Live data from Hacker News

Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

news.ycombinator.com

671–680 of 712 posts

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#671
For anyone regularly above the new 1TB limits, or using close to 20TB already on these services - what kinds of use cases are these?

If it was a basic, or private CDN, for example, the lag time might be pretty negligible to stream out of EU for the extra bandwidth.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#672
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.

Being cloud-agnostic is highly valuable. It's also possible to make determinations on where your needs are served best pro-actively, independent of service plan like this.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can confirm this.

I had packet loss on my server. They asked me several times to reboot my server into rescue mode and leave it there for 10+ hours until their senior technician could look into it at an unspecified time of day.

After a month of doing this 3-4 times, they finally admitted that their switch is overprovisioned and there was no ETA. This problem happened in 2 locations.

Also had a problem with the failover ip failing to move. Again they told me to reboot into rescue mode and leave it like that for hours. No fix.

I've left OVH entirely after being a customer of theirs for over 10 years.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#674
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of "normal circumstances". Being a bigger user should fall within it or that's not accurate advertising. Some places will offer a choice between faster metered and slower unmetered. That seems like a good compromise to me. A nice big link should cost the host a single digit number of dollars per 100Mbps, so it's not hard to find an option where everyone is happy with the speed and pricing.

If you want a contract that has every term and circumstance negotiated up front, you’re going to need to speak with Hetzner’s business development team. You’ll also need to be a bigger fish than a single hobby developer.

Hetzner has terms up front just fine. $1/TB.

The unmetered issue involves other providers, and plenty of them are up front about it too.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#675
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.

Thats not a bad overage price, but then again cutting from 20 to 1 while raising prices seems fucking insane

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#676
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm missing something then. If that were true, wouldn't you lower the network allowance and then make the product cheaper or at least priced the same? This would have the no-traffic users paying "their fair share" and the overage costs (or higher traffic addon) would make up for the heavy users. The current plan makes everything more expensive for everyone. They would do this if a) they never had a sustainabl…

They recently entered the US market, so almost surely there was some honeymoon period (ie. investment to gain market share), but likely there's a significant difference between how the IXP/bandwidth/peering market works in the US compared to their home market (EU).

Pricing is fairly similar, particularly in ashburn. Europe can be a little cheaper, but usually not a massive amount in it.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#677

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…

It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of committing fraud their first interaction. Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.

Hahaha, I promise you it is. Not saying that's a good thing, but.

If this is exactly what they said it was probably either language barrier, like mis translation of "try again, making sure it's all spelt correctly" OR just that you really did use fake information, in which case here, folks will just say that. You can get told off for not saying please when ordering coffee, I like it but can understand how anyone conditioned to american customer service would be horrified.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#678

> 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…

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

What? Afaik they are unmetered. And real unmetered - there are people who are saturating their connections 24/7 while using them.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#679

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…

Rather, the backbone providers dont do peering agreements and the traffic is very expensive, especially in the post-zirp inflation period. Europe is different - everybody peers with everybody so traffic is dirt cheap.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#680

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…

It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of committing fraud their first interaction. Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.

If that ticked you off, Hetzner support would tick you off even more. Within ~45 minutes of opening a ticket, you get an actual engineer to look into your case, and they are constantly blunt and semi-irate both because of the German work culture and the nature of network/hardware engineering I guess. They fix your stuff fast, and they keep being short, blunt and concise while doing it. No "I'm sorry to hear..." or "Thank you for contacting us with..." blahblah like in the US. All business, no fluff.

Aside from knowing their sh*t and being available at short notice, you'll get along very well after you learn how to communicate with them. By being concise, precise, and blunt of course...

Post reply on HN