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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

#541

Post by rendaw »

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…

> it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth

It's reasonable for OVH to prevent that, and it's also reasonable for OVH to explicitly and clearly define the limits up front.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#542

Post by srockets »

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.

CSPs aren't your cellular provider. You don't get better pricing by telling them you'd switch, because both the AE and yourself (assuming you ever did the math), know it's not a viable option.

Trying to be multicloud by choice, unless you have a very unique use case, which you probably don't, is simply admitting you are incapable of calculating the cost of being multicloud. This would get you horrible pricing, as you just showed your hand.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#543

Post by sureIy »

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…

Maximized by flat rate payer, minimized by pay-per-use.

You want to maximize it, the hosting definitely prefers someone who pays and doesn't use, so they can double-book that server.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#544

Post by woodson »

zarzavat wrote: post #472
cameronh90 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, Germany is an extremely low-trust society masquerading as a high-trust society. Herzner get flack because they are probably the only German entity that the average HN user has dealings with. Anyone who has had exposure to German bureaucracy will recognise the hostility.

The strange thing is that the same thing is happening in the US. A story of someone’s Google, PayPal, Instagram etc account getting banned for no reason gets posted every day. Customer service means posting on social media and hoping it gets enough traction. Hell, I can’t even buy anything at Walmart online because they cancel every order because of suspicious activity, even though I ordered there before with the same payment method and address. I think a lot of people have a strong sense of entitlement and blame things such as this on the foreignness of the entity (in this case Hetzner).

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#545

Post by Chaosvex »

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…

I think others have said it well enough, but you're mixing the VPS business model up with cloud. It's in the interests of cloud providers to have you utilising resources because that's how you're billed. VPS and dedicated servers just give you a bill for potential utilisation, regardless of how much or little you choose to actually use (excluding bandwidth overages).

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#546

Post by ghssds »

saurik wrote: post #508
matt-p wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#547

Post by josephcsible »

naniwaduni wrote: post #538
josephcsible wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one big complaint and one little one. The big complaint is that they didn't even give one business day's notice, and the little complaint is that they raised prices at the same time they cut what they were offering by 20x, instead of doing one at a time.

They're giving two business days' notice for new product and three months for existing product?

December 1st's change isn't just for new customers. It's for newly-created or rescaled servers belonging to existing customers too, and it's plausible that those operations might happen a lot for some customers. And Thanksgiving and Black Friday are holidays for almost all American tech workers, so I'm not counting them as business days.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#548

Post by fastball »

dastbe wrote: post #514
fastball wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely backwards. A server that is being paid for but not utilized is the best-case scenario for a hosting provider – revenue the same, lower costs (electrical/cooling/etc).

in mba brain, but hosting providers want as much utilization because it means people are going to use more over time.

Not really. If I have a profitable app that only uses 10% CPU on average, and you have a profitable app that uses 90% CPU on average (because it is a more CPU intensive program), both of us are going to keep paying our hosting provider indefinitely, but you are less profitable to them.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#549

Post by IAmGraydon »

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…

You seem oddly emotional about this. Also, you're wrong.

Hosting companies count on a certain Don't get so emotional, but if you do, at least make sure you aren't wrong first.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#550

Post by IAmGraydon »

tchbnl wrote: post #2

>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. So... raising the prices for everybody instead?

Agreed. This was an incredibly stupid statement to make because they didn't reduce prices anywhere. This was not a price re-balancing, but a price hike.
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