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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

#491

Post by matt-p »

Aachen wrote: post #440
fastily wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use OVH (VPS’s specifically), which offers unlimited bandwidth. In my experience they’ve been both reliable and affordable which is a rarity. I run a few applications that require high amounts of bandwidth, so silly caps like the ones that Hetzner are imposing are a non-starter for me

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. Offering unlimited bandwidth removes the hassle of overage charges/billing queries and eases customer concern/friction. Both sides benefit from this.

However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth?

Should providers avoid offering unlimited bandwidth unless it's truly unlimited? From an engineer's perspective, yes, I agree. But this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"—just to address a handful of users who take full advantage of it.

It's tough, so IME most such providers leave something in their terms that allows them to intervene in extreme cases but typically exercise restraint in doing so, usually only doing it manually if they notice that 'extreme' usage is damaging other users experience e.g it's serious and prolonged usage.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#492

Post by dpkirchner »

Aachen wrote: post #451
dpkirchner wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done business in Germany or used German banks -- is it hard to get them to reverse charges?

Well yes, you go to court if you can't agree with the merchant on anything. They're the competent authority to settle disputes When I pay for something, now the other party has the money, that's how money works. If I trust them that little, I should probably be using escrow but this costs extra and so it imo doesn't make sense to pay that fee for every transaction - as one does with this chargeback guarantee thing. P…

I guess I assumed that consumer protection laws would mean people could reverse charges more easily than they can here in the US (which we can do easily, albeit as a cardholder benefit, not a matter of law). Interesting.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#493

Post by CGamesPlay »

whalesalad wrote: post #486
atomic128 wrote: post #282

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Why is this attitude so commonplace? Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty. Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of t…

This is absolutely untrue in both a naive and more nuanced sense. Naively, it's not like an airplane, it's like an airplane rented by the month: the owner of the airplane collects rent whether or not the airplane is flying. More nuanced, many VPS providers don't sell you 100% CPU utilization; they sell you a compute budget. AWS actually enforces this; I don't know about other providers. But if you're exceeding your compute budget and the provider doesn't enforce the budget limit, you can expect the system to break at some point.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#494

Post by BoorishBears »

whalesalad wrote: post #486
atomic128 wrote: post #282

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Why is this attitude so commonplace? Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty. Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of t…

No competitively priced VPS* is charging a price that works when everyone is fully utilizing their entire quota at 100%...

It's not nefarious: you pay a bit more than the compute you use would cost on a fractional basis, and in exchange the cost of entry is dramatically reduced, spikes in usage get absorbed, etc.

It's a win for everyone involved unless usage patterns shift and suddenly there's never a surplus to go around. At that point prices will quickly climb to roughly what dedicated resources cost.

(*and frankly it's not just VPS, a lot of cloud services rely on everyone not trying to max out their quota at the same time to even function, let alone profit.)

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#495

Post by mr_toad »

whalesalad wrote: post #486
atomic128 wrote: post #282

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets. This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. I expect Li…

Why is this attitude so commonplace? Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty. Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of t…

On the other hand airlines regularly overbook flights, and residential ISPs don’t have nearly enough bandwidth for every customer to max it out.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#496

Post by arcastroe »

themgt wrote: 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.

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 Plex, which as I understand does not support high availability. If I ever find a cheaper host, I'll simply switch over. No hassle and no vendor lock in.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#497

Post by sneak »

consumer451 wrote: post #455
princevegeta89 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an actual entire machine given to you. I remember there were a few options for me from Ubuntu, Debian to Red Hat to choose from, but all of them would also have preconfigured system users and some level of administration done by the provider. But other than that, it's an actual bare metal machine and I installed Ubuntu on it and threw in a giant heap of services that have been running on it for more than a year…

If you could rewind the clock, would you have started setting it up any differently, like in a container? I am just curious what your options would be now if you wanted to migrate. Would you just copy your bash history to a local text file for reference, and then repeat the steps on a new server?

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 can easily be redeployed is very convenient.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#499

Post by throwaway2037 »

crowcroft wrote: post #329
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.

I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.

Why were you using a VPN?

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#500

Post by 0xFEE1DEAD »

consumer451 wrote: post #378
ajb wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying here as your other question is at max thread depth: A non virtualized Linux install isn't more locked in than a docker install, as for a bare metal server you are choosing your own OS. I have done the docker thing on a bare metal server, but that's because I wanted to run multiple services on it and isolate them operationally.

> A non virtualized Linux install isn't more locked in than a docker install Again, sorry for my ignorance here, but if not virtualized, how does one move hosting providers otherwise? My experience is limited to either running all the bash commands in an install readme, or installing a docker image. So there must be something in-between, to recreate a linux install elsewhere? > Replying here as your other question is…

Using dedicated servers doesn't mean you're not using virtualization - it just means you're the one managing it. You control the hypervisor and the vms running on top of it. Because of that, you're actually less tied to a specific hosting provider since you're not reliant on their APIs to set up and manage your infrastructure.

Even if you're not using virtualization there are still plenty of ways to migrate your servers.

One of the most common approaches (which was the thing before docker took over) is managing servers with an IaC approach using tools like chef, puppet, ansible, saltstack etc.

With IaC you define your entire infrastructure in configuration files and deploy those configs to your host. It's a bit like docker swarm but for managing physical and/or virtual servers instead of containers.

Another popular option, often paired with IaC, is to create your own pre-configured *nix images tailored to your needs. For example, you might have specific images set up for your load balancers, db servers, file hosts, or other roles in your stack.

I've worked at a company where we handled migrations using dd. Technically that's also an option. Wouldn't recommend it tho.

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