261–270 of 311 posts
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That’s not how anything in the consumer world works. If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.
Imagine going to a unlimited buffet restaurant per customer and paying an extra $15 and then being told after it is capped at one plate from the salad bar.
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I used to work for a visual effects studio in Los Angeles, we setup a Canadian office and wanted to do offsite backups from Canada to LA and from LA to Canada for redundancy. We found a provider who would give us dedicated unmetered 1gbps and then setup a simple rsync. It worked great, we hit 800mbps (the theoretical maximum with TCP overhead) and then 5 days later we got a call from the provider who was absolutely f…
Now that is a shitty hosting company, since you told them what you were going to do in advance and wrote a bandwidth commitment into the sales order.
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…
"Unlimited 1 Gbps" should be unlimited. Otherwise it's downright fraud to label it "unlimited".
I wonder at what point an all you can eat buffet would kick you out? And how does this situation compare.
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What nonsense. A 1gbps connection has a limit of traffic it can push in a month, that is the limit of their "unlimited" offer. They are advertising that you can use 100% of your 1gbps link in a month then cutting TFA OP off at 80%.
> A 1gbps connection has a limit of traffic it can push in a month, that is the limit of their "unlimited" offer. If your interpretation of basic words is so wildly different from the norm that you already consider "1Gbps unlimited" a contradiction then surely you would never find yourself in a contract where subtler terms are in question.
1gbps maxed out for a month (you know, unlimited usage of a 1gbps line) equals 330TB (give or take depending on the length of the month).
If you signed up for a service which offered 50TB of upload then they cut you off at 35TB then you would be rightly annoyed.
If you have caps on your sevrvice? Cool. Don't use the word unlimited and inform customers of those limits.
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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.
Is it unethical or illegal?
The way I see it, this conduct is antithetical to the spirit of the free market and harmful to society at large, regardless of whether or not it can be defended in court.
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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”.
Just to be pedantic, without disputing your broader point about what customers should expect:
Phrases like "finest quality" are known in marketing as "puffery" and companies aren't liable for these claims. From a quick search, specific factual claims like "unlimited 1Gbps" might be held to a different standard, depending on whether "no reasonable person" would take the claim seriously.
> The Second Circuit explained, "Puffery is an exaggeration or overstatement expressed in broad, vague, and commendatory language. Such sales talk is considered to be offered and understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only, which is to be discounted as such by the buyer."
> One type of puffery is a non-specific claim that one product is better than another The Second Circuit explained it as, "a general claim of superiority over comparable products that is so vague that it can be understood as nothing more than a mere expression of opinion."
> Looking at Starbucks's advertising, the court held that statements such as, "Best coffee for the best you," "taste of inspiration," "Starbucks or nothing," and "heart, soul, craft, pride, love; you won't find that in any other cup of coffee" are all puffery. The court wrote, "These statements vaguely assert that Starbucks's coffee is better than its competitors' in a manner best "understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only." They aren't, the court said, specific enough to "misrepresent an inherent quality or characteristic of the defendant's product."
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ac3f3d65-2e97...
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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.
It is the normal operating mode of an internet connected server to send traffic to the internet - often even 100% of the time! It is the normal operating mode of drinks at a restaurant to be drank by the person while there, and maybe one refill for the road.
Trying to liken "Using the 'Unlimited' 1gbps port that was advertised "to "Refilling a cup and dumping it into a garbage bag" is ludicrous.
I don't understand why people are doing mental gymnastics to defend a bad advertising practice.
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…
every isp ever since the dawn of the commercial internet oversells its capacity, you rely on 98% of the users not actually trying to max out their circuit at near line rate 24x7. if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.
1) You have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can utilize what you advertise, and there are enough people not needing it that this is all fine
2) You do not have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can't utilize what you advertise, in which case you are, at best, being deceptive in your advertising practices.
No one cares about the former, and even though the latter is common place, that doesn't mean that it isn't a shitty advertising practice nor should someone making use of a provider have to know that this is common place.
You should be able to reasonably expect to get what a commercial entity is advertising itself as giving as part of your payment to them. Just because this industry has been garbage about it doesn't mean that it should always be garbage about it.
250TB/month is about 770 Mbps sustained. And you still only get a strongly worded letter!
250TB/month is still way, way below "unlimited" though.
It averages on multiple of their servers, which indicates to me that the average was taken over the course of some months (?). They may well have reached 320TB in some months on some servers.
I'm not surprised by this. For me, unlimited traffic (with 1 gbps) means i can spike in some months without having to worry about costs exploding, but if I'm maxing it out consistently, then I might be asked to move to a different service or upgrade.