just saying that they are citing a specific section of their terms and conditions which would allow them to terminate the contract.

Since we don't know what causes that much traffic my guess is as good as yours. Those servers are like Schroedingers cat in a superposition, hosting legal and illegal content at the same time.

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

#226

Post by eropple »

cthalupa wrote: post #185
gernb wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a horrible analogy. At a fast food places they advertise unlimited refills on the cup they sold you as part of the meal. Here you are being advertised unlimited traffic on the port they sold you as part of the server. Trying to liken using the port you are being sold as part of the server to driving up a tanker trunk to a fast food place is silly.

Then presuppose that you walk up with a garbage bag, fill your cup, and dump it into the garbage bag. Rinse and repeat.

You will probably not stay in the establishment very long.

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

#227

Post by teraflop »

blowski wrote: post #73
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud, and doesn't make it okay. If you can't actually sell that capacity, just say up front what you're actually selling people.

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”.

They are very explicitly stating the limit: it's 1 gigabit per second. And they're knowingly and specifically advertising that as the only limit on bandwidth, even though what they're actually willing to provide (when averaged over a billing period) is much lower.

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

#228

Post by freemint »

corrral wrote: post #210
freemint wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I know I leased you this entire acre on an ongoing basis, and said you could plant on the whole thing, but now that I see you're actually planting the entire acre and not just a quarter-acre, I'm terminating your lease at the end of the current term—which is compliant with our lease agreement—because I didn't ever actually intend to let you plant on the whole thing even though I listed that, explicitly, on the adver…

As long as they didn't interfere with the plants that were planted, like throttling the connection, they offered exactly what they promised. Hetzner never offered unchanging contracts. Hetzner made a material claim. They fulfilled that claim from all i can see. You can get unlimited 1 Gbit/s traffic at Hetzner for a month at said price.

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

#229

Post by icehawk »

nZUC2qDyxDA3Kpe wrote: post #211
gcbirzan wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If using what they advertise is impacting other customers they shouldn't advertise it

I doubt they have ever advertised that you can saturate your link 24/7 for multiple months.

What's on the order page is the following:

Connection: 1 GBit/s port Guaranteed bandwidth: 1 GBit/s Traffic: Unlimited *

*Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon. In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.00/TB. (The basis for calculation is for outgoing traffic only. Incoming and internal traffic is not calculated.) There is no bandwidth limitation.

If they want to say, "you can't saturate your link 24/7 for multiple months" then they should say that.

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

#230

Post by corrral »

woojoo666 wrote: post #222
istinetz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The actual limits are there and detailed in the terms and conditions, and often the marketing material will say that additional terms apply. It's the customers fault for assuming "unlimited" means actually unlimited, which is unrealistic and also not what a typical customer would think.

"We—on purpose—didn't mean what we said" is identical to "we lied".
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