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Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#61

Post by high_na_euv »

cuuupid wrote: post #49
stavros wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they realized that nobody switches away from AWS because of their expensive bandwidth.

Bingo, lots of people are loud about this online and many influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it’s easy to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up less than 1% of a serious company’s revenue for AWS. I’ve liked using Hetzner before and I’m curious how they’ll go after the market now. This is probably the wrong move though; Cloud…

What do you mean?

News Hacker isnt representative sample that also understands the insustry and the business?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#62

Post by jeremyjh »

risyachka wrote: post #40
mythz wrote: post #16

Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end of an era.

It was expected considering during the last year everyone on Twitter was shouting left and right that everyone should use Hetzner because it is cheap. Yeah it was cheap - only because the demand was low and they were competing on price. Now it will only go up.

Its still a really good price though.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#63

Post by bradley13 »

mythz wrote: post #16

Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end of an era.

But, really? What are you doing, that your VMs need more than 1TB of data per month? That's a huge amount! That's 23MB per minute, continuously.

If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem entirely reasonable.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#64

Post by ptero »

This seems to be a huge PR blunder. As a single data point, I have to say that my first reaction is illogical.

I have two hetzner shared instances and I am royally pissed by the 20x reduction in traffic allowance. It is also irrelevant to me: over the last 12 months I never exceeded 1TB. My unhappiness on the traffic reduction is purely of a "what if I start using more" type. For which two rational answers is "well you can explore alternatives then" and "d'oh, your average is way under 100GB, it's not going over 1TB". But I still started looking at alternatives.

My feeling is that the reduction is aimed at a small group, but upsets a much larger set of customers who now will start looking for alternatives. Which indicates a typical marketing screwup. My 2c.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#65

Post by HighGoldstein »

johnisgood wrote: post #53
dietr1ch wrote: post #45

Weird, one would expect that in anything related to technology either prices go down, or performance goes up over time.

True, so what gives? Just them wanting more money now that they got enough customers? They probably did some calculations and realized that damn, they could pocket more money so might as well try their luck. Like yeah, let us assume they have 10k customers: 7.05 * 10000 is 70500, 8.99 * 10000 is 89900, that is 19400 USD more for them, and that is just for one!

Or the cause is one step removed, for example the handful of giant companies that control all US internet infrastructure, versus the hundreds all over Europe.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#66

Post by machinekob »

marcinzm wrote: post #59
machinekob wrote: post #25

So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working. Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it? I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?

The per capita GDP of Germany is $52,745.76. The US is $81,695.19. The EU as a whole is $43,194. Median household income is $38,971 in Germany and $80,610 in the US. When people cost twice in one place versus another companies will focus on more expensive but less people intensive approaches.

However, we are also considering infrastructure costs. The median salary in Germany is approximately 60,000 USD, which should probably be taken into account when comparing company costs to those in the USA, which are around 70-80,000 USD.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#68

Post by authorfly »

bradley13 wrote: post #63
mythz wrote: post #16

Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end of an era.

But, really? What are you doing, that your VMs need more than 1TB of data per month? That's a huge amount! That's 23MB per minute, continuously. If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem entirely reasonable.

I agree it is still reasonable.

But some examples of things that are profitable under the old regime, but maybe not at 20x the limit:

API services that consume media, whether to do some business logic specific thing or something specific, e.g. Transcriptions for videos, file conversion API, OCR API provider, etc.

If you try a video app without using WebRTC and peer traffic your bandwidth can blow up too. Even if you use something like push notifications with base64. There are lots of traps that use Bandwidth.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#69

Post by theshrike79 »

bradley13 wrote: post #63
mythz wrote: post #16

Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end of an era.

But, really? What are you doing, that your VMs need more than 1TB of data per month? That's a huge amount! That's 23MB per minute, continuously. If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem entirely reasonable.

You can get pretty cheap servers with massive storage (2x2TB for example) and use them as backup targets.
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