I don't know why people praise Hetzner. They're not as good.
Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
621–630 of 712 posts
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
In the US, DL works as an ID for almost anything other than voting in an election. You can fly to almost any US territory with that plastic card. And it is state-provided ID -- nobody questions that. And we are talking about 300M people here, which is about 4 times the population for Germany. If they hate US residents they should declare that clearly on their website, not wasting customers' (and their own) time.
But you don't just have one type of drivers license for 300M people, do you? As far as I'm aware each state has their own. So it's not 300M vs. 80M, but 80M vs. 50x 6M people (incredibly simplified and wrong numbers, but you get the gist). Far more effort to verify each document.
That would still exclude non-driving customers, which means allowing at least one additional form of ID per state - suddenly you have to support at least 100 IDs for US customers, while German customers have exactly 1.
Not sure how you arrive at them "hating US residents", that's a weird conclusion to get to.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what was your concern - Hetzner is obliged by law to make sure their signing up a real person or a company and that their servers are not used for malicious intent.
It's pretty obvious what the concern is, no? Hetzner's process seems to be blocking real people with no malicious intent (myself included) from creating accounts, even when we try to provide proof. Obviously this means we end up using a different provider instead. Though in my experience attempting to do business in Germany, this kind of forbidden-by-default perspective is quite common there, so they probably don't s…
A credit card is “low trust” confirmation of identity. Usually for this kind of services, you also have to submit your ID for verification. Perhaps you’re based in a country where this is not possible so they didn’t ask upfront?
Either way, it’s their process so you’re of course welcome to go elsewhere if you want. I don’t see it as a “bad thing” for companies to require some level of trust.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#624Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#625Earlier 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…
> What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not low usage users subsidising high usage users, it’s OVH margins.
I did not miss this, and it was part of my point: the only reason this makes any sense at all is because these providers are ripping people off on bandwidth, which is how they have a margin so large that they feel a need to hide it from people under this kind of ridiculous pricing abnormality.
What is awkward is just accepting that and helping to make it worse by advocating for making it easier to kind of hide that fact: bandwidth is a commodity product, and these pricing games aren't pro-consumer because they somehow help people not have to worry about one month getting ripped off too much... they are anti-consumer because they enable the perpetuation of the state of affairs wherein people get ripped off in the first place.
The bandwidth providers know this, but they--of course ;P--like their excessive margins... but, if you just stopped claiming this was pro-consumer and realized what was actually going on here, the idea that a margin so excessive as to be able to essentially make the usage for the median user irrelevant should indicate a nigh-unto-ridiculous level of market distortion.
Like, we shouldn't sit around and just tolerate these margins. And that this particular pricing trick helps make these margins a bit more stomached by people really sucks! And in some sense I get it that it does make it easier to stomach... but... only because I think people are just buying into the idea that this must be a reasonable price :(.
And--even then--it doesn't fix the other problem I talked about (which I explicitly hedged as being in the world where the price wasn't set up to gouge everyone): when Facetime came out, it overnight was going to cause everyone with an iPhone to suddenly need more bandwidth, and so network providers temporarily needed to ban it or charge more for it; we see the same thing with the step up to video streaming services from basic web browsing, leading to providers feeling a need to zero-rate.
The reality is that bandwidth IS a limited common resource being shared at that provider--the same as any other product where the price isn't being distorted: this is the whole reason we use markets for this stuff in the first place--and the pricing of it at different providers should encounter market forces to drive it down closer to cost... except we are trapped in a local minimum here by people who refuse to understand that unlimited schemes cost more, not less.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#626Earlier 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…
View this as an insurance and it suddenly all makes perfect sense. You pay a little more so if this month your usage pikes, you won't get a surprise invoice you didn't budget for, and you won't get cut either. At worst, you'll get rate-limited. This price stability is valuable and paying extra to get it isn't being charged an unfair price. Of course if you don't find it beneficial, you should choose another offering.
This is only relevant because the cost of bandwidth is excessively high--much higher than it should be--and so people essentially need to pay for this gouging-insurance.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#627Earlier 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.
I run everything on Longhorn, including databases. Not the highest iops but definitely worth the hit for the easy of migrating.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't Hetzner impacted in Europe at the moment from a cable cut? Wouldn't surprise me if there is a wave of people moving stuff over to the US because of that. I don't know much about cloud though. I believe "The Ship has arrived and repairs are underway, which will still take some time." and "the repair may take up to two weeks.".
Last I heard from Cinia was that the cable should be fixed by the end of November, so sometime within the next 55 hours.
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
In the US, DL works as an ID for almost anything other than voting in an election. You can fly to almost any US territory with that plastic card. And it is state-provided ID -- nobody questions that. And we are talking about 300M people here, which is about 4 times the population for Germany. If they hate US residents they should declare that clearly on their website, not wasting customers' (and their own) time.
Contrary to the belief of a lot of Americans, just because it works in the US doesn't mean it works elsewhere. In the rest of the world a driver's license is used for proving your right to drive and we have a thing called passports for proving your identity. Hetzner isn't an American company so why should they accept American drivers licenses?
Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.
I understand Tailscale is the new Hamachi.
I'm aware, but I stick with Hamachi because I know how to use it, and I have yet to run into a situation that would motivate me to replace it.