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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

#481
post #283

What are some examples of applications people are running that: 1. Require 20TB of bandwidth / month 2. That bandwidth can't be shielded by Cloudflare and others? Is it like... real time video streaming? Gaming servers? I can't imagine a web app getting anywhere close to that. I run a mid sized NFT art creation website that generates both images and GIF's ( https://mintables.club ) and with over 100000 users at peak,…

BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month to be in good standing within that tracker’s community

Good thing I pay only 30 EUR a month for symmetric 1 gbit fiber. Right now with BF you can find BF deals cheaper than 2 USD a month, and then there's Usenet.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These stories are marketing mythology.

Think about. Imagine they sell 100 hot dogs per hour. A $0.25 difference means $25/hr in a store doing many orders of magnitude more revenue each hour.

It’s nothing. The way they play it up in the media gets a lot of attention and builds goodwill, but it’s entirely meaningless to their bottom line.

It’s amazing that people eat these stories up, though. I’ve heard so many people repeating this story as if it’s some amazing secret.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#483
post #356
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.

Right but that sucks. So CC companies/banks are simply shifting risk from one side of the transaction to the other. Sure, as a consumer you don’t have to worry because you’ll get your money back. But if the merchant has to worry and reject customers who are “suspicious” to protect themselves then you’re back to square one, except more kafkaesque. That’s why I said cash is better.

I’d rather have $10 permanently lost for a month of VPS than being banned after 5 days setting it up because I’m traveling and my IP is “suspicious”. Which has happened to me.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? Did they actually raise the hotdog price? I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad times to come.

Costco hotdogs have been underpriced for decades. It's an intentional choice, a loss leader. It raising would be mostly meaningless. But no, last I looked a week ago or so it was still the same price.

It’s a warmed hot dog, a bun, some self-serve condiments, and it’s served by people who can do hundreds of them an hour.

$1.50 might very well cover the cost, but even if it’s a loss leader then it’s entirely negligible.

The mythology around the hot dog price makes people think they’re getting a screaming deal, though. It’s perfect marketing material.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#485

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 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…

> where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong desire to make the customer happy

It’s definitely a culture shock for people from these cultures to encounter businesses who reject their business, whether it’s deemed risky or not worthwhile.

It was eye opening to me to spend time working with cultures where I had to convince businesses to deal with me rather than the other way around. Some people get extremely offended when businesses don’t bend over backward for them, but that’s not going to work when you encounter cultures who operate differently.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#486

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Why is this attitude so commonplace?

Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty.

Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of that service for that fee.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#487

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Why is this attitude so commonplace? Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty. Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of t…

I'm not sure why you compare this to airplanes. Airplanes fuel consumption is very expensive if the plane is empty relative to profit. They need to put bums in seats for the flight to be viable commercially.

On the other hand, a flat out rack takes more power than an idle one. So this isn't the same thing at all.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#488

I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know I’m over-provisioned; that’s not the point). Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..). People probably spam-provisioned cheap CPX boxes to get cheap bandwidth. Also, complaining about a "large 27.52% price increase" is kind of absurd when the absolute value of the increase is just under…

> Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).

That seems backwards? They're not hogging anything, they're paying for network they're not using; this is excellent for Hetzner.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#489

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Off topic, your website is interesting, I wish I knew how to interpret it "commitment of traders". Maybe there is a blog post somewhere?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#490

Used Linode for years. Brilliant service. Not sure how the Akamai takeover will pan out. Anyone else looking to migrate. https://www.serverhunter.com/

Ironically one of the reasons I abandoned Linode for Hetzner was because I assumed Akamai would ruin it. I still have stuff on Linode and I don't think Akamai ruined it.

With that said, Hetzner's prices are still cheaper and I've never had issues with their service, but I feel gaslit by this announcement.

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