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

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

#291

Post by hansvm » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #261

encryptluks2 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except buffets do do that. Not that extreme, but if you go into a one and continue to eat for multiple hours, you’ll be kicked out despite having “unlimited food”.

And when it goes to court they usually lose. They can ban you in the future if they want, but they sold an "all you can eat" meal and are expected to provide that meal even if you're extra hungry.

Much like the Hetzner article, there's an obvious physical cap that can't be exceeded, and they're supposedly selling up to that cap.

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

#292

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

freemint wrote: post #180

marcosdumay wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy to solve; just don't promise unlimited bandwidth. Don't lie and people won't complain that you lied. Yes, they provided a very good service for the money they received. One would be hard pressed trying to find a better deal. Yet, they did lie.

How did Hetzner lie? They offered unlimited 1Gbit interconnect to this user every month they are subscribed. They did not offer "unlimited contract not subject to change you are entitled to the same conditions forever".

They never had the intention of letting him use his unlimited bandwidth. So, claiming it's unlimited is a lie.

Specifically, it's misleading publicity. AFAIK, that's an issue in Germany. They did the bare minimum to not get into any legal issues, but if they insist on the publicity message, they will very likely have problems.

They really shouldn't try to mimic an US company.

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

#293

Post by corrral » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

freemint wrote: post #228

corrral wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"Great, so I can sign up for the same plan again, since my use falls within what you're offering?"

"Well, no, because now we know you'll actually use what we say we provide, and we don't really want to provide what we're offering—that part's a lie."

It'd be different if they'd responded by discontinuing that kind of plan entirely.

This seems pretty straightforward to me.

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

#294

Post by walrus01 » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

beaugunderson wrote: post #262

walrus01 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it was a classic case of "sales person will do anything to get the deal done, including things that are harmful to their employer"!

assuming this person is paying at least $200 a month (not $40-50 like for a hetzner server) it's probably not even harmful economically.

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

#295

Post by beaugunderson » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #294

beaugunderson wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a classic case of "sales person will do anything to get the deal done, including things that are harmful to their employer"!

assuming this person is paying at least $200 a month (not $40-50 like for a hetzner server) it's probably not even harmful economically.

Not sure if you mean me or the OP; for us this was a LONG time ago so if memory serves (and it might not) I think we were paying $2,000+/month.

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

#296

Post by 300bps » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

13415 wrote: post #77

300bps wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract. The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. First you say they need to honor their contract and then say they're honoring their contract. What's the problem? Similarly if someone runs a restaurant with an "All You Can Eat!" special and someone comes in with a 40 gallon drum…

It's not an abuse of a system to use it in the way it was advertised. If it says unlimited, then it's unlimited. "All you can eat" means all the individual customer can eat (usually within a time frame). If you offer it and then stop offering food when customers (in your opinion) eat too much, then that's fraud.

If unlimited means unlimited then why doesn't "all you can eat" mean all you can eat? Why are you assuming unstated restrictions on "all you can eat" when you aren't allowing unstated restrictions on "unlimited"?

You literally made up the restriction of, "usually within a timeframe".

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

#297

Post by macspoofing » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #107

macspoofing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud 'Fraud' is too strong of word. Almost everything in the world has some level of over-subscription. I don't know for sure BUT if every person and business turned all their water taps on full blast, I think we may have a problem.

That just means that almost everything in world has a level of dishonesty and fraud. And just because it happens, it doesn't mean we should just accept it.

>That just means that almost everything in world has a level of dishonesty and fraud.

Words are tools to convey information, if you label everything as fraud, that 'tool' is no longer useful.

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

#298

Post by kjeetgill » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43

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.

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.

It's not fraud. Even slightly.

Overselling capacity is perfectly fine if most of the time* you go to use the capacity it's there for you. If 95% of users under use capacity and you have the stats for it, it's perfectly reasonable to oversell sell with respect to the expected capacity usage. If those stats change, sure - they should adjust how much they oversell or what they advertise.

It's the same way a bank can't handle everyone pulling their money out all at once. It's perfectly reasonable to plan around practical scenarios.

Now if you rarely get what you paid for, sure, go for their heads over it.

* for some definition of most of the time aka get SLAs

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

#299

Post by romwell » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #103

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…

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity I would personally assume that it would include 100% 24/7 (barring reasonable service outages). That's what "unlimited" means.

People in this thread: unlimited means what I want it to mean, and today, it means "limited". Why, that's just how the world works!

People who own dictionaries: this is a completely idiotic line of thinking. By which I mean "reasonable". Why, is there a problem?

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

#300

Post by 13415 » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

300bps wrote: post #296

13415 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an abuse of a system to use it in the way it was advertised. If it says unlimited, then it's unlimited. "All you can eat" means all the individual customer can eat (usually within a time frame). If you offer it and then stop offering food when customers (in your opinion) eat too much, then that's fraud.

If unlimited means unlimited then why doesn't "all you can eat" mean all you can eat? Why are you assuming unstated restrictions on "all you can eat" when you aren't allowing unstated restrictions on "unlimited"? You literally made up the restriction of, "usually within a timeframe".

No, I didn't make up a restriction. You misunderstood. "All you can eat" offers usually contain an explicit time frame, for the obvious reason that they don't want customers to enter in the morning and re-enter in the evening. That's why I wrote "usually". If they don't, then that's their mistake and they have to literally offer all the customer can eat.

The same for hosting. If you make your offer unlimited and don't make any exceptions explicit, then your offer is unlimited. The least thing you have to do is to add a little * and list the exceptions in every advertisement. Otherwise it's deceptive advertising and bait-and-switch fraud. It's really very simple.