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Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

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Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#221

This thread is where I'm learning that American English uses tariff mainly for import tariffs. Here in India, the most common usage of it is to talk about telecom tariffs - mainly mobile, sometimes broadband. So it didn't even occur to me when reading the question that it might have anything to do with import tariffs, until I read some comments that misunderstood it that way.

hotels in India also use the word tariff for room rates, as in, see the tariff chart on the wall behind the reception desk.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#222

> for other customers who have used much more resources So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher than that of European and Singaporean customers? I wonder what it consists of. * π x thumb = ballpark figure

> So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher than that of European and Singaporean customers? I wouldn't be amazed if Hetzner benefits significantly from peering, which is much more widespread in US than in Europe. Interesting piece on this from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... It's quite possible…

Really? Peering is very big in Europe, we have like 10+ CIX operators with 20+ locations in Germany alone.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#223
post #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.

> I could perhaps understand using it for example for someone that tried to store a petrabyte of storage on a consumer unlimited storage plan.

I couldn't, don't call it unlimited if it's not unlimited, using what you paid for is not a "misdeed".

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#224

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?

No.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#225

This is typical of Hetzner, if a product SKU is losing money they very quickly make changes, even going as far as to discontinue the product entirely (eg. GPU servers). They definitely don't seem to be a fan of loss leaders. I'm guessing somehow the traffic usage patterns of their USA customers was very different to their EU counterparts, or the cost of expanding network capacity was a lot higher than anticipated. It…

I have no complaints at all about this model. They work out the cost of providing a service, then they charge that cost plus a markup. They keep doing things that make them money. They stop doing things that don't make them money.

It seems like a straightforward way to run a business.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#226

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

That's usually true if you see the actual costs of the thing.

In the case of data transmission if you were using some data transmission system where you were charged per byte based on the operator's costs (possibly time dependent so the cost per byte might vary depending on the amount of traffic on the provider's network and on the varying real time prices of the networks they connect to) then you would indeed see prices going down over time and performance going up.

Consumers, small businesses, and often even medium businesses generally hate that kind of pricing. They like fixed monthly bills. So providers offer that, setting the amount of data included in that price high enough that most customers won't ever come near it.

That tends to result in the lower bandwidth users actually paying quite a bit more than they would if they had per byte pricing and the higher bandwidth (but not so high as to go over the included data and hit overage fees) paying less than they would under the per byte model.

That can attract more high bandwidth customers and eventually the model of customer bandwidth usage that was used to set the price and bandwidth allowance is no longer accurate and gets adjusted.

Note that this means that price you pay is not just a function of the underlying technology costs--it is also a function of how other people are using the service.

Same thing happens even in non-technology areas. You probably wouldn't go into a fixed price "all you can eat" restaurant just to get a donut and cup of coffee. The fixed price is set to cover people getting full meals. And if a bunch of competitive eaters started coming in every day to do their training at that restaurant you can safely bet that the price is going to go up for everyone or there is going to be an asterisk added to "all you can eat" with a footnote that puts some sort of cap on it.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#229

They recently changed to bill by the hour. Not hard to destroy and reprovision once you're near the traffic limit. Massive loophole.

Yeah but if you're running something that is using a ton of bandwidth, presumably it's a service that needs to be online and reliable. Being cheap and constantly cycling out servers introduces complexity to your system. Hetzner could also easily change their terms to close this loophole if it's an actual problem.
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