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Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

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131–140 of 712 posts

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#131
post #121
post #91

When has AWS done something like this? LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.

If you use 20 TB each month the price will be 25.39€ instead of 5.39€. I can't think of any business that would seriously struggle with this 20€ monthly price increase. Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not catastrophic.

In % terms though?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#132

> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. I may know one of the culprits -- whom I will leave unnamed here. But the company, who is fairly popular, built out their own CDN via putting a bunch of nginx caching proxies on various Hetzner servers around the world. It apparentl…

Sounds like a completely legitimate use though. Hetzner were widely telling people about that 20TB limit, so why would they be surprised when people use them as CDN boxes?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#133

> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. I may know one of the culprits -- whom I will leave unnamed here. But the company, who is fairly popular, built out their own CDN via putting a bunch of nginx caching proxies on various Hetzner servers around the world. It apparentl…

Want to give a clue on who the culprit is?

I was curious and checked if they are still using Hetzner. It appears not, so I can share who it was. It was https://artstation.com. Basically heavily oriented towards serving static images, so the CDN could have been really expensive. Doing a reverse IP lookup on cdn.artstation.com servers now resolves to Cloudflare and it has cloudflare headers on the response.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#134
post #67

Traffic over-usage is $1 per TB, so this is still quite fair, only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.

so still order or orders of magnitude cheaper than the the big 3 hyperscalers.

  AWS EC2: 100GB included and then $90 per TB.
  GCP Premium Tier: $120 per TB
  GCP Standard Tier: $85 per TB
That's a bunch of money...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#135

Possible theory why they did it: To my understanding, you don't pay for traffic, you pay for network capacity. Maybe US instances aren't getting the uptake they had hoped for, and they are looking lower some costs by reducing their network capacity (they are a very German company and care a lot about efficiency). Hetzner is very cheap and still profitable because classic "economy of scale" and vertical integration. T…

That doesn't explain a 20x regional pricing difference for the same service (outgoing bandwidth). It's either a malicious change to extract exorbitant rent from customers (hostages at that point) or buying enough bandwidth is whole lot more expensive than they calculated and it reflects costs to provide the product (a virtual machine a specific traffic cap).

If its mostly the later case they really fucked up their customer communication. They should care enough to provide their customers with time to respond and transparency to (re-)earn the trust a hosting provider requires.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#136

I would think an auction system would be the best system to price bandwidth.

Enron tried this in the late 90s/early 2000s.

That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books), but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth’s value is highly dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to create a seamless trading market.

There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this problem. I remain highly skeptical.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#137
post #121
post #91

When has AWS done something like this? LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.

If you use 20 TB each month the price will be 25.39€ instead of 5.39€. I can't think of any business that would seriously struggle with this 20€ monthly price increase. Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not catastrophic.

Your traffic bill is increasing by 471% and that's not OK.

Bill increases don't have to be catastrophic to be bad. Remember that businesses/startups range from being well funded to not-funded-at-all-trying-to-survive. Depending on the country, 20€ can be a lot of money.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#138

> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. I may know one of the culprits -- whom I will leave unnamed here. But the company, who is fairly popular, built out their own CDN via putting a bunch of nginx caching proxies on various Hetzner servers around the world. It apparentl…

I think culprits is a poor choice of words since it means someone suspected of a misdeed. I could perhaps understand using it for example for someone that tried to store a petrabyte of storage on a consumer unlimited storage plan. But in this case Hetzner set a specific data usage amount you are paying for so using that amount is not a misdeed.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#139
post #5
post #2

>Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. So... raising the prices for everybody instead?

Yeah, the justification given makes absolutely no sense - you are paying more than before even if you stay under the new limit (which is 1/20th of the original!) They also use the word "tariff" several times without elaborating, as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word. Seems like intentional deception to hide a standard "we just want more money" price raise.

In Germany "phone plan" is written as the literal translation of "mobile radio tariff", as a bundle of price and terms.

So it's not unexpected to use the uncommon in English meaning of the word to describe these changes.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#140
post #95
post #91

When has AWS done something like this? LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.

Never. I don't think AWS have _ever_ icnreased prices.

IPv4 charge caused me to have to redesign some things and cull servers for some projects.
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