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Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

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Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#201

Post by nZUC2qDyxDA3Kpe »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #50
mlyle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "way, way" below when pegging the link is 320TB/month.

I feel fairly comfortably describing 250TB as far, far below 350TB.

Go get a 1Gbps link and try to download 24/7 for a month. See what you get. Averaged, it'll probably be around 800Mbps, or 260TB. Latency exists.

(If you're really lucky, you might be able to get 900Mbps or so, but that's not likely: the max throughput on 1Gb Ethernet is below 950Mbps, even if you had packets flowing continuously!)

They also said the use averages above 250TB.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#202

Post by gcbirzan »

tuetuopay wrote: post #150
secondcoming wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of our GCP machines use far more than 80% CPU 24/7/365 on both preemptible and non-preemptible instances. We've yet to be asked to move to dedicated machines. It was pretty much the same when we were on AWS. I don't see how a cloud provider can complain about high CPU-usage if they bill by the machine and by the minute. Otherwise 20% of your bill is for idle CPUs.

It really depends how wide your impact is. When you have a lot of instances with this behaviour, you generate a lot of CPU steal for the neighbors on the same hypervisor (depending on the mitigations they put in place). If you happen to impact too many customers (many performance issue tickets), then the CSP will be more than happy to reach out to you to "upgrade" you. It really boils down to the business impact you…

That aws things you linked is for a specific type of instances, for which they clearly state that you cannot run at 100 percent cpu all the time. It even says so in the first sentence

> Traditional Amazon EC2 instance types provide fixed CPU resources, while burstable performance instances provide a baseline level of CPU utilization with the ability to burst CPU utilization above the baseline level.

If the provider you are working for is doing this crap, then it sucks.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#203

Post by coder543 »

As interesting as this discussion has been, I want to point out that we have no proof of any of this.

- The link says "my friend got this", so even the person who authored that post isn't claiming to have received this notice. This is a second hand report, at best. For all we know, their friend received this notice years ago, and mentioned it to the OP, who didn't realize it was old news.

- We don't even have a screenshot of an email like this (which could also be easily faked, but it would be more credible than that zero-effort text post), nor do we have any public statement from Hetzner.

- It's not like a flood of people are reporting this happening to them... I haven't seen a single person in this HN discussion mention receiving a similar notice from Hetzner. I didn't read the entire thread that was linked, but I also didn't see anyone there claiming to have personally received this notice either.

- The phrase "we’re writing to you today because of your traffic use" does not appear on any google results other than the linked thread, so this could be the first and only time that Hetzner has reached out to anyone about this, if it is even real, and even then... they might be motivated to cancel their contract with the customer for real reasons that they don't want to discuss with the customer, in hopes of lessening the drama. Companies do that sometimes, as crappy as it may be, so this whole thing could be a red herring if it only happens to one account.

If anyone does have additional evidence or anecdotes to contribute related to Hetzner getting upset at "unlimited" traffic usage, that would be nice to see. If this is a pattern that can be confirmed, then all of this discussion is absolutely warranted.

Hetzner might have sent this notice, but I've seen people get similarly flustered about other things on the internet that turned out to be fake. Can we gather some more evidence before raising our pitchforks? Literally anyone could have made up a story like this about any company, and people do make stories like this up.

Those are just my thoughts, but now that everyone has their pitchforks out, I doubt they are willing to provide benefit of the doubt to the accused party and wait for more evidence to show up.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#204

Post by encryptluks2 »

teej wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity Why ever not? If you sell someone something but only let them use less than 80% of it, that feels like fraud.

That’s not how anything in the consumer world works. If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

Imagine going to a unlimited buffet restaurant per customer and paying an extra $15 and then being told after it is capped at one plate from the salad bar.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#205

Post by braingenious »

de6u99er wrote: post #84

It looks to me as if they know that the content is violating their terms and conditions. >... We will routinely check your traffic use. If we continue to see such a high amount, we may choose to cancel your contract. (Please see 2.7 of our Terms and conditions ... >2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among…

Wait, what?

You’re confident that this person is engaged in spamming? Or wait no, copyright infringement? Or wait no, illegal content?

Are there any legitimate use cases that might use a lot of bandwidth?

I could imagine hosting 4k video. Or a software archive. Or image hosting. Or hosting podcasts, ML models, backup services, OS images, high traffic forums, public domain archives, adult content (which is not disallowed by Hetzner), etc.

I’ve noticed a lot of people starting with the premise that “It’s okay for Hetzner to lie to customers” and working backwards to enumerate reasons why it’s not only acceptable, but good and necessary. It’s a strange phenomenon.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#206

Post by tomjen3 »

NavinF wrote: post #188
tomjen3 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is overcharging badly . I wouldn't even take them seriously if you want to do something with e.g video. Charging per GB is a joke in a world where my (expensive) ISP doesn't even offer anything less than 30/30mb. IMHO Hertzer is the only hosting company that get what business it is in. AWS makes a ton of sense if you need to rent serious iron to do OCR on 100+ GB of scans of corporate documents, you need GPU powe…

> AWS makes a ton of sense if […] you need GPU power to train your AI model, Breakeven time between paying for GPUs, servers, and colo vs GCP was 3 months when I last checked. AWS was even worse. For training, cloud GPUs only make sense if you don’t have anyone on your team that’s familiar with physical infra or if you have a ton of free credits which is fairly common for startups with VC funding.

I was assuming that you only needed to train your AI once.

AWS is like a hotel. Great if you need it for a couple days, but you are mad if you want to live there indefinitely.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#207

Post by tshaddox »

whatshisface wrote: post #179
arghwhat wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is only fraud if it is intentional deception. In this case I suspect they assumed reasonable interpretation and customer interest: No realistic hosting provider can have the capacity to have every server utilize network 100%, but despite this the customer still benefits from increasing the uplink speed. In my opinion, their limits are perfectly reasonable, the configuration is in the interest of the customer, and…

So what you're saying is, if I offer 10,000 gallons of ice cream for $100, but deliver an ice cream cone, I can defend myself by saying that what I delivered was more in line with what a typical customer would want?

No, but if you offer an “unlimited ice cream” ticket but then refuse to deliver me 100 solar masses of ice cream, I think that’s okay.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#208

Post by thaumasiotes »

300bps wrote: post #56
the_biot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run an ISP network, and I feel their pain. But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract. The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. That's a pretty lame way to resolve what is basically a marketing problem -- they want to sell a bandwidth-limited service as unlimited i.e. lie about it. Say what you will about fa…

But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract. The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. First you say they need to honor their contract and then say they're honoring their contract. What's the problem? Similarly if someone runs a restaurant with an "All You Can Eat!" special and someone comes in with a 40 gallon drum…

> The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason.

> First you say they need to honor their contract and then say they're honoring their contract. What's the problem?

The contract terms don't actually say they can terminate a contract for any reason, though. They actually say they can terminate a contract "for good cause", where "good cause" is explicitly undefined.

They'd be on better ground if their contract really did say they could terminate it for any reason.

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#209

Post by gcbirzan »

nZUC2qDyxDA3Kpe wrote: post #189
icehawk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are terms and conditions and, there's no "fair use" clauses for bandwidth in the terms and conditions. It feels a bad-faith interpretation of the "Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" portion of section 2.7.

It feels like the plain meaning of that sentence, to me. They are "using content" (downloading it), and it probably "impairs the regular operating behavior ... of [their] infrastructure" (how many 1Gbps servers do you think are sharing a switch? how fast do you think that switch's uplink is? now double the first and half the second because it's Hetzner :P).

If using what they advertise is impacting other customers they shouldn't advertise it

Re: Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

#210

Post by corrral »

freemint wrote: post #162
corrral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP. Raises hand The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.

How does Hetzner lie here? They provided unlimited 1-ish GBit/s sustained for every month they were in contract. It is their right to choose to not do business with that user as laid out in the short ToS.

"I know I leased you this entire acre on an ongoing basis, and said you could plant on the whole thing, but now that I see you're actually planting the entire acre and not just a quarter-acre, I'm terminating your lease at the end of the current term—which is compliant with our lease agreement—because I didn't ever actually intend to let you plant on the whole thing even though I listed that, explicitly, on the advertisement for the land"

That means a lie was told.

The reason for not continuing the service means they lied. That it doesn't violate their ToS is beside the point—they offered something that they did not intend to let people actually use. The evidence is precisely the fact that they'll stop doing business with you if you actually use what they sold you (and don't agree to pay them more money).

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