They recently changed to bill by the hour. Not hard to destroy and reprovision once you're near the traffic limit. Massive loophole.
They don't pro-rate the included traffic quota for servers that don't run a full month?
Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
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Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#212>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?
They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers use more than a terabyte per month. Based on my experience, it's not easy to go over a terabyte of bandwidth for most web services. I doubt the majority of their customers will see any change in price.
Sucks to pay a dollar per terabyte extra if you're downloading a petabyte per month through your hetzner VPN, but this sure beats raising everyone's prices because two or three companies decided to use Hetzner to build a CDN.
This is why you can't offer unlimited anything, and why we can't have nice things.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hetzner have definitely always been scumbags about the bait & switch on aspects of their service like that. Granted it's pretty typical of the too good to be true rule of life.
Do you have any details? I was about to move all my services off from vultr to hetzner due to the much better pricing
I’ve had several servers with them for years now - private and VPS, and they do what it says on the tin.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
>“Culprits” because they used the service they paid for within its advertised limits? "Culprits" because it was their (legal) use of the service that made Hetzner rethink and change their service plan.
So then the culprits are the company’s own engineering and marketing departments for not correctly anticipating user demand.
Sure .. also them.
Having said that, I am usually empathetic to these kinds of 'unlimited' deals because even though they aren't really 'unlimited', they do tend to be generous to the average use-case and average user .. Inevitably, and unfortunately, someone decides to test the limits and the entire thing collapses.
It reminds me of the Blockbuster "No more late fees" policy, which was a really good customer-friendly policy (speaking as someone who regularly returned rentals late) .. but then they were sued because an aspect of the policy had Blockbuster charging the cost of the rental to the customer if it wasn't returned in some period of time .. and because that charge looked like a 'late fee' they got sued. Urgh.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#215When 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.
While perhaps not like this, AWS has from time to time ensured average rate goes up or introduced charges for something previously free:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/new-featu...
See notes 1 and 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#216> 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?
Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut them back. The marginal customers who need those features leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used to your product and stays.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#217I think OVH has a more logical bandwidth policy. They give you a certain Mbps cap, and that’s that. I haven’t used them personally, though, so can’t vouch for the experience. I’m curious to hear from folks who have used both providers.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#218I would think an auction system would be the best system to price bandwidth.
That could work for some use cases where you transfer in bulk, like backups, CDN sync, research data transfer, etc. Either auction or off-hours or "spot"/low-QoS.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#219>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?
They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers use more than a terabyte per month. Based on my experience, it's not easy to go over a terabyte of bandwidth for most web services. I doubt the majority of their customers will see any change in price. Sucks to pay a dollar per terabyte extra if you're downloading a petabyte per month through your hetzner VPN, but this sure beats raising everyone's prices bec…
> They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers use more than a terabyte per month.
It sure reads to me like they raised the base instance price across the board. The biggest increases will be for those using over the new included bandwidth (min 1tb) but they are going up for everyone.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut them back. The marginal customers who need those features leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used to your product and stays.
MBA value extraction 101.