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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

#561

Post by UberFly »

voytec wrote: post #396
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…

> I think this might be a cultural thing. It's just German bureaucracy. When I wanted to register domains with Hetzner few years back, they asked me to print multiple pages of forms and contract, fill out, sign and... fax it back.

I'm fine being fed up with the bureaucracy in my own country without also having to deal with Germany's. A big no-thanks to ever dealing with Hetzner.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#562

Post by lysp »

arcastroe wrote: post #496
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.

Exactly! I had a three node k3s cluster hosted on OVH. When I decided to switch to Contabo, it was as easy as adding the three Contabo nodes to the cluster, and then removing the three OVH nodes (plus updating some DNS rules). It was the easiest and simplest migration I'd ever done. All my services and data just moved automatically and mostly with zero downtime. The only service that experienced a little downtime was…

This is what I also want to do.

How are you handling storage? That is the only issue I'm struggling with for a small 3-node deployment.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#563

Post by wqaatwt »

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.

> but they're not anywhere else.

They certainly are very common in much of Europe. Buying stuff on credit might be not that common but plenty of people have credit cards themselves (even of they are effectively used the same way as debit cards)

To be fair not sure if you comment is just sarcasm.. but I’ve never had any issues using a credit card on Hetzner or pretty much any other European company

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#564

Post by dabedee »

markvdb wrote: post #433
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

OVH and reliable, in the same sentence? They're cheap, so suitable for projects you don't mind going poof. Personal anecdote. A few years ago, I lost a lot of sleep on a domain renewal at OVH. Their incompetence was mind-boggling. A less common tld was the only slightly challenging bit. After a week of calling and emailing, and on the verge of the domain lapsing, I gave up and sent someone to the tld registry with ca…

From personal experience a few years back, OVH support was one of the worst I have ever experienced in my career. Technical incompetence at multiple levels of the chain (e.g lack of understanding of how DNS works). I would never recommend it to anyone, not even my worst enemy.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#565

Post by wqaatwt »

dpkirchner wrote: post #436
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.

I haven't done business in Germany or used German banks -- is it hard to get them to reverse charges?

You can still do chargebacks if you pay with a credit card from a German or other European bank (experience of course might vary but you can just switch to one that offers better customer service)

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#566

Post by danielovichdk »

While all the guesswork ? They explain clearly why this is happening. And it seems fair.

"With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. 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. The new prices will give our customers the best possible price for the resources they use."

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#567

Post by asyx »

sdwr wrote: post #216
justinclift wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a completely legitimate use though. Hetzner were widely telling people about that 20TB limit, so why would they be surprised when people use them as CDN boxes?

Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut them back. The marginal customers who need those features leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used to your product and stays.

Hetzner has been in this business for a very long time and I’m sure half the German small to medium sized companies use Hetzner. They have costs as well and with virtual servers they just assumed the usage pattern was similar to their eu data center and that didn’t work out so they increase the prices a bit. So that on average their calculation works out again.

Like, this is not Netflix tripling the prices over a few years.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#568

Post by iforgotpassword »

danielovichdk wrote: post #566

While all the guesswork ? They explain clearly why this is happening. And it seems fair. "With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers w…

It doesn't seem so fair if you didn't know that in advance. I don't do research on what actual costs a provider I sign up with has, and whether a product might be subsidized in some way. If I relied on those 20TB a month I now got a 100 to 400% price increase.

I really like hetzner and their service quality, but that does leave a bad taste... I seems like they badly miscalculated.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#569

Post by qwertox »

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.

Sure, it's not solid, but they knew I was a private customer, so what should they do? Do a request to a private credit bureau like the SCHUFA (like Equifax) to check if my provided details are valid?

It feels like it's a check to get a general feeling if things sound plausible. Like no Russian accent for a German name, some knowledge of the surroundings, a valid phone number.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#570

Post by mort96 »

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.

You're leaving out a crucial detail: did they just assume your real information was incorrect because the name is unusual or something, or did you actually provide incorrect information?
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