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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

#261

> 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…

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings

The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#262
post #175
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, I really don't understand that part of the message. It'd make sense if they were lowering prices elsewhere, but now they just... raise them? I seriously don't see how that benefits _anyone_ except Hetzner.

What likely happened here is that they were raising prices due to increased costs for energy and various other costs, and if they hadn't made this change then they would have had to increase the price more, so relative to that it keeps it cheaper for low-traffic customers - and they just communicated this poorly.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#263

> 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…

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

Do they have dedicated servers in US?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly acceptable British English. 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.")

Good to know, so it's an American vs. British thing. Thanks! Is there any further distinction between a "tariff" and a "rate" in British English? The example sentence you provide uses both, which makes me wonder if there's even more to the picture here.

Without checking, my feeling is a "tariff" is the whole contracted agreement, and a "rate" is a part of it.

An EV electricity tariff might have a cheap night rate, and a more expensive day rate. Another tariff might be entirely variable rate (price changes every hour).

Wiktionary defines a tariff as "A schedule of rates, fees or prices." so I think my feeling is correct.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#265

I thought of giving a recommendation here but I fear that they would raise the prices too... :|

That's exactly how these things spread - as soon as one provider gets called out for good value, they seem to "adjust" their pricing.

Hetzner had these good prices for decades now.

They are still dirt cheap for cloud and dedicated

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#266
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's really funny. But even funnier, I can't think of a 1-1 English word, and even Google translate gives me tariff. It's actually just "price", but in the context of these kinds of services, could be also something like "tier" (but not to be confused with the German Tier :-)).

I’m not sure the meanings are really different. It’s just that tariff usually refers to import duties in the US. People arguing that’s the only US meaning are just wrong though

But that's normal for languages, the meaning of a word can adjust to the point a meaning previously used becomes archaic. It's obvious these two words share the same for lack of a better word gist, but the actual usage diverged later.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#267

>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?

For speed that's how it works, but not for data caps.

"data caps" aren't real though from a networking perspective. A router or switch will push packets at line rate speed, not based on the total amount of storage or cap.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#268
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's really funny. But even funnier, I can't think of a 1-1 English word, and even Google translate gives me tariff. It's actually just "price", but in the context of these kinds of services, could be also something like "tier" (but not to be confused with the German Tier :-)).

No, it's not just price, the entire structure of pricing changed.

I meant the German word is price, sorry for being unclear.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#269
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word. In my country, "tariff" is seen in several contexts: * A tax on imports, much in the news since the recent US election. * A pub or bar's price list is known as the "bar tariff" * Energy companies offer a selection of "tariffs" i.e. agreed contract rates for usage-based pricing. e.g. a 3-year-fixed-price tariff, a 100%-green-energy tar…

> So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a "tariff" I'm pretty sure it is in American English. That usage might be ok in British English, but for Americans that terminology is going to be confusing. Before today, I had never heard tariff used for anything other than import taxes. And since this applies to servers in the US, it would make sense not to use terminology that would be confusing to people in…

From what I can tell, in the US energy suppliers talking to one another use the term "tariff" like for example https://www.puc.texas.gov/industry/electric/rates/tdr.aspx

Whereas when talking to consumers they seem to use terms like 'rate' and 'plan'.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#270
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.

In Singapore and Asia in general traffic is very expensive, because there are no peering exchanges. So you need to pay for each Mbps you use. Big ISPs there are oligopolies and aren't too fast or keen to work with you.
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