Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by 3np » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

icehawk wrote: post #229

nZUC2qDyxDA3Kpe wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

Yeah, and I doubt many customers would have an issue with the same cap and overage terms of the 10G variety.

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

#242

Post by filleokus » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #136

filleokus wrote: post #33

Slightly OT: Suppose you want to deliver a couple of 100’s Mbps to people in EU on the cheap, how would you do it? Assume it’s static files, so the server doesn’t need to be that beefy. Hetzner would probably be my first choice. Even though I’ve hade some strangely slow connections there sometimes. Other more enterprisey providers like Datapacket seem to be significantly more expensive.

I rent a VPS with Leaseweb. Their prices aren't the lowest, but their performance is better than many cheaper alternatives. There is no unlimited data. Either data centers are lying to you, or they're going to end your contract the month after you start sending hundreds of TB. Their data plans clearly state the traffic limits and their terms state the overcharge you can expect. If you need more network traffic than t…

I mean FDC offers 1Gbs unmetered[1] (and I do think they actually mean unmetered), dedicated for $199 / month . While being ≈ 4 times more expensive than a cheap Hetzner dedicated box mentioned in OP, I don't think OP would have gotten an email from them.

I was thinking that maybe some provider basically was reselling ≈FDC dedicated boxes with VPS's that tailored to high bandwidth usage. Of course being more expensive than run of the mill VPS's. But maybe the server performance per price, and bandwidth price equation doesn't make it so attractive. Even if you're just pushing static files, you need some CPU to saturate it (especially considering tls termination)

[1]: https://www.fdcservers.net/budget-server-1

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

#243

Post by prvit » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:55 PM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #62

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…

> Even at $0.01/GB, that would be $2,560. That's still overpriced by a factor of 10. Hetzner overage price for the 10G link is 1 euro / TB or about $0.001/GB. That seems pretty reasonable. So we're really looking at something more like $250/month. https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic

Hetzner still makes a good profit on that $0.001/GB.

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

#244

Post by brandon272 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #217

woojoo666 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "unlimited", its "unlimited*". There are additional constraints that are enumerated afterwards. But for the vast majority of users, it will feel like unlimited, so it's not necessary for them to read those additional constraints

Limited shouldn't be called unlimited. That's just straightforward false advertising. But it sounds like Hertzner doesn't even have the asterisk with additional constraints.

The "asterisk" is the Terms and Conditions that you agree to when signing up for the service.

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

#245

Post by olyjohn » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

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…

1 gallon per day is not unlimited ice cream!! It's limited to one fucking gallon per day. "English motherfucker! Do you speak it?"

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

#246

Post by stonemetal12 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

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…

So I buy a gallon of milk, but depending on how much I pay for the gallon of milk, I get some percentage of it?

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

#247

Post by mort96 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

brandon272 wrote: post #244

mort96 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limited shouldn't be called unlimited. That's just straightforward false advertising. But it sounds like Hertzner doesn't even have the asterisk with additional constraints.

The "asterisk" is the Terms and Conditions that you agree to when signing up for the service.

Can you enumerate these bandwidth usage constraints then?

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

#248

Post by renewiltord » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

cglan wrote: post #21

I don't get it. If you're paying for 1Gbps then why does it matter how much you use up to that amount? If they're overselling their capacity then they should just stop doing that. If they can only handle 80% of the sustained capacity, only sell up to that amount. You pay for pipe capacity, you don't pay for usage according to sales page. If they want to change their business model they can. It's not my fault that I'm…

Ultimately, it's because you're not paying for 1 Gbps. You're paying for 1 Gbps with an arbitrary cut-off switch held by someone else. If you want them to not have the cut-off switch, you have to pay more.

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

#249

Post by braingenious » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

de6u99er wrote: post #225

braingenious wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Hetzner didn’t cite what you’re describing. They only cited the “LMFAO fuck you got mine” section of the agreement.

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

#250

Post by stonemetal12 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

dale_glass wrote: post #219

mort96 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits. Let's say the provider has a 100 Gpbs upstream, 1000 clients, and offers a cheap plan where you pay for 1 Gbps with no limit. The provider obviously can't provide a sustained 1 Gbps to every client 24/7. Now, how do you honestly advertise that? Because you can give people 1 Gbps service so long not too many clients do that at the same time. And you can tol…

Probably the way they do processors, say you get N Mhz as a min that is boostable up to M Mhz.

If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.