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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

dark-star wrote: post #289
worldofmatthew wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. The product he had was for unlimited traffic on a guaranteed 1Gbit/s port. There are no limits listed, just a provider who offered something too cheaply and wants out. False Advertising. Simple as.

That still doesn't explain why this seems to be tolerated with "free refills" but not with "unlimited bandwidth". And even if you were right, even if it's just a case of false advertising and the provider wanting to get out, there is nothing wrong (neither morally nor legally) for them to unilaterally terminate the contract, which they could have well done instead of writing that notification letter. They explicitly…

[deleted]

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

dark-star wrote: post #282
hengistbury wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the difference is that it would be understandably unreasonable for someone to start filling extra containers at an unlimited soda refill, they would probably understand that they are pushing their luck. If the restaurant sold 'Unlimited Soda, 2 liters per minute, £50/month' I would expect them to deliver on the very specific quantities they promised at the price they offered. If they tell me I'm over-dispen…

Exactly. Hetzner doesn't sell you "850mbit/s for 24/7, 50€ a month". If they did, I agree with you that the OP should be rightfully annoyed about this letter. Instead, Hetzner sells "unlimited bandwidth" the same way McDonalds sells "free refills". It's also understandably unreasonable for someone to start pushing data at the max rate for months non-stop, the same way it is unreasonable for people to fill 50 large cu…

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by bb88 »

prvit wrote: post #243
bb88 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm guessing a lot of that money is being reinvested into the network. At the point in time their business levels off, they can take profit.

Likely in this case, they can't upgrade their network fast enough, I'm guessing. And they don't have the funds to do it.

This would be a different story than my local cableco say. They will sell you 5TB of data for $100/mo. Or about $0.02/GB. But that money isn't going into network upgrades. And won't until they're forced to, since that's the cable company business model and has been for decades.

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

#304

Post by short_sells_poo »

macspoofing wrote: post #297
short_sells_poo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes words are tools to convey information. If by default all information is dishonest, the entire purpose of using words is no longer useful.

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

#305

Post by kyriakos »

mort96 wrote: post #152
krn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. In my country, an "Unlimited 4G LTE" data plan costs 12 EUR. But without any "fair usage" policy that would be simply impossible. Nobody would expect to use tens of TBs per month without ever being contacted or heavily throttled.

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.

It's not illegal because they don't cut you off but after you go above a threshold they throttle your speed instead.

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

#306

Post by kazen44 »

pixl97 wrote: post #183
kazen44 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, what do you count as bandwith? Simply sending packets down a wire usually limits one to the physical speed of the interface, but even then some kind of packets might get dropped by various filters/mechanisms along the way. For instance, should i be able to use my full bandwith of my connection by sending purely BUM traffic down the link? Somewhere in the network, some policer is going to start dropping BUM traf…

I remember years ago working with ISPs and many of their monitoring systems assumed that packet = 1500 bytes as a fixed measure. Running a DNS server at full throttle could lead to a situation where you'd get bandwidth charges for amounts higher than could be served at line rate. I'm assuming modern systems do this better, but I've learned never to make assumptions when they benefit the billing party more.

it gets even more fun if you think about what people are actually paying for.

For instance, do you charge for the overhead of the Ethernet frame? What about additional size thanks to tunneling/encapsulation?

One could argue that no, you should not charge a customer for that because that is part of local transport inside a layer 2 domain, which is not in control of the customer.

But what about things like MPLS labels? you could go and on and on..

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

#307

Post by eropple »

Volundr wrote: post #288
cthalupa wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such as? Sure if you are operating on massive scale or have a remarkably steady load that 20% margin might be feasible, but that's the exception not the rule. Especially for a lone piece of physical hardware that can't scale up/down.

I'd be interested in an example of this, too, because I've been doing this for a while and I can't think of many--particularly in a modern, scalable environment (because Hetzner's APIs aren't great but you absolutely can scale automatically in their environment if you want to).

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

#308

Post by Handytinge »

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.

You appear to be projecting your experiences in your country as "the consumer world".

For example, Australia:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/06/spintel-acma-unlimited-si...

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

#309

Post by Handytinge »

mdasen wrote: post #199
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.

It's hard to respond to stuff like this. I get the attitude: "I'm due what I paid for!" There are so many ways in our society where there's unwritten expectations. In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate. Likewise, I'd interpret it to mean…

> In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate.

Actually the written expectation was "unlimited" - without limitation. These so called "unwritten limitations" exist solely in your head, and are not suitable for companies to assume users inherently know.

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

#310

Post by Handytinge »

walrus01 wrote: post #24

I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. This person is probably paying like 50 bucks a month or less and is in the top 1% of bandwidth users as measured by individual ethernet ports from a top of rack aggregation switch or similar.

I have, doing all 3.

I agree, this person is for sure costing the company significantly more than they're worth.

The correct solution is to fire the marketing team, and grandfather "unlimited" plans.

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