231–240 of 712 posts
So, do bandwidth limited (instead of traffic metering limited) VPSes still exist? I mean, to pull numbers out of ass, instead of $5 for 1.5 Tb of metered traffic on a 10 Gbps pipe, the $5 pays for 10 mpbs without metering. I know protecting the client from extra unforeseen charges isn't predatory enough, but maybe some offerings like that still exist.
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.
Breath of fresh air in the modern cloud era tbh.
> 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
Hetzner has been an established player in Europe for a long time. It seems plausible that they have enough customers who use small amounts of bandwidth to subsidise the heavier users. Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with better pricing than established players, it stands to reason that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be the heavier users.
>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. Isent this how every ISP works? You and all your neighbors can subscribe to 1Gigabit because they don't anticipate everyone maxxing out the bandwidth at once?
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.
Not just mainly, but exclusively in my experience. (Import/export tariffs.) Until this thread, I have never encountered the term "bar tariff" for a list of drink prices, or "energy tariff" instead of rate. Those uses are simply not American English, and you would be misunderstood. Hetzner is a German company so I find myself wondering if this is a British usage, or a mistranslation of the German word "tarif" that sho…
21 occurrences of "tariff" on one of British Gas' pages: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/off-peak-electric... ("Your energy provider may offer time of use tariffs and cheaper night-time electricity rates.")
>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…
No they're not? AFAICT if I made a CPX11 using 0.1TB/mo, my price just went from 3.85 to 4.49.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hetzner has been an established player in Europe for a long time. It seems plausible that they have enough customers who use small amounts of bandwidth to subsidise the heavier users. Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with better pricing than established players, it stands to reason that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be the heavier users.
EU transit costs and peering agreements are much more relaxed and cheaper than in US
> 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…
They write that transit bandwith costs are similar in Europe and the USA, but Europe has more peering — it's around 50% of their traffic rather than 20%.
> The corollary is that in Europe transit is also cheap but peering is very easy, making the effective price of bandwidth in the region the lowest in the world.
Ahh, yes, the good old "here, you purchased X amount of things for $Z. But don't dare to use everything you paid for, or we double the price"
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.