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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

#271

Post by Volundr »

cthalupa wrote: post #268
eropple wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do we keep coming up with these bizarre ways to try and make this work? 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…

> 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? I've been admining servers for a long time and I've never run one using 100% of it's upload bandwidth 100% of the time. I've never even run one at 80%. Being that near capacity means your service is about to fall over. Frankly for most services it's probably flagging.

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

#272

Post by banana_giraffe »

foobiekr wrote: post #170
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this would be fair to your customers how? Where you draw the line who is who? How would you feel if your services started to be less responsive for no apparent reason, even though you paid for them and did nothing wrong?

Imagine the AWS EBS bursting/credits applied to networking. It would be awful. (It's also awful with EBS)

Many do, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-inst... :

> Typically, instances with 16 vCPUs or fewer (size 4xlarge and smaller) are documented as having "up to" a specified bandwidth; for example, "up to 10 Gbps". These instances have a baseline bandwidth. To meet additional demand, they can use a network I/O credit mechanism to burst beyond their baseline bandwidth. Instances can use burst bandwidth for a limited time, typically from 5 to 60 minutes, depending on the instance size.

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

#273

Post by cthalupa »

Volundr wrote: post #271
cthalupa wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we keep coming up with these bizarre ways to try and make this work? 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…

> 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? I've been admining servers for a long time and I've never run one using 100% of it's upload bandwidth 100% of the time. I've never even run one at 80%. Being that near capacity means your service is about to fall over. Frankly for most services it's probably flagging.

There are plenty of workloads where 20% slack in the workload would result in massive (both relative and in absolute terms) additional costs. In these sorts of workloads, it's incredibly common to run any individual server in the fleet very close to maximum capacity. And even if any individual workload isn't, virtualization and containers letting you bin-pack servers makes it even more common.

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

#274

Post by zdragnar »

whatshisface wrote: post #184
pixl97 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

AWS has a reasonable defense for charging for that - it costs them money whether you meant to run it or not.

To be fair, it'd be fantastic if there were an option to put an automatic hard stop on services once a billing threshold is reached. I seem to recall AWS explaining how to rube-goldberg something together yourself with lambdas and alerts, but if they're capable of telling me to how cobble together the feature myself with their services, surely they could offer it as a turnkey option.

That aside, I also understand that they can't actually put a hard cap, since usage is measured after the fact occurs, and by the time the system triggers a halt, more usage has likely occurred. At the very least, I'd be fine with paying $X + 1 when I set an auto-shutdown threshold to $X if that was what they had to do to implement it.

Outside of that quibble, I find the other complaints to be less reasonable.

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

#275

Post by worldofmatthew »

teej wrote: post #106
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.

That’s not how anything in the consumer world works. If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

Hetzner sell dedicated server with Unlimited and Guaranteed traffic at a 1Gbit port (As per the product pages).

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

#276

Post by worldofmatthew »

walrus01 wrote: post #144
worldofmatthew wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember; FDC has 100Gbit/s for $4,999/month.

fdc is not a transit provider specialist with POPs in every major global city (as measured by CAIDA ASrank size) similar to Cogent or Telia or level3, which a hosting company like hetzner might become a customer of, rather, it's a hosting company

Its their resold transit product (their 100G Dedicated Bandwidth Servers are often cheaper).

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

#277

Post by walrus01 »

cthalupa wrote: post #269
walrus01 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can oversell capacity in two ways: 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…

Complaining that ovh or hetzner is garbage is like complaining that a $19 coffee maker you bought at Walmart is kind of crap. You bought the absolute cheapest product on the market that claims to do the job. It's like buying a Nissan micra and then complaining about the compromises inherent in a subcompact economy car.

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

#278

Post by tadfisher »

teraflop wrote: post #220
tshaddox wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you offer an “unlimited ice cream” ticket but then refuse to deliver me 100 solar masses of ice cream, I think that’s okay.

What if I offer "unlimited ice cream, up to 1 cone per day for a month", and then after you pay for a month and ask for an ice cream cone every day for three consecutive weeks, I refuse and say your demands are excessive? Sure, I might be within my legal rights to drop you as a customer the next month, but isn't it still a scummy and misleading way to advertise my service?

This is pretty much how MoviePass went bankrupt. The unifying gist is, the business model depends on acquiring customers that don't use the advertised service. But customers are smart and want to maximize the value they receive for their money.

Eventually, you either get an ISP-like situation where everyone has caps on their "unlimited" service and there is no room to disrupt the market, or you get MoviePass.

There is not going to be a free-market solution to this problem, because no service with defined limits will be able to compete with the "unlimited" service at the same price point, and there are no consequences to simply dropping the expensive customers.

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

#279

Post by KronisLV »

teej wrote: post #106
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.

That’s not how anything in the consumer world works. If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

> If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

I think that what a lot of people have problems with, is the fact that Hetzner doesn't actually tell you what is okay and what isn't. Would using 70% of the link's capacity be okay? What about 60%? Or maybe 50% is where they draw the line?

Here's another host that I use, Time4VPS, which have more clear terms: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (remove affid for non-affiliate link if you don't want me to get a kickback in case anyone buys the services; I also host my blog with them)

Their servers include a guaranteed amount of bandwidth, either at 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. And should you exceed that limit, they're also clear about what will happen:

> What happens if I run out of bandwidth?

> We reduce your VPS server’s port speed 10 times until the new month starts. No worries, we won’t charge any extra fees or suspend your services.

So if I'd exceed the amount that's given to me with any of their services, my 1 Gbps link would become a 100 Mbps link, or my 100 Mbps link would become a 10 Mbps link. On a technical level, it's obviously worse than Hetzner's offering (speaking of how much data you can actually move), but the transparency is nice and I wouldn't ever have to worry about my services being suspended because they don't automatically enforce any limitations just so they'd get to claim "unlimited" in their marketing materials.

Disclaimer: I still use Hetzner personally, they're one of the more affordable platforms (pretty much the same pricing tier as Time4VPS) out there. Though it's also nice when service providers have some provisions in place to automatically introduce limits for those things that could cause problems, like the amount of bandwidth that's available to you. Or just charge you for it outright, so there are fewer unknown variables.

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

#280

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits.

But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere.

Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July.

Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources.

  John:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
  
  Jane:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
As a matter of fact, Hetzner already has something like that under their "Limits" section:

  Limits
  Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you.
  Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone.
You don't necessarily have to advertise the fact that your limits will be dependent on lots of variables and will change (though you should disclose it). What you shouldn't do is say that there are no limits, which is clearly lying. Even if the lie only becomes relevant to a very small part of the clientele who'll be affected by this, it's still lying.

Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.

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