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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

#661

Post by mst »

fastily wrote: post #392
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.

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

The systems *I* currently have at hetzner are, so far as I'm aware, on a "we don't charge for bandwidth but if you use a shitload you'll get throttled for the rest of the month" plan just like my ovh boxen.

But I only pull dedis from hetzner; my VPSen are all ovh based. So please nobody expect my experience to generalise without triple checking the terms just like I did in the process of signing up for those systems.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#662

Post by jorams »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #658
jorams wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what math you're basing this on, but it's far from correct. They include slightly less transfer in the instances, but their overage pricing is about 10% of DO and their instances are so much cheaper that you'll be paying much less even after adding a few TB. For example compare the CPX11 to the cheapest similar offering from DO: CPX11: 2vCPU, 2GB, 40GB storage (NVMe), 1TB transfer, ~$5 per month DO Basic…

I was basing it off of the transfer per instance. Using DO, that transfer limit is pooled, so if you need a lot of bandwidth, the best option was to get a lot of $5/month droplets, which each came with 1TB/month. Looking at their pricing just now, it looks like it's $6/month for that droplet, which changes things a bit. Now, as long as you're willing to get droplets purely for the bandwidth allotment, DO's bandwidth…

But overages from Hetzner are $1.05 per TB, which is significantly less than $6, so you can just get whichever instance you need and let it roll.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#663

Post by Dylan16807 »

whatio wrote: post #609
Aachen wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > is a meter attached > Yes, of course. So it's not unmetered as advertised or am I misunderstanding that word? > this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth" How so? If they want to be relaxed about it, the terms can say that you can burst more (e.g. "you can use 500GB/month, and burst to 5TB for two months of ev…

“Unmetered” means “You will not be charged under normal circumstances based on the measurement of the data you use.” It does not mean that your traffic is literally not measured. They don’t put a specific hard limit because doing so both limits their own flexibility as a service provider and creates a target for abuse by users.

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.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#664

Post by matt-p »

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…

So, the "fair price" for internet bandwidth in Europe/NA is typically between a tenth and a quarter of a single cent per GB transfered in the heaviest direction.

So you prefer to pay $4.50 for your vm + 47.12126 cents for 460Gb data transfer , rather than $5 for your VM with unmetered data transfer?

I think by the way that the sensible answer is what DO/Linode etc do which is allocate some included data transfer per VM and pool it across your account. That's honestly a very sensible balance from my viewpoint, but they then charge you quite alot for overage around 1-2c per GB which is ~10X the "fair price".

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#665

Post by whatio »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #663
whatio wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unmetered” means “You will not be charged under normal circumstances based on the measurement of the data you use.” It does not mean that your traffic is literally not measured. They don’t put a specific hard limit because doing so both limits their own flexibility as a service provider and creates a target for abuse by users.

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.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#666

Post by AlchemistCamp »

jorams wrote: post #662
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was basing it off of the transfer per instance. Using DO, that transfer limit is pooled, so if you need a lot of bandwidth, the best option was to get a lot of $5/month droplets, which each came with 1TB/month. Looking at their pricing just now, it looks like it's $6/month for that droplet, which changes things a bit. Now, as long as you're willing to get droplets purely for the bandwidth allotment, DO's bandwidth…

But overages from Hetzner are $1.05 per TB, which is significantly less than $6, so you can just get whichever instance you need and let it roll.

That's the key thing I missed. It's nowhere near the deal it was but it's still clearly ahead of DO.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#667

Post by matt-p »

oarsinsync wrote: post #640
chipdart wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Irrelevant. If you sell a vCPU with enough bandwidth to feed your 1GBps 24/7/365 needs, and you charge $5/month for it, then it matters nothing what's your personal notion of reasonable. What matters is the service plan offered by the cloud provider and the…

> What matters is the service plan offered by the cloud provider and the performance indicators they are contractually obligated to meet Indeed, and those indicators are specified in the contract, not in the headline product description. There are a lot of people unhappy that those indicators in this contract are not specific enough. Those people shouldn’t buy these contracts. (Also, if you use your 1Gbps port at ful…

Thats only true if all your customers choose the exact same 37 Hours (and the same/similar destinations) back in the real world that's very very unlikely and so the 95%ile "issue" is a bit misleading unless an individual customer has the ability to use more than a couple of percent of your overall capacity (rare-ish at scale).

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#668

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

One core isn't very expensive, and when we look at modern super dense CPUs full load is less than 5 watts per core.

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#669

Post by rendaw »

oarsinsync wrote: post #637
rendaw wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers don’t understand 95th percentile billing, which is the model that they’re being charged at by their transit suppliers. It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers dont understand that transit costs blend with port costs depending on destination, and some destinations are effectively ‘free’ to send/receive from (fixed p…

You're acting like it's complicated, but they could just not say "unlimited" here: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/bandwidth/

Like:

> Generous bandwidth limits*

> *see this link for details

Re: Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

#670

Post by urda »

This feels like a bait-and-switch, especially after taking the time to learn Hetzner and start telling my peers about Hetzner. I understand that pricing structures need to update, but good god existing users should have been kept as-is going forward.

This behavior, and the cute little "cancel anytime!" has made me pause suggesting Hetzner in my circles as I re-evaluate their company.

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