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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

#551
post #508
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

This is a for profit business not a limited common ressource being shared.

What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not low usage users subsidising high usage users, it’s OVH margins. Nobody is being subsidised. Low usage users just make OVH more money than high usage users. OVH doesn’t mind because per user costs are actually low and they are already competitive at that price without adding more complexity to their product mix. Users which would lead to an actual loss are rate limited.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#552
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the same etymology and even having the exact same spelling in two languages does not disqualify a word from being a false friend at all! Take "gift", for example: "Gift" means "poison" in German, despite both the English and German word deriving from the same Proto-Germanic root, meaning "to give". > (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the ex…

I said same etymology AND same meaning. They are the same word, not false friends. US English may have dropped that meaning, but British English still uses it in this way, as do many Europeans when they speak English. It’s a correct translation.

This is an announcement targeted at US customers. One could assume that at least some of these might assume the American English sense of the word.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#553

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.

OVH did the same thing to me...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#554
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could rewind the clock, would you have started setting it up any differently, like in a container? I am just curious what your options would be now if you wanted to migrate. Would you just copy your bash history to a local text file for reference, and then repeat the steps on a new server?

Generally even in containerized deployments, you run one container per service/process. You wouldn't run everything you’d run on one box in one container. I definitely recommend using docker compose or similar even in a one node deployment versus just installing and running things on the host linux system like it’s still 1998. Having a single directory to back up and a single file defining all of the services that ca…

The performance impact seems completely unjustified for most of the things people do with a personal machine however.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#555
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I'm currently using Linode. If they started requiring every account to have a valid US passport, I'd happily comply.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#557
post #491
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…

> However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth?

Irrelevant. If you sell a vCPU with enough bandwidth to feed your 1GBps 24/7/365 needs, and you charge $5/month for it, then it matters nothing what's your personal notion of reasonable. What matters is the service plan offered by the cloud provider and the performance indicators they are contractually obligated to meet.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#558

> 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…

Well, I doubt an extra $1/TB is going to stop Hetzner from being very price effective.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#559
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally even in containerized deployments, you run one container per service/process. You wouldn't run everything you’d run on one box in one container. I definitely recommend using docker compose or similar even in a one node deployment versus just installing and running things on the host linux system like it’s still 1998. Having a single directory to back up and a single file defining all of the services that ca…

The performance impact seems completely unjustified for most of the things people do with a personal machine however.

What is the performance impact? Going one page into Google results, I found this paper. Is there a better reference?

> At light workload levels, the native host performs better than Docker. However, as the workload increases, both Docker and the native host show similar performance, with the difference getting smaller

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376557310_Comparati...

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#560
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, you go to court if you can't agree with the merchant on anything. They're the competent authority to settle disputes When I pay for something, now the other party has the money, that's how money works. If I trust them that little, I should probably be using escrow but this costs extra and so it imo doesn't make sense to pay that fee for every transaction - as one does with this chargeback guarantee thing. P…

I guess I assumed that consumer protection laws would mean people could reverse charges more easily than they can here in the US (which we can do easily, albeit as a cardholder benefit, not a matter of law). Interesting.

They're mainly designed to make it so you don't need to. If you buy something, it's going to work; and if it doesn't, the seller is required to make up for that.

I can only speak for Norway, but this doesn't normally mean reversing the charge. It's assumed that, if you bought an X, you wanted an X. So the seller is required to get you an X of good enough quality to actually do the job, and if that isn't what they were trying to sell... well, then they won't be in business for long.

Normally this means repairs or replacement, of course on the seller's bill.

The US seems much more geared to seeing every interaction as... I want to say 'combative'.

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