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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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also may depend on peering arrangements Hetzner has. If EU ISP more inclined to peer with Hetzner than US one bandwidth in EU will be cheaper for them.

- in EU there are large peering exchanges to swap traffic - in USA no peering exchanges exists and you need to pay for your traffic most of the time. Few big operators in US and they enforce this. Looks like some deal wasn't renewed and they lost a big chunk of cheap pipe or/and some of their upstream providers decided to do something with routing.

Also, Hetzner is way bigger in the EU than in the US. Good access to services hosted by Hetzner is thus more relevant to EU ISPs, because customers in the EU will probably use more services hosted on Hetzner infra. This gives Hetzner more leverage in the EU to negotiate beneficial conditions with regard to its uplinks and peering agreements.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> What is the performance impact?

DNAT, layered file system access, likely duplication of libraries if you don't pay much attention to your containers.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#583

This is typical of Hetzner, if a product SKU is losing money they very quickly make changes, even going as far as to discontinue the product entirely (eg. GPU servers). They definitely don't seem to be a fan of loss leaders. I'm guessing somehow the traffic usage patterns of their USA customers was very different to their EU counterparts, or the cost of expanding network capacity was a lot higher than anticipated. It…

The bandwidth market is very different between EU and USA, maybe they weren't prepared for the much higher prices in USA? I'm pretty used to having a 100 Mbps connection to our servers that we can use without any strings attached. Even on the lowest tier. (Not Hetzner customer but been thinking about it)

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#585
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.

The performance impact is approximately zero.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#586
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not advocating for anyone being a nasty person, but there are significant cultural differences again for what it means to be rude. In Japan the cultural expectation is that saying "no" is rude in a customer service situation, which is far beyond the expectations of most of the world. This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no". If you're used to American customer service, you may find European cu…

"Try again, and this time provide real data" would be considered very rude even in Germany.

Since I wasn't there I can't say what happened. Can be a language thing too, I can imagine that the intended meaning would be "Try again, making sure you spell everything exactly as the data on the card" but it came out as "Try again with the real info". In germany the English language is very optional, it's not needed for any media consumtion since everything is being dubbed and/or translated. This leads to less experience using the language.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#587
post #570

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?

I've had the exact thing happen to me. Real information they deemed fake for whatever reason.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#588

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…

FAANG has exactly the same behavior. When you have billions of users and no customer support, no one cares about the customer being right.

Last month I tried to create an Instagram account, I kept being instabanned on 5 different devices with different IPs. No recourse possible. HN is full of horror stories like this.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#589
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's indeed the pain point. Distributing a stateless app is relatively easy. Distributing the shared file system and database over a remote, higher latency, cross-cloud setup is hard.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#590

It's now more expensive for bandwidth than Digital Ocean, completely destroying what was its value proposition previously.

I'm not sure what math you're basing this on, but it's far from correct. They include slightly less transfer in the instances, but their overage pricing is about 10% of DO and their instances are so much cheaper that you'll be paying much less even after adding a few TB.

For example compare the CPX11 to the cheapest similar offering from DO:

CPX11: 2vCPU, 2GB, 40GB storage (NVMe), 1TB transfer, ~$5 per month

DO Basic: 2vCPU, 2GB, 60GB storage (non-NVMe), 3TB transfer, $18 per month

Add 2TB more transfer at Hetzner and you're at ~$7 per month. Still a bit less storage though, let's also compare it to the CPX21:

CPX21: 3vCPU, 4GB, 80GB storage (NVMe), 2TB transfer, ~$9.50 per month. Add 1TB of transfer and you get more of everything for ~$10.50, ~40% less than at DO. And bandwidth overages at DO are about 10x as expensive.

We can also compare a higher tier:

CPX41: 8vCPU, 16GB, 240GB storage (NVMe), 4TB transfer, ~$32 per month

CPX51: 16vCPU, 32GB, 360GB storage (NVMe), 5TB transfer, ~$63.50 per month

DO Basic: 8vCPU, 16GB, 320GB storage (non-NVMe), 6TB transfer, $96 per month

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