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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to never raise prices if you have 1000% markup.

The point remains, if I was a customer who had planned my budget on the previously lower rates, this move’d be very disruptive. Herzner is an established player, not a startup, this either shows a lack of regards for customers, or that they aren’t very well run.

If you need long term price security, than you need to get a long term contract. The big cloud providers will give you that if you pay them enough in advance, but probably for at least 50 times the price per TB.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#272
post #64

This seems to be a huge PR blunder. As a single data point, I have to say that my first reaction is illogical. I have two hetzner shared instances and I am royally pissed by the 20x reduction in traffic allowance. It is also irrelevant to me: over the last 12 months I never exceeded 1TB. My unhappiness on the traffic reduction is purely of a "what if I start using more" type. For which two rational answers is "well y…

Very well put! I had the exact same reaction as you: even though I don't even use 1TB/month, I found myself looking at alternatives simply b/c of the cognitive jolt of seeing the 20x reduction. Sometimes I wonder if companies don't consider the psychological impact of changes enough. No, logically, this change means a meager price increase for me, but if it caused me (and at least one other) to think about competing offerings, then like you said, indicates a marketing screwup.

That's not to say they have to keep offering that much traffic if they're losing money (of course they don't), but the way you make changes matters.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#273
post #171

> 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…

Then why does this only apply in the US? Are they saying EU customers are well behaved?

It also may depend on peering arrangements Hetzner has. If EU ISP more inclined to peer with Hetzner than US one bandwidth in EU will be cheaper for them.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#274
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why does this only apply in the US? Are they saying EU customers are well behaved?

It also may depend on peering arrangements Hetzner has. If EU ISP more inclined to peer with Hetzner than US one bandwidth in EU will be cheaper for them.

- in EU there are large peering exchanges to swap traffic

- in USA no peering exchanges exists and you need to pay for your traffic most of the time. Few big operators in US and they enforce this.

Looks like some deal wasn't renewed and they lost a big chunk of cheap pipe or/and some of their upstream providers decided to do something with routing.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#275

"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." ... This argument does not make sense. I use very few resources but have to pay more.

Yeah, my price just changed from €7.05 to €8.99—in the name of fairness to low impact users? It’s brazenly nonsensical.

It would be so much better if they’d just said “sorry but we need to raise prices”. The attempt to sugarcoat it is insulting to begin with, and it’s only made worse that their backwards excuse comes across as thoughtlessly trampling us.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You've written that the wrong way around. You've written the opposite of what Cloudflare writes. 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.

Oops, yep, so I have. Should’ve read “much more widespread in Europe than the US”. Sorry, long day.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#277
post #171

> 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…

Then why does this only apply in the US? Are they saying EU customers are well behaved?

Hetzner colo's for their US servers/locations. Perhaps their US bandwidth rates are much higher than their own DCs?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB. Expensive by Hetzner standards but still cheap by cloud standards, egress from Singapore EC2 instances is between $80 and $120 per TB for example.

$80!! EC2 is a scam

I know serverless is really expensive, but Vercel is about $400 for 1TB
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