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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

#591

Post by ihateolives »

n144q wrote: post #362
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.

Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on the ID. I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.

> real drivers licence

Drivers licence as a personal ID is not really a thing in Europe. It's accepted at some places, but either passport or your state provided ID-card is much preferred.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#592

Post by fransje26 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #504
ironhaven wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#593

Post by ea016 »

leerob wrote: post #280
eatery1234 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know serverless is really expensive, but Vercel is about $400 for 1TB

Vercel is $150: https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress

Vercel heavy user here. They have a very misleading pricing. It's "starting at $150", it varies depending on the region. I end up paying $400 / TB as we have a very international website.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#594

Post by fransje26 »

Fnoord wrote: post #481
ironhaven wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's BF for the laymen?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#595

Post by bashy »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #568
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.

If the location (USA) is key, then fair enough but if not, just buy one of their dedicated servers and get unlimited[1] traffic.

Only outgoing external traffic is counted.

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#596

Post by jeroenhd »

ihateolives wrote: post #591
n144q wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on the ID. I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.

> real drivers licence Drivers licence as a personal ID is not really a thing in Europe. It's accepted at some places, but either passport or your state provided ID-card is much preferred.

Very few Americans have personal ID so if they intend to do business in America, they should be prepared to accept drivers licenses.

Maybe they just don't want to sell to Americans, which is always allowed I guess, but setting up an American VPS provider and not accepting the standard American KYC verification methods would be a rather incompetent way of doing business. It'd be no different from doing business in Europe and only accepting drivers licenses and not accepting passports/ID cards for identity verification.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#597

Post by Aachen »

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…

> > is a meter attached

> Yes, of course.

So it's not unmetered as advertised or am I misunderstanding that word?

> this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"

How so? If they want to be relaxed about it, the terms can say that you can burst more (e.g. "you can use 500GB/month, and burst to 5TB for two months of every two-year period; we'll send you a notification email whenever this happens so you're not caught by surprise"). If they don't want to be flexible, they can mention the hard limit that they are going to enforce regardless of whether they call it unlimited without asterisk. Either way, the buyer would know what they can actually use and doesn't have to guess

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#598

Post by immibis »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #551
saurik wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complexit…

If you pay $5 and use $100 of bandwidth costs, you are in fact being subsidized by other users, not by margins. We don't know what OVH pays for bandwidth though.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#599

Post by immibis »

Aurornis wrote: post #482
BrutalCoding wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When the price does increase, you'll know that there's a new CEO who's lost all connection to reality (in the same way that always happens when you put a person in front of an abstraction without obvious leaks).

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#600

Post by immibis »

macspoofing wrote: post #214
paxys wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then the culprits are the company’s own engineering and marketing departments for not correctly anticipating user demand.

Sure .. also them. Having said that, I am usually empathetic to these kinds of 'unlimited' deals because even though they aren't really 'unlimited', they do tend to be generous to the average use-case and average user .. Inevitably, and unfortunately, someone decides to test the limits and the entire thing collapses. It reminds me of the Blockbuster "No more late fees" policy, which was a really good customer-friendl…

Looked like? Sounds like it was a late fee. Look at us, we've got the cheapest plane tickets by $25 ($50 booking fee applies).
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