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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

#501

Post by throwaway2037 »

keyle wrote: post #487
whalesalad wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the GP comment is so dumb. Most commercial aircraft are owned by a few leasing companies. They would love if lessors didn't fly the aircraft, but paid leasing fees!

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#502

Post by throwaway2037 »

dangus wrote: post #284
atomic128 wrote: post #282

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…

I don’t find that to be all that impressive. I’m immediately saving money with the server I built out of mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS solutions. The only reason it’s near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS instances have barely any computing power assigned to them. For the same price as one game server I’m running something like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real CPU…

What is your annual electricity cost for that server in your closet?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#503

Post by [deleted] »

haolez wrote: post #442
Filligree wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never had an issue with credit cards on AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr and Scaleway.

[deleted]

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#504

Post by throwaway2037 »

ironhaven wrote: post #298
czhu12 wrote: 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

Is this legitimate data or pirated media?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#505

Post by fastball »

whalesalad wrote: post #486
atomic128 wrote: post #282

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…

Completely backwards. A server that is being paid for but not utilized is the best-case scenario for a hosting provider – revenue the same, lower costs (electrical/cooling/etc).

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#506

Post by faet »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #499
crowcroft wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why were you using a VPN?

Apple Private Relay is on by default for a lot of Apple products these days. This is why my account was banned.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#507

Post by shlomo_z »

Aachen wrote: post #447
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout-out to Microtronixdc, my colocation provider. For their $55/month/U colocation package, they provide unmetered gigabit for no additional cost. https://microtronixdc.com/

I see terms for hosting and domain registration and managed databases, but not colocation. Do you know if they really not care if you actually use that connection to the stated allowance?

Bandwidth for these providers is super cheap. The main cost is power consumption.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#508

Post by saurik »

matt-p wrote: post #491
Aachen wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Yes, of course. Having flow data (or monitoring ports/interfaces) for traffic engineering and management is pretty essential, not least for determining when capacity upgrades are needed. I understand both sides of the argument here. The idea of offering "unlimited" is appealing because most users of a typical 2GB RAM virtual machine (as an example) consume less than 1TB of bandwidth per month. O…

Doing billing like this is awkward as you just don't know what you are going to get. And, in a world where most people are in fact using small amounts of bandwidth, what you have done is caused people who use small amounts of bandwidth to pay MORE than they should, as they are effectively paying the price of the bandwidth for the average user: if you use less than the average, you are subsidizing the people who use more than the average.

Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either has to raise rates for everyone or they have to start claiming some uses of bandwidth are "egregious".

The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user from paying even more than the too much you are already charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users), you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes out the window :/.

The real reason any of this works is just that people in fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time, and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS than they often do today, but everyone would be paying little enough that this idea that it is a big customer "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over sudden utility overages.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#510

Post by foxylad »

Y_Y wrote: post #383
qwertox wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I ordered a VPS at Netcup (a Hetzner alternative) they called me and asked me for the name of the hotel next to my place to check if I really lived at the address I provided. I guess that if i would have needed to look it up, that is, struggled a bit with the answer, they would have denied me as a customer.

If they can look it up then so can you! Maybe it filters out lazy scammers, but it doesn't sound like solid KYC to me. In fact I don't feel like a hosting service should need to do this at all. If you pay your bills and aren't on the Stasi blacklist you should be good to go. I don't want or expect the likes of Hetzner to be responsible for policing.

As someone who runs mail servers, I wish they'd be MORE strict to stop the drive-by spammers. Every so often our servers get blocked because someone starts sending spam from a machine on the same netblock.

It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.

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