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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

#461

Post by tredre3 »

lannisterstark wrote: post #375
danpalmer wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be a cultural thing. HN, SV, and the market for IaaS/SaaS products is a bit of an American monoculture, where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong desire to make the customer happy. I think this is mostly a good thing and especially a good way to build early stage companies, but in my experience it's less present elsewhere. In some places companies are happy doing their own thing, do…

It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of committing fraud their first interaction. Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.

> It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of committing fraud their first interaction.

In my experience a lot of German businesses are like that, they'll woosh you away for any slight (perceived or real). So it is definitely a cultural thing. Of course my small sample doesn't mean anything in regards to german culture, but at the very least it proves that this corporate culture is indeed a thing.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#462

Post by sgarland »

Filligree wrote: post #417
haolez wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with me a few years ago. Their support told me that they didn't want me as a customer. It was my first interaction with them. I swear I'm just a regular nerd with a credit card :D They are bizarre.

A credit card? That... makes some sense, then. I'd be wary if anyone trying to pay with one of those as well; they're much too rare, and I've heard it's easy to unilaterally reverse charges. Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in the USA, but they're not anywhere else.

They are literally the preferred way to pay in the U.S. for damn near everything.

I’ve also had no problems using them in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Korea…

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#463

Post by Aachen »

crowcroft wrote: post #329
lordofgibbons wrote: post #295

I created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in. I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere. I don't know how they're still in business.

I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.

That seems fair to me though. If that ISP (whatever the WHOIS resolves to for your VPN) gets a high rate of fraudulent customers, how is Hetzner to know if you're the same fraudster again or a new customer? Especially if you share not just the ISP but even your IP address with someone... we also rate limit logins for example based on IP address. If you're coming from the same origin as an attacker, there's no way for me to tell who's who

Perhaps they could implement some way to do a 1-cent bank transfer from an account with a name which isn't on their fraud list, but as a simple step it seems pretty normal to use your regular internet connection (that ties the IP+timestamp combination to a real-world subscriber) and not some anonymity service

Although it would be nice if we could be anonymous on the web, when abuse traffic is involved (more than posting a comment on some forum as an anonymous source or something), I don't know how that'd be possible to reconcile

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#464

Post by BlueTemplar »

akerl_ wrote: post #356
klabb3 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of fraud exactly? You mean like stolen CCs? It feels very medieval as a financial trust system if every little vendor can’t trust payments, even when you pay up front ? Like this is in some ways worse than cold hard cash. And then we pay VISA premium on top of that, for the convenience of being mistrusted..

Paying up front doesn't really mean much, because if the credit card info is stolen, the actual owner will report the transaction and it will be reversed.

I wonder if they tried a debit card...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#465

Post by BrutalCoding »

ndjdjddjsjj wrote: post #348
themgt wrote: post #322

As a Hetzner bandwidth enjoyer affected by this, this is why ( HN cough ) multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great, because if you get rug pulled you just migrate to another provider with better prices. That said, $1/TB for bandwidth overage seems pretty fair. I empathize with the complaining but if the new price is such a ripoff everyone should be recommending what cloud VM provider they're migrating to for a better deal.

It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"

I remember reading something about the Costco hot dog story, quite funny IMO, here's what I just found from 2018: "I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed. By the way, if you raised (the price) to $1.75, it would not be that big of a deal. People would still buy (it). But it’s the mindset that when you think of Costco, you think of the $1.50 hot dog (and soda)." [1].

Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from 2024: "'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip said." [2].

Sources:

[1] https://www.425business.com/news/costco-ceo-craig-jelinek-on...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/05/31/cos...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#466

Post by preisschild »

yesbut wrote: post #426
TZubiri wrote: post #374

This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US tariffs. "I’ve been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they’ve made a feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of “fairness”." Hetzner is a company know for it's precise pricing structure. An increase in prices would be correlated to an increase in costs, and in fact the next paragraph Hetzner writes: "With the new tariff structure, we want to mak…

Probably more likely has something to do with increased energy costs.

Pretty sure VA/US energy prices are a lot cheaper than German ones.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#467

Post by Sebguer »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #295

I created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in. I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere. I don't know how they're still in business.

Were you using your real information when you signed up? Were you using a disposable / privacy-first credit card? Did you try to obscure your name or register from a VPN? You're very upset at them accusing you of abuse or fraud, but you haven't actually made it clear whether any of the signals you provided them when signing up were aligned with what they'd usually see from abusive or fraudulent users.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#468

Post by dboreham »

viraptor wrote: post #314
Firerouge wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?

Any decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than $5 linode. For example search for optiflex https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to go for i7s

But it'll cost $100+/yr in electricity.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#469

Post by BlueTemplar »

thisiscrazy2k wrote: post #438

I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the streets to lay cable. So is bandwidth going to the cable? I am asking that because I never quite understood 3g/4g/5g costs. In my youth it was $0.10US for a text message.…

My first smartphone had a data plan which cost 1024€/Go. And I was happy about how cheap it was (it got more expensive shortly after).

Cellular towers aren't cheap: you need to install quite a lot of them, especially in big cities!

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#470

Post by derefr »

Aachen wrote: post #440
fastily wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use OVH (VPS’s specifically), which offers unlimited bandwidth. In my experience they’ve been both reliable and affordable which is a rarity. I run a few applications that require high amounts of bandwidth, so silly caps like the ones that Hetzner are imposing are a non-starter for me

That's what a friend said also. If you look beyond the marketing material, hoever, the ToS says: > OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would…

> is a meter attached

Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to saturate their network switches they’ll add one, to figure out who’s disrupting everyone else’s QoS.

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