Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices • Hacker News Board

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#151

Post by flumpcakes » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

GavCo wrote: post #109

DataDaemon wrote: post #71

Inflation, the real inflation is 10%

Inflation doesn't explain reducing the included traffic from 20TB to 1TB while simultaneously increasing prices. This is a much more dramatic change than what inflation would justify.

Things are rarely priced at actual face value.

You purchase a 10Gb/s firewall for $100,000 - you will not be using 10Gb/s traffic for the lifespan of this device.

Applying this to Hetzner:

You sell a service with X bandwidth included free because you know that only Y% is only ever used on average.

Now people exploit the X allowance - spinning up new virtual machines to multiply this already generous allowance to get unlimited bandwidth for a fee 1/10000th of other commercial offerings. Your Y% costing is now completely invalid.

You reduce the allowance 20x to mitigate this.

I can't blame Hetzner at all for this, especially when Google/Amazon/Microsoft are printing money with their insane bandwidth costs. You know they are insane when they then change the rules to say it's completely free if you are migrating to a different provider - suddenly it doesn't cost anything at all for egress? Oh, it was actually upcoming monopoly investigations that might have taken a dim view...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#152

Post by llm_nerd » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #95

glzone1 wrote: 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.

AWS also charges multiples the price to begin with. I mean, the "scam" of AWS has always been the absolutely outrageous network egress pricing.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#153

Post by yurishimo » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #132

bhouston wrote: post #93

> 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?

Until you remember that marketing is a separate department from finance which is a separate department from ops/engineering.

The engineers said 20TB in aggregate was fine but likely didn’t consider the “bad apples”. Marketing obviously wants to use the biggest numbers and then finance comes in with the hammer and dev points to egress as an simple way to upset rhe fewest number of real customers.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#154

Post by geek_at » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #142

sigio wrote: 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.

That’s very fair. I wish they had put that in the email!

That is right, it would have maybe reduced the public outcry. It just makes it 10$ more expensive per month which is totally OK in my book

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#155

Post by hiccuphippo » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

machinekob wrote: post #73

dietr1ch wrote: post #45

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

Not when there is a duopoly on one market (US) and hundreds of companies on other (EU).

This case is for a EU company's offerings to the US. Why would they make themselves less competitive?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#156

Post by immibis » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #36

It sounds like I can just move my bandwidth hungry servers to europe and eat the latency penalty- is that a correct read?

Yes. And you're not even exploiting the system, just using it as it is - bandwidth really is cheaper over here.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#157

Post by BeeOnRope » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

tekla wrote: post #118

maccard wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe they have for very specific services, but never for things like EC2 or RDS. There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading instance types in the same "size" are more expensive, but that is very rare, but I dont believe AWS has ever pulled the rug out from under you.

> There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading instance types in the same "size" are more expensive

An increase in price has been the rule rather than the exception for recent upgrades for vanilla instance types, e.g., c, r, m types in the newest generations (6 -> 7 for x86, 6 -> 7, or -> 8 for Arm types).

The increases have been modest though, perhaps around 10%. You get additional CPU and sometimes minor increases in other resources on the newer types.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#158

Post by immibis » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

thg wrote: post #77

isoprophlex wrote: post #54

I run a dedicated server with them that does about 1 TB inbound / 50 GB outbound daily. If they start fucking people over on the dedicated servers as well, this product is basically dead because I can't find anywhere else that allows me to do this at the current price point... Unless of course I slap a box under my desk and hook it up to my fiber internet.

The traffic limit is outbound only. There is no limit on inbound / internal traffic. So even if they were to hit you with a 5TB / month limit, you'd be just fine. https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ (bottom of the page)

This is correct. No idea why it was flagged. Hetzner only counts outbound traffic.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#159

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#160

Post by rollcat » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

deskr wrote: post #137

andix wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. We got hit by a sudden change in a popular SaaS' pricing, from $10 to $75/mo - a 650% increase. We don't have a big margin, if a different provider did this sort of thing overnight, we could be instantly out of business. It's already difficult to build a competitive business even WITH the ability to outsource a class of problems to a SaaS.

I've been a big fan of Hetzner for the last decade, and I understand and agree with their motivation for this change. However December 1st is effectively almost tomorrow, they could have easily given us a month's notice instead.