[HN Gopher] Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
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Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
Just received by email: We are writing to inform you about
important changes to the tariff structure of our Cloud servers (CCX
and CPX lines) and our Load balancers at our US locations in
Ashburn and Hillsboro. What will change? Starting on 1 December
2024, 01:00 am CET, we will begin charging new prices for newly-
created Cloud servers and introduce new amounts for included
traffic for Cloud Servers and Load balancers at the US locations in
Ashburn (ASH) and Hillsboro (HIL). This also applies to existing
Cloud servers and Load balancers that are switched to a different
tariff using the "Rescale" function. For any existing Cloud servers
and Load balancers you have at these locations, the new prices and
the new amounts for included traffic will apply later, starting on
1 February 2025, 01:00 am CET. The price for traffic overage will
remain unchanged in the new price structure. What are the new
prices and amounts of included traffic? Below, you can see a list
of the old and new prices and the included traffic. Product Old
price New price Old included traffic New included traffic CPX11
EUR 3.85 EUR 4.49 20 TB 1 TB CPX21 EUR 7.05 EUR 8.99 20 TB 2 TB
CPX31 EUR 13.10 EUR 15.99 20 TB 3 TB CPX41 EUR 24.70 EUR 29.99 20
TB 4 TB CPX51 EUR 54.40 EUR 59.99 20 TB 5 TB CCX13 EUR 11.99 EUR
12.99 20 TB 1 TB CCX23 EUR 23.99 EUR 25.99 20 TB 2 TB CCX33 EUR
47.99 EUR 49.99 30 TB 3 TB CCX43 EUR 95.99 EUR 99.99 40 TB 4 TB
CCX53 EUR 191.99 EUR 199.99 50 TB 6 TB CCX63 EUR 287.99 EUR 299.99
60 TB 8 TB LB11 EUR 5.39 unchanged 20 TB 1 TB LB21 EUR 16.40
unchanged 20 TB 2 TB LB31 EUR 32.90 unchanged 20 TB 3 TB All
monthly prices are excl. VAT and excl. IPv4 addresses. Why are we
making these changes? With the new tariff structure, we want to
make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as
possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local
conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. 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. The new prices will give our
customers the best possible price for the resources they use. ...
Author : hyperknot
Score : 446 points
Date : 2024-11-28 11:22 UTC (2 days ago)
| tchbnl wrote:
| >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?
| bakugo wrote:
| Yeah, the justification given makes absolutely no sense - you
| are paying more than before even if you stay under the new
| limit (which is 1/20th of the original!)
|
| They also use the word "tariff" several times without
| elaborating, as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know
| the actual meaning of the word.
|
| Seems like intentional deception to hide a standard "we just
| want more money" price raise.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| What's wrong with their use of "tariff"? Looks fine to me!
| dagw wrote:
| _as if the person who wrote the email doesn 't know the
| actual meaning of the word._
|
| The word "tariff" has a few different meanings. I'd say
| they're using it correctly, just not with the same meaning
| that the word is commonly being used in the news right now.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> as if the person who wrote the email doesn 't know the
| actual meaning of the word._
|
| In my country, "tariff" is seen in several contexts:
|
| * A tax on imports, much in the news since the recent US
| election.
|
| * A pub or bar's price list is known as the "bar tariff"
|
| * Energy companies offer a selection of "tariffs" i.e. agreed
| contract rates for usage-based pricing. e.g. a 3-year-fixed-
| price tariff, a 100%-green-energy tariff, and so on.
|
| * The portion of a 'life' jail sentence which must be served,
| before a prisoner can be considered for parole.
|
| So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a
| "tariff", merely unusual.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Right, only the first usage is mainstream American English.
| The others are not.
|
| I am curious if the others are British English? Or Indian?
| Other?
| thayne wrote:
| > So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a
| "tariff"
|
| I'm pretty sure it is in American English. That usage might
| be ok in British English, but for Americans that
| terminology is going to be confusing. Before today, I had
| never heard tariff used for anything other than import
| taxes. And since this applies to servers in the US, it
| would make sense not to use terminology that would be
| confusing to people in that country.
| michaelt wrote:
| From what I can tell, in the US energy suppliers talking
| to one another use the term "tariff" like for example htt
| ps://www.puc.texas.gov/industry/electric/rates/tdr.aspx
|
| Whereas when talking to consumers they seem to use terms
| like 'rate' and 'plan'.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "We just want more money" Is the standard operating procedure
| and the goal of all for-profit companies. How can hackers not
| understand this? Of course they will always want as much
| money as possible, and it is up to you as a customer to
| decide if their product is worth what they are asking or if
| you will go to a competitor.
| rixed wrote:
| Because hackers are individual human beings, and as such
| are motivated by a whole variety of reasons, money being
| just one of them.
|
| When running small companies they still tend to be
| motivated by other things, such as proving a point,
| achieving a technical goal or having some cultural
| influence etc.
|
| It's only when the company grows in size that it becomes
| this soulless greedy sociopath we are all too accustomed
| to.
|
| Hetzner grew a lot those last 5 years or so.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > It's only when the company grows in size that it
| becomes this soulless greedy sociopath we are all too
| accustomed to.
|
| Most small and medium size businesses also fit this
| description. And I don't consider a price hike to be
| sociopathic or soulless. Greedy, sure. But businesses are
| always profit focused first and foremost.
| namibj wrote:
| In Germany "phone plan" is written as the literal translation
| of "mobile radio tariff", as a bundle of price and terms.
|
| So it's not unexpected to use the uncommon in English meaning
| of the word to describe these changes.
| ragall wrote:
| Tariff can simply mean "fee". Don't be so proud of your
| ignorance.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| It's not used that way in American English at all; it
| almost borders on archaic. Given the purpose of this email
| was to primarily let their American customers know they'd
| be raising prices on them, it seems unfair to tell someone
| they're ignorant when they were sent a message containing
| verbiage that has entirely different meaning to them.
| dijit wrote:
| It is not only correct British english, it would be
| considered formal and academic.
|
| I understand that American english has diverged somewhat,
| but I would not have expected this word to give so much
| anguish. I wasn't even personally aware that americans
| used it for a particular terminology.
|
| in the meanwhile, us brits will continue using a literal
| swear word as our most popular version control system and
| not complain about it. :)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, I really don't understand that part of the message. It'd
| make sense if they were lowering prices elsewhere, but now they
| just... raise them? I seriously don't see how that benefits
| _anyone_ except Hetzner.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| What likely happened here is that they were raising prices
| due to increased costs for energy and various other costs,
| and if they hadn't made this change then they would have had
| to increase the price _more_ , so relative to that it keeps
| it cheaper for low-traffic customers - and they just
| communicated this poorly.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers use
| more than a terabyte per month. Based on my experience, it's
| not easy to go over a terabyte of bandwidth for most web
| services. I doubt the majority of their customers will see any
| change in price.
|
| Sucks to pay a dollar per terabyte extra if you're downloading
| a petabyte per month through your hetzner VPN, but this sure
| beats raising everyone's prices because two or three companies
| decided to use Hetzner to build a CDN.
|
| This is why you can't offer unlimited anything, and why we
| can't have nice things.
| Volundr wrote:
| > They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers
| use more than a terabyte per month.
|
| It sure reads to me like they raised the base instance price
| across the board. The _biggest_ increases will be for those
| using over the new included bandwidth (min 1tb) but they are
| going up for everyone.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers
| use more than a terabyte per month.
|
| No they're not? AFAICT if I made a CPX11 using 0.1TB/mo, my
| price just went from 3.85 to 4.49.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| andrewcamel wrote:
| Are tariffs already in place or is this just a thinly-veiled
| scapegoat for haircutting traffic allocation by 95%? To a
| customer, it certainly feels like a bait and switch to sell a
| subscription product and once customers are embedded materially
| change the economic trade.
| sva_ wrote:
| By tariff they just mean contract pricing, not the tax kind.
| jsnell wrote:
| It's the language barrier. The German word Tarif doesn't mean
| the same as the English word tariff.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well actually one meaning of the English word tariff is the
| same as the German meaning, although it's not as widely used.
| To quote Wiktionary:
|
| > _tariff (plural tariffs)
|
| 1. A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported
| or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties
| themselves.
|
| 2. A schedule of rates, fees or prices.
|
| 3. (British) A sentence determined according to a scale of
| standard penalties for certain categories of crime._
|
| ...so Hetzner's usage of the word is technically correct(tm),
| even though native speakers might not use it in this context.
| tyrfing wrote:
| It's closer to industry jargon at this point in American
| English. Search for LTL tariffs, for example, and you'll
| find a very long list of trucking companies publishing
| their fees and terms as tariffs.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's completely normal usage in Britain.
|
| "I changed electricity provider to one with an EV
| tariff."
| locallost wrote:
| Yes, that's really funny. But even funnier, I can't think of
| a 1-1 English word, and even Google translate gives me
| tariff. It's actually just "price", but in the context of
| these kinds of services, could be also something like "tier"
| (but not to be confused with the German Tier :-)).
| namibj wrote:
| No, it's not just price, the entire structure of pricing
| changed.
| locallost wrote:
| I meant the German word is price, sorry for being
| unclear.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure the meanings are really different. It's just
| that tariff _usually_ refers to import duties in the US.
|
| People arguing that's the only US meaning are just wrong
| though
| locallost wrote:
| But that's normal for languages, the meaning of a word
| can adjust to the point a meaning previously used becomes
| archaic. It's obvious these two words share the same for
| lack of a better word gist, but the actual usage diverged
| later.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's also used in that sense in English (in
| telecom/utilities, airlines, etc.), just that the
| political/taxation usage is more heavily covered, especially
| lately.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| This has nothing to do with any possible trade wars or trade
| tariffs.
|
| The word tariff is often used in telecom to indicate rates and
| fees for some given quantity of services, and that seems to be
| the use here.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| This is pretty steep... their website still seems to list the old
| included traffic and price (though okay, I guess they still have
| 3 days to update). Is there a more official link, or was it
| distributed through email?
| GavCo wrote:
| Haven't been able to find a link. Seems like it was only
| distributed by email -- which isn't great communication IMO
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Ahh, yes, the good old "here, you purchased X amount of things
| for $Z. But don't dare to use everything you paid for, or we
| double the price"
| adventured wrote:
| Hetzner have definitely always been scumbags about the bait &
| switch on aspects of their service like that. Granted it's
| pretty typical of the too good to be true rule of life.
| socksy wrote:
| Do you have any details? I was about to move all my services
| off from vultr to hetzner due to the much better pricing
| FredPret wrote:
| I've had several servers with them for years now - private
| and VPS, and they do what it says on the tin.
| amluto wrote:
| Vultr still seems to charge several times as much for
| bandwidth as Herzner.
| StrauXX wrote:
| I have only had and have heard of great experiences with
| Hetzner. For both their offerings snd their support. I am
| based in Europe though.
| christophilus wrote:
| Been using them happily for a few years. They've been rock
| solid and cheap. Can't complain, even about this hike.
| qeternity wrote:
| I can't think of a single other instance of bait and switch
| with Hetzner and we run a fair bit of infra with them.
| Retric wrote:
| It's not an individual customer thing. It's a subsidy for early
| customers to get market share > raise prices.
| tledakis wrote:
| So... enshittification :)
| StressedDev wrote:
| I think you are probably misreading the situation. My guess is
| that their costs went up and they are now increasing their
| prices so they don't lose money.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Dunno... my reaction was for this sentence specifically:
| > Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources
| have covered the costs [...] for other customers who have
| used much more resources.
|
| This _does_ sound to me like "here, all 20TB is yours, but
| make sure you don't use more than 2TB, or else" - regardless
| from which angle I look at it.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| or else they charge you $1 a tb, not cut you off
| elpocko wrote:
| In the second example charging 28% more for 90% less traffic,
| starting in 3 days. That's straight up illegal in some parts of
| the world, but apparently not in the US?
| shubhamjain wrote:
| The pricing applies immediately only for new customers. For
| existing ones, it applies from Feb 2025.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That ain't exactly a very long timeline either.
| switch007 wrote:
| Nope, but they must have covered their ass in the legal
| T&Cs with something along the lines of them being able to
| vary the prices at their discretion etc
| Slartie wrote:
| Did they finally realize how AWS/Azure/Gcloud actually generate
| their exorbitant profit margins?
| stavros wrote:
| No, they realized that nobody switches away from AWS because of
| their expensive bandwidth.
| acdha wrote:
| AWS negotiates on bandwidth, too, so I imagine the actual
| savings would be a lot smaller for most customers unless you
| have some business which is heavily dominated by egress
| pricing.
| cuuupid wrote:
| Bingo, lots of people are loud about this online and many
| influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it's easy to
| conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand
| indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up
| less than 1% of a serious company's revenue for AWS.
|
| I've liked using Hetzner before and I'm curious how they'll
| go after the market now. This is probably the wrong move
| though; Cloudflare realized this same fact some time ago but
| they kept their prices low to avoid cultivating ill will.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| What do you mean?
|
| News Hacker isnt representative sample that also
| understands the insustry and the business?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _lots of people are loud about this online and many
| influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it's easy
| to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand
| indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making
| up less than 1% of a serious company's revenue for AWS._
|
| So basically, by getting worked up publicly about this,
| those people provide _free marketing_ for Hetzner?
| ghaff wrote:
| There probably are a number of things about AWS (see also
| no hard price caps) that people on forums froth at the
| mouth about but which most customers AWS actually cares
| about are largely indifferent about.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Can confirm that the enterprise I work for does not care
| one whit about the odd $5k mistake. It's all a drop in a
| bucket anyway.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Good. Maybe they can stop null routing traffic to paid customer
| accounts because their abuse detection false-positives
| constantly.
| pixard wrote:
| Just got this via email. Well that's great, just as I moved a
| high bandwidth client to them a couple months ago. I love the "if
| you don't like it feel free to cancel" in the email also. SMH.
| musha68k wrote:
| Unity moment.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Bit annoying that the word tariff differs between the continents.
| Was thinking it related to possible trade tariffs
| devjab wrote:
| I wonder why English decided to narrow its meaning. Well I
| guess a language doesn't decide anything, but I think you know
| what I mean. In many EU countries it simply means "cost list"
| or "price list" which can be for import duties but also for a
| range of other things.
|
| It's very nice to have it called tariff in basically every EU
| country though. We get green energy tariffs and if it was
| called something different in each country they wouldn't be
| fun.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Oh shit, did some VC or PrivEquity buy Hetzner? Will we have HWS
| soon?...
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Am I calculating right that 20TB per month means around ~60Mbits
| per second for 24/7? Not a network expert, but it is hard to see
| how this could be sustainable for less than EUR5/month.
|
| Sounds a bit like the usual case where company is able to give a
| generous offering because most customers utilize just a small
| portion of it. Maybe with the attention they have been getting,
| they have attracted more bandwidth hungry customers.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| They already offer it on their European servers and it's still
| unchanged. Also, just because it's included doesn't mean
| everyone is using it to their full capacity.
| immibis wrote:
| Internet is much cheaper in Europe than in most other regions
| and there's more of it. Europe is effectively the center of
| the Internet. Most of the time (in regions like Asia-Pacific
| and Africa) this is simply due to having more time and money
| to build it, but when comparing Europe to the USA, it's
| probably because of regulatory structure - more competition,
| less monopolization.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What do you mean? Is peering/transit actually more
| expensive in the US? Residential internet isn't really
| relevant here, and if it was, it would still not really
| make sense considering that Germany (where they have their
| main datacenter) has much worse internet than the US
| according to most speed/bandwidth averages. Because if you
| are not referring to residential ISP, I don't think there's
| any peering/transit provider monopoly in the US
| immibis wrote:
| Yes. I suspect that because of the low number of
| residential ISPs there's less internet infrastructure in
| general and less competition. Who needs peering if
| there's only Comcast? You point out that networks can
| exist that don't serve residential customers, but who do
| they serve - mostly other networks which don't exist
| because they can't serve residential customers. The
| entire US is just the access region for a few networks to
| backhaul to NYC, Chicago and SF, not a full fledged
| network itself.
| summarity wrote:
| That is what they (explicitly) said in the email: users using
| next to no bandwidth were offsetting the costs for the heaviest
| users. That was no longer sustainable.
| drpossum wrote:
| 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
| sustainable model in the first place or b) they were just
| being greedy
| pas wrote:
| 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).
| matt-p wrote:
| Pricing is fairly similar, particularly in ashburn.
| Europe can be a little cheaper, but usually not a massive
| amount in it.
| pas wrote:
| Hm, interesting! Then probably lots of "bandwidth
| conscious" folks pounced on on their fancy new PoP.
|
| Whatever the reason, rather strange to do this without
| even a few days of notice.
| atwrk wrote:
| Is that much? I use a German competitor, Contabo, and they
| offer 32TB even with their entry-level VPS for 4.5EUR plus
| taxes.
| rsynnott wrote:
| IIRC a while back one of the CDNs had a post about their
| transit costs; they worked out _way_ lower in Europe than in
| the US. I don't think Hetzner Germany is increasing prices
| here, just the US one?
| dmazin wrote:
| Oof, that reduction in bandwidth is huge.
|
| Am I correct that this only applies to outgoing WAN traffic?
| Incoming/internal is still free?
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| That is correct, incoming traffic is still free
| mythz wrote:
| Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price
| increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB
| free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our
| Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end
| of an era.
| dizhn wrote:
| This is only for USA, isn't it?
| risyachka wrote:
| It was expected considering during the last year everyone on
| Twitter was shouting left and right that everyone should use
| Hetzner because it is cheap.
|
| Yeah it was cheap - only because the demand was low and they
| were competing on price.
|
| Now it will only go up.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Its still a really good price though.
| bradley13 wrote:
| But, really? What are you doing, that your VMs need more than
| 1TB of data per month? That's a huge amount! That's 23MB per
| minute, continuously.
|
| If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem
| entirely reasonable.
| authorfly wrote:
| I agree it is still reasonable.
|
| But some examples of things that are profitable under the old
| regime, but maybe not at 20x the limit:
|
| API services that consume media, whether to do some business
| logic specific thing or something specific, e.g.
| Transcriptions for videos, file conversion API, OCR API
| provider, etc.
|
| If you try a video app without using WebRTC and peer traffic
| your bandwidth can blow up too. Even if you use something
| like push notifications with base64. There are lots of traps
| that use Bandwidth.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| You can get pretty cheap servers with massive storage (2x2TB
| for example) and use them as backup targets.
| holoduke wrote:
| We have about 50TB for about 500.000 users per month. Our
| Hetzner costs are about 2k per month. Similar setup at aws
| would cost us about 10 to 20k per month. No joke.
| steve1977 wrote:
| At least from that link, they are not talking about bandwidth,
| but included traffic.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| That's a bit harsh but probably for understandable reasons, I
| wonder if DHHs shoutout to Hetzner in his last demo had an
| effect.
| pietz wrote:
| A lot less bandwidth and higher prices with less than a week
| until it goes live. That's insane.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Less than a week for newly created resources. At least they're
| allowing until February for existing resources.
| dzonga wrote:
| I think this is fair. All their competitors have crazy pricing
| for bandwidth, so why should be they be generous ?
| raverbashing wrote:
| That's, non ironically, the answer
|
| Pulling the price too low in comparison, let's say with AWS,
| will just make your life harder but will not squeeze them in
| any way
| machinekob wrote:
| So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working.
|
| Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations
| dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons
| of medium sized and even small business that do it?
|
| I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially
| why costs are so high compared to EU?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Which duopoly are you thinking? AWS, GCP, Azure + smaller
| (still significant) Digital Ocean, Linode?
| machinekob wrote:
| So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working.
| Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations
| dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons
| of medium sized and even small business that do it? I would love
| some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are
| so high compared to EU?
| omnimus wrote:
| Seems like the companies in US trust AWS just in case and this
| too cheap german company is suspicious. I would take guess that
| those who actually use Hetzner in US use it solely to abuse the
| generous traffic and not care that much about compute. Where in
| EUrope many companies never jumped on AWS in the first place.
| acdha wrote:
| AWS, Microsoft, and even Google provide a lot of features large
| enterprises want. A cheaper competitor which expects you to
| build more of that yourself entails larger staffing costs and
| that's going to sound riskier if you aren't great at
| consistently delivering software projects.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The per capita GDP of Germany is $52,745.76. The US is
| $81,695.19. The EU as a whole is $43,194. Median household
| income is $38,971 in Germany and $80,610 in the US.
|
| When people cost twice in one place versus another companies
| will focus on more expensive but less people intensive
| approaches.
| machinekob wrote:
| However, we are also considering infrastructure costs. The
| median salary in Germany is approximately 60,000 USD, which
| should probably be taken into account when comparing company
| costs to those in the USA, which are around 70-80,000 USD.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Median household income is $38,971 in Germany
|
| That is a median "disposable income" (after taxes and
| transfers), which is not directly comparable to the US figure
| you cited (which is gross [before taxes]).
| fabian2k wrote:
| Is traffic generally much more expensive in the US than in
| Germany? This seems to be a US-only change and I'm wondering a
| bit about the reasoning here and whether to expect this to also
| change in other regions.
| jsheard wrote:
| Not really, CDNs with regional pricing usually charge almost if
| not exactly the same amount for NA and EU traffic. It's the
| other regions that tend to be more expensive.
|
| I wonder if this has anything to do with how Hetzner operates
| in each region, they run their own EU datacenters but AFAIK
| they just rent rack space in the US, so they're more at the
| mercy of upstream providers.
| machinekob wrote:
| From Cloudflare blog about why EU prices are lower (around
| 50% cheaper than US at least according to cloudflare)
|
| The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks
| that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-
| IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London
| Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges
| in the world.
|
| In Europe, and most other regions outside North America,
| these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit
| collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North
| America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are
| typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these
| for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a
| data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities
| to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they
| are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American
| exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of
| the world.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There _are_ non-profit neutral exchanges in the US (eg
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Internet_Exchange),
| but they're just not as dominant as they are in Europe.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| It sounds like I can just move my bandwidth hungry servers to
| europe and eat the latency penalty- is that a correct read?
| leca wrote:
| That's correct but assuming you want > 300 MB/s from EU to NA
| that will be a struggle.
|
| If you don't care about high upload/download speed from/to
| NA<->EU then yes, that's a good move. Otherwise closeness in
| geo is still king.
| crest wrote:
| As long as the link doesn't drop or reorder packets too badly
| a >300MB/s (or probably given we're talking about small
| virtual machines 300Mb/s) flow doesn't require much tuning.
| For a single long lived TCP connection allowing the window
| size to scale to ~2x the expected bandwidth delay product
| should be enough. So a simple things like large HTTP uploads
| or downloads will work fine once the congestion window has
| grown.
|
| The real problem is going to be anything more complex than
| that. Most request-response protocols too chatty and won't
| send enough independent outstanding requests to fill up the
| bandwidth delay product of an intercontinental link which
| will kill the throughput. Also users don't like to wait for
| slow responses no matter what throughput you can sustain for
| large transfers.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes. And you're not even exploiting the system, just using it
| as it is - bandwidth really is cheaper over here.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264789
| bilekas wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That is utter nonsense. If the customers who are 'covering the
| costs' have a problem, they can move? Yet even still they are
| charging those SAME customers who now actually receive less
| resources, even if they were using them or not.
| Havoc wrote:
| > That is utter nonsense.
|
| Hardly. Some level of cross subsidisation happens in all
| service of this nature. Depending on use youre either paying or
| receiving
|
| Most Providers and customers just ignore it as inconsequential
| though.
| bilekas wrote:
| The reasoning the gave still doesn't pass the smell test. If
| it's as they say, then they wouldn't increase the price they
| would tariff the traffic. Like other providers.
|
| Don't increase prices and claim it's to help the little guy.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The problem with their old pricing structure is that it
| attracts high-utilization customers who will max out their
| transfer every month. But yes, they raised prices for all of
| us. Their pricing was so low, my guess is it was never
| profitable enough to be worthwhile long-term. It brought them a
| lot of business, some of which they'd be happier without under
| the old terms.
| zapkyeskrill wrote:
| Maybe that's exactly what happened. So now nobody is covering
| the free loaders and they need to charge them.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Doesn't bother me with those measly 50GB my mail server is using
| in a month...
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Weird, one would expect that in anything related to technology
| either prices go down, or performance goes up over time.
| johnisgood wrote:
| True, so what gives? Just them wanting more money now that they
| got enough customers? They probably did some calculations and
| realized that damn, they could pocket more money so might as
| well try their luck. Like yeah, let us assume they have 10k
| customers: 7.05 * 10000 is 70500, 8.99 * 10000 is 89900, that
| is 19400 USD more for them, and that is just for one!
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| Or the cause is one step removed, for example the handful of
| giant companies that control all US internet infrastructure,
| versus the hundreds all over Europe.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, so that probably means the count of users is higher
| than the previously assumed 10k. They can do it, so they
| will do it.
| machinekob wrote:
| Not when there is a duopoly on one market (US) and hundreds of
| companies on other (EU).
| anon7000 wrote:
| How is there a duopoly in the cloud market in the US?
| eptcyka wrote:
| Duopoly in connectivity.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| This case is for a EU company's offerings to the US. Why
| would they make themselves less competitive?
| tzs wrote:
| That's usually true _if_ you see the actual costs of the thing.
|
| In the case of data transmission if you were using some data
| transmission system where you were charged per byte based on
| the operator's costs (possibly time dependent so the cost per
| byte might vary depending on the amount of traffic on the
| provider's network and on the varying real time prices of the
| networks they connect to) then you would indeed see prices
| going down over time and performance going up.
|
| Consumers, small businesses, and often even medium businesses
| generally hate that kind of pricing. They like fixed monthly
| bills. So providers offer that, setting the amount of data
| included in that price high enough that most customers won't
| ever come near it.
|
| That tends to result in the lower bandwidth users actually
| paying quite a bit more than they would if they had per byte
| pricing and the higher bandwidth (but not so high as to go over
| the included data and hit overage fees) paying less than they
| would under the per byte model.
|
| That can attract more high bandwidth customers and eventually
| the model of customer bandwidth usage that was used to set the
| price and bandwidth allowance is no longer accurate and gets
| adjusted.
|
| Note that this means that price you pay is not just a function
| of the underlying technology costs--it is also a function of
| how other people are using the service.
|
| Same thing happens even in non-technology areas. You probably
| wouldn't go into a fixed price "all you can eat" restaurant
| just to get a donut and cup of coffee. The fixed price is set
| to cover people getting full meals. And if a bunch of
| competitive eaters started coming in every day to do their
| training at that restaurant you can safely bet that the price
| is going to go up for everyone or there is going to be an
| asterisk added to "all you can eat" with a footnote that puts
| some sort of cap on it.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I thought of giving a recommendation here but I fear that they
| would raise the prices too... :|
| benocodes wrote:
| That's exactly how these things spread - as soon as one
| provider gets called out for good value, they seem to "adjust"
| their pricing.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Hetzner had these good prices for decades now.
|
| They are still dirt cheap for cloud and dedicated
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I run a dedicated server with them that does about 1 TB inbound /
| 50 GB outbound daily.
|
| If they start fucking people over on the dedicated servers as
| well, this product is basically dead because I can't find
| anywhere else that allows me to do this at the current price
| point...
|
| Unless of course I slap a box under my desk and hook it up to my
| fiber internet.
| thg wrote:
| The traffic limit is outbound only. There is no limit on
| inbound / internal traffic. So even if they were to hit you
| with a 5TB / month limit, you'd be just fine.
|
| https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ (bottom of the
| page)
| immibis wrote:
| This is correct. No idea why it was flagged. Hetzner only
| counts outbound traffic.
| esskay wrote:
| Pretty clear this is only affecting US cloud services so you
| arent affected.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| Possible theory why they did it: To my understanding, you don't
| pay for traffic, you pay for network capacity. Maybe US instances
| aren't getting the uptake they had hoped for, and they are
| looking lower some costs by reducing their network capacity (they
| are a very German company and care a lot about efficiency).
|
| Hetzner is very cheap and still profitable because classic
| "economy of scale" and vertical integration. They own, build, and
| operate all their data centers. This comment goes into more
| details[1], but it's possible this doesn't really work out in a
| foreign location like US.
|
| [1]: https://forumweb.hosting/13663-why-are-hetzners-dedicated-
| ho...
| esskay wrote:
| Counterpoint: They could've lowered their capacity without
| changing plans if they were indeed seeing lower uptake, and
| increase capacity as/when it's needed if it did indeed ever
| pick up. They wouldn't be the first provider to put products
| out of stock whilst they scale back up.
| crest wrote:
| That doesn't explain a 20x regional pricing difference for the
| same service (outgoing bandwidth). It's either a malicious
| change to extract exorbitant rent from customers (hostages at
| that point) or buying enough bandwidth is whole lot more
| expensive than they calculated and it reflects costs to provide
| the product (a virtual machine a specific traffic cap).
|
| If its mostly the later case they really fucked up their
| customer communication. They should care enough to provide
| their customers with time to respond and transparency to
| (re-)earn the trust a hosting provider requires.
| mdasen wrote:
| If it were malicious, they would have increased prices in
| Europe as well. They could try and extract money from
| European customers just as much as American ones.
|
| And the bandwidth pricing is still quite cheap, $0.001/GB.
| Major cloud providers usually charge nearly 100x that (AWS
| 90x, GCP at 85x or 120x depending on whether you want
| standard or premium, Azure at 80x or 87x depending on
| standard or premium).
|
| You used to get 20TB for free and now you get 1-8TB free. If
| you had to pay for 19TB, that's another $19. If you had to
| pay for 19TB from a major cloud provider, that'd be
| $1,556-2,335. Even if you had DigitalOcean, they'd be
| charging you $0.01/GB (10x) and you'd be hit with a $190
| bill.
|
| I think the issue is that in the US, they don't have their
| own network. They peer with a single company in Virginia for
| 200Gbps and then pay for transit on 1Tbps. That's a lot of
| transit to be paying for - and 5x more transit than peering.
| In Europe, it looks like they have their own network between
| Finland, Germany, France, Amsterdam, UK, Austria, and Czech
| Republic. They also have a much better ratio of peering to
| transit. So they can use their network to carry the traffic
| to a lot of Europe and then maybe they have peering
| arrangements to handle most of their traffic when they need
| to hand it off.
|
| In Europe, they're more likely to face owner economics while
| in the US, they're effectively renters - and the more their
| customers use, the more it's going to cost them.
|
| If this were really a cash grab, it's a pretty terrible cash
| grab. It will certainly impact some users, but the maximum it
| will impact any user is $19/mo (if they're on a server with
| only 1TB of included traffic). But most people don't use many
| TB of traffic. Consuming all Bluesky posts in zstd compressed
| JSON is 30GB/mo. These weren't servers that had unlimited
| traffic on a 1Gbps port. They had a 20TB limit. If you were
| hitting that and intend to continue hitting that, it's
| another $12-19/mo.
|
| If I had to guess, I'd say that they probably thought they'd
| expand more in the US and build out a fiber network here (as
| OVH has done), but that didn't happen and now they're looking
| at continuing to pay transit for the foreseeable future.
| Though I feel like the optics of this are pretty bad given
| that most people probably use less than 1TB and those users
| will still feel like something is being taken from them (even
| if they were never using that much anyway).
| dumbledoren wrote:
| American traffic is expensive and they scarcely do peering
| agreements. And the backbone providers are probably jacking
| up the prices to boost revenue in these inflationary times.
| Eu users are not affected because the Eu invested heavily in
| the internet backbone and everybody peers with everybody
| there. In the US the isps cripple any effort to improve the
| internet infrastructure for profit.
| ptero wrote:
| This seems to be a huge PR blunder. As a single data point, I
| have to say that my first reaction is illogical.
|
| I have two hetzner shared instances and I am royally pissed by
| the 20x reduction in traffic allowance. It is also irrelevant to
| me: over the last 12 months I never exceeded 1TB. My unhappiness
| on the traffic reduction is purely of a "what if I start using
| more" type. For which two rational answers is "well you can
| explore alternatives then" and "d'oh, your average is way under
| 100GB, it's not going over 1TB". But I still started looking at
| alternatives.
|
| My feeling is that the reduction is aimed at a small group, but
| upsets a much larger set of customers who now will start looking
| for alternatives. Which indicates a typical marketing screwup. My
| 2c.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| Fair I felt similar about it.
|
| But then, I have looked at alternatives before they even
| offered their US locations (and also for a CA one) and couldn't
| find anything decent for even nearly the price.
|
| So we can pay a little more and get a little less, or move
| somewhere else and either pay a lot more or get a lot less
| christophilus wrote:
| OVH is comparable and has locations in North America.
| SixThreeOne wrote:
| Very well put! I had the exact same reaction as you: even
| though I don't even use 1TB/month, I found myself looking at
| alternatives simply b/c of the cognitive jolt of seeing the 20x
| reduction. Sometimes I wonder if companies don't consider the
| psychological impact of changes enough. No, logically, this
| change means a meager price increase for me, but if it caused
| me (and at least one other) to think about competing offerings,
| then like you said, indicates a marketing screwup.
|
| That's not to say they have to keep offering that much traffic
| if they're losing money (of course they don't), but the way you
| make changes matters.
| sigio wrote:
| Traffic over-usage is $1 per TB, so this is still quite fair,
| only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| so still order or orders of magnitude cheaper than the the big
| 3 hyperscalers.
| tecleandor wrote:
| AWS EC2: 100GB included and then $90 per TB. GCP
| Premium Tier: $120 per TB GCP Standard Tier: $85 per TB
|
| That's a bunch of money...
| glzone1 wrote:
| AWS drops to $50/TB - still 2x to 10x maybe? A lot of CDNs
| cost a surprising amount or hide pricing.
| jsheard wrote:
| > only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.
|
| Expensive by Hetzner standards but still cheap by cloud
| standards, egress from Singapore EC2 instances is between $80
| and $120 per TB for example.
| tr33house wrote:
| $80!! EC2 is a scam
| jsheard wrote:
| It's $120/TB for the first 10TB in a month, so you need to
| be spending >$1200 just on bandwidth every month before you
| even get the "discounted" rates.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| The real savings only come in bulk
| eatery1234 wrote:
| I know serverless is really expensive, but Vercel is about
| $400 for 1TB
| leerob wrote:
| Vercel is $150: https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-
| egress
| ea016 wrote:
| Vercel heavy user here. They have a very misleading
| pricing. It's "starting at $150", it varies depending on
| the region. I end up paying $400 / TB as we have a very
| international website.
| binarymax wrote:
| That's very fair. I wish they had put that in the email!
| geek_at wrote:
| That is right, it would have maybe reduced the public outcry.
| It just makes it 10$ more expensive per month which is
| totally OK in my book
| freefaler wrote:
| In Singapore and Asia in general traffic is very expensive,
| because there are no peering exchanges. So you need to pay for
| each Mbps you use. Big ISPs there are oligopolies and aren't
| too fast or keen to work with you.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| "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." ... This argument does not make sense. I
| use very few resources but have to pay more.
| nh2 wrote:
| The argument would make sense if the prices of any Hetzner
| service decreased (no longer necessary to substitute high
| traffic users).
|
| But all prices in this message increase.
| aendruk wrote:
| Yeah, my price just changed from EUR7.05 to EUR8.99--in the
| name of fairness to low impact users? It's brazenly
| nonsensical.
|
| It would be so much better if they'd just said "sorry but we
| need to raise prices". The attempt to sugarcoat it is insulting
| to begin with, and it's only made worse that their backwards
| excuse comes across as thoughtlessly trampling us.
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Inflation, the real inflation is 10%
| GavCo wrote:
| Inflation doesn't explain reducing the included traffic from
| 20TB to 1TB while simultaneously increasing prices. This is a
| much more dramatic change than what inflation would justify.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| Things are rarely priced at actual face value.
|
| You purchase a 10Gb/s firewall for $100,000 - you will not be
| using 10Gb/s traffic for the lifespan of this device.
|
| Applying this to Hetzner:
|
| You sell a service with X bandwidth included free because you
| know that only Y% is only ever used on average.
|
| Now people exploit the X allowance - spinning up new virtual
| machines to multiply this already generous allowance to get
| unlimited bandwidth for a fee 1/10000th of other commercial
| offerings. Your Y% costing is now completely invalid.
|
| You reduce the allowance 20x to mitigate this.
|
| I can't blame Hetzner at all for this, especially when
| Google/Amazon/Microsoft are printing money with their insane
| bandwidth costs. You know they are insane when they then
| change the rules to say it's completely free if you are
| migrating to a different provider - suddenly it doesn't cost
| anything at all for egress? Oh, it was actually upcoming
| monopoly investigations that might have taken a dim view...
| nottorp wrote:
| So, do bandwidth limited (instead of traffic metering limited)
| VPSes still exist?
|
| I mean, to pull numbers out of ass, instead of $5 for 1.5 Tb of
| metered traffic on a 10 Gbps pipe, the $5 pays for 10 mpbs
| without metering.
|
| I know protecting the client from extra unforeseen charges isn't
| predatory enough, but maybe some offerings like that still exist.
| christophilus wrote:
| Yeah. OVH prices things out that way.
| glzone1 wrote:
| When has AWS done something like this?
|
| LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you'd
| built a business on this platform.
| maccard wrote:
| Never. I don't think AWS have _ever_ icnreased prices.
| glzone1 wrote:
| Right - I've been on them since EC2 flat network / simple DB
| days and was trying to remember if I ever got an email like
| this.
|
| I know google has jacked rates (maps etc) and killed services
| (I used their first paas before it was basically abandoned)
|
| I have argued online with folks about their pricing - my
| point usually being as soon as you try to do Netflix or
| YouTube on the "Free" or unlimited or ultra low cost
| providers - you find out it's a lie.
|
| My impression was hetzner had started null routing customers
| for "abuse" who used a lot. No idea if that's true, but used
| to be the way the "unlimited" VPS providers did it.
| bhouston wrote:
| They have, but usually it is via introducing additional fees
| to services/transactions, eg:
|
| https://www.astuto.ai/blogs/understanding-the-aws-public-
| ipv... https://www.wiv.ai/navigating-the-rising-tide-of-aws-
| pricing...
| glzone1 wrote:
| The IPv4 charge is a good one!
|
| I thought this was to allow them to be more relaxed about
| the limit (5 per region) which is how they used to control
| fully free services that cost them.
|
| But an increase for sure - they did note the supply of free
| ARIN allocations was gone
| irunmyownemail wrote:
| It's a matter of perspective, I don't do IPv6, when AWS
| decided to start charging for IPv4, I moved to Oracle
| Cloud.
| tekla wrote:
| I believe they have for very specific services, but never for
| things like EC2 or RDS.
|
| There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading
| instance types in the same "size" are more expensive, but
| that is very rare, but I dont believe AWS has ever pulled the
| rug out from under you.
| BeeOnRope wrote:
| > There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading
| instance types in the same "size" are more expensive
|
| An increase in price has been the rule rather than the
| exception for recent upgrades for vanilla instance types,
| e.g., c, r, m types in the newest generations (6 -> 7 for
| x86, 6 -> 7, or -> 8 for Arm types).
|
| The increases have been modest though, perhaps around 10%.
| You get additional CPU and sometimes minor increases in
| other resources on the newer types.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Increasing prices is not "pulling the rug out from under
| you". Hertzer decided to raise their prices. Their
| customers can either continue using their service, reduce
| their use of the service, or go somewhere else.
|
| Also, we live in a time of high inflation. We should expect
| price increases because they value of the dollar, euro,
| etc. is going down.
| christina97 wrote:
| IPv4 charge caused me to have to redesign some things and
| cull servers for some projects.
| irunmyownemail wrote:
| I decided to move to Oracle Cloud when they made that move.
| hobofan wrote:
| AWS raised the prices (/slashed the free tier) for Cognito
| literally last week[0], in a way that's quite similar to
| Hetzner.
|
| [0]: https://saasprices.net/blog/aws-price-rise
| llm_nerd wrote:
| AWS also charges multiples the price to begin with. I mean,
| the "scam" of AWS has always been the absolutely outrageous
| network egress pricing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's easy to never raise prices if you have 1000% markup.
| signatoremo wrote:
| The point remains, if I was a customer who had planned my
| budget on the previously lower rates, this move'd be very
| disruptive.
|
| Herzner is an established player, not a startup, this either
| shows a lack of regards for customers, or that they aren't
| very well run.
| andix wrote:
| If you need long term price security, than you need to get
| a long term contract. The big cloud providers will give you
| that if you pay them enough in advance, but probably for at
| least 50 times the price per TB.
| andix wrote:
| If you use 20 TB each month the price will be 25.39EUR instead
| of 5.39EUR. I can't think of any business that would seriously
| struggle with this 20EUR monthly price increase.
|
| Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not
| catastrophic.
| nly wrote:
| In % terms though?
| baq wrote:
| Is 500% on 5 bucks a lot?
| deskr wrote:
| Your traffic bill is increasing by 471% and that's not OK.
|
| Bill increases don't have to be catastrophic to be bad.
| Remember that businesses/startups range from being well
| funded to not-funded-at-all-trying-to-survive. Depending on
| the country, 20EUR can be a lot of money.
| ragall wrote:
| Yes,that is OK. It's still much cheaper than the
| alternatives.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ya if you're on the cheapest service and and the next
| cheapest service is an order of magnitude higher or more
| then your business is already at risk. It's a sign that
| it's subsidized and that a pricing shock will happen in
| the future.
| ghaff wrote:
| If it's a competitive market you're almost certainly
| exploiting some sort of anomaly that t will probably go
| away.
| rollcat wrote:
| This. We got hit by a sudden change in a popular SaaS'
| pricing, from $10 to $75/mo - a 650% increase. We don't
| have a big margin, if a different provider did this sort of
| thing overnight, we could be instantly out of business.
| It's already difficult to build a competitive business even
| WITH the ability to outsource a class of problems to a
| SaaS.
|
| I've been a big fan of Hetzner for the last decade, and I
| understand and agree with their motivation for this change.
| However December 1st is effectively almost tomorrow, they
| could have easily given us a month's notice instead.
| christophilus wrote:
| You have until Feb for your existing infra, so that seems
| fair to me.
| baq wrote:
| > Your traffic bill is increasing by 471% and that's not
| OK.
|
| Your traffic bill is increasing by 20 bucks per month and
| that isn't ok? If you're running any sort of business and
| that isn't ok I'm not sure what to tell you.
| deskr wrote:
| I've worked for a startup in my early years that was on a
| shoestring budget. We had no spare money. When we
| celebrated a big goal we bought a supermarket cake for $2
| to go with the coffee. That happened max few times a
| year. 20 bucks is nothing when you have a lot. But if you
| have nothing then 20 bucks can be everything.
| Terretta wrote:
| While perhaps not _like this_ , AWS has from time to time
| ensured average rate goes up or introduced charges for
| something previously free:
|
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/new-featu...
|
| See notes 1 and 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/
| nh2 wrote:
| What their announcement does not cover is whether or not the 1
| EUR/TB price above the free quota will still be active in the US.
| bhouston wrote:
| > 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 apparently was really cheap and very
| effective. Given that they were bootstrapped and this was prior
| to Cloudflare really being that popular, it was a great strategy.
| This was true like 8 years ago, so maybe it has changed in the
| meantime.
| learnedbytes wrote:
| Want to give a clue on who the culprit is?
| bhouston wrote:
| I was curious and checked if they are still using Hetzner. It
| appears not, so I can share who it was. It was
| https://artstation.com. Basically heavily oriented towards
| serving static images, so the CDN could have been really
| expensive. Doing a reverse IP lookup on cdn.artstation.com
| servers now resolves to Cloudflare and it has cloudflare
| headers on the response.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like a completely legitimate use though. Hetzner were
| widely telling people about that 20TB limit, so why would they
| be surprised when people use them as CDN boxes?
| yurishimo wrote:
| Until you remember that marketing is a separate department
| from finance which is a separate department from
| ops/engineering.
|
| The engineers said 20TB in aggregate was fine but likely
| didn't consider the "bad apples". Marketing obviously wants
| to use the biggest numbers and then finance comes in with the
| hammer and dev points to egress as an simple way to upset rhe
| fewest number of real customers.
| hyperpape wrote:
| As an engineer, if you don't qualify whether your answer is
| average or max, you've messed up.
| drpossum wrote:
| I'm confident the marketing folks would just say
| something akin to "shut up nerd", cash their bonuses, and
| leave you with the problem.
| cluckindan wrote:
| As an engineer, NEVER give out averages without checking
| that they are consistent with the distribution of the
| actual data.
| phil21 wrote:
| Averages tend to skew once exposed to adverse selection.
| Moru wrote:
| Don't think you find much engineers in the marketing
| department though.
| bmicraft wrote:
| It does make sense: The average was low enough that a 20TB
| cap worked. Then marketing started boasting about the 20TB
| limit and attracted a bunch of high-bandwith customers,
| thereby driving up the average making 20TB decidedly "not
| fine".
| sdwr wrote:
| Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum
| up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut
| them back. The marginal customers who need those features
| leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used
| to your product and stays.
| baq wrote:
| MBA value extraction 101.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That or they just didn't dimension well their prices and
| now it's biting them back.
|
| I prefer to assume naivety over malice/negligence.
| asyx wrote:
| Hetzner has been in this business for a very long time and
| I'm sure half the German small to medium sized companies
| use Hetzner. They have costs as well and with virtual
| servers they just assumed the usage pattern was similar to
| their eu data center and that didn't work out so they
| increase the prices a bit. So that on average their
| calculation works out again.
|
| Like, this is not Netflix tripling the prices over a few
| years.
| tssva wrote:
| I think culprits is a poor choice of words since it means
| someone suspected of a misdeed. I could perhaps understand
| using it for example for someone that tried to store a
| petrabyte of storage on a consumer unlimited storage plan. But
| in this case Hetzner set a specific data usage amount you are
| paying for so using that amount is not a misdeed.
| KomoD wrote:
| > I could perhaps understand using it for example for someone
| that tried to store a petrabyte of storage on a consumer
| unlimited storage plan.
|
| I couldn't, don't call it unlimited if it's not unlimited,
| using what you paid for is not a "misdeed".
| paxys wrote:
| "Culprits" because they used the service they paid for within
| its advertised limits?
|
| It's the same with cloud storage providers. First give out a
| massive amount of storage and rapidly gain users, then cut it
| down after blaming people for "abusing" it. How about you
| advertise your correct capacity to begin with?
|
| They are simply deflecting blame for their own
| enshittification.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >"Culprits" because they used the service they paid for
| within its advertised limits?
|
| "Culprits" because it was their (legal) use of the service
| that made Hetzner rethink and change their service plan.
| paxys wrote:
| So then the culprits are the company's own engineering and
| marketing departments for not correctly anticipating user
| demand.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or you take your best shot and then adjust as needed.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Sure .. also them.
|
| Having said that, I am usually empathetic to these kinds
| of 'unlimited' deals because even though they aren't
| really 'unlimited', they do tend to be generous to the
| average use-case and average user .. Inevitably, and
| unfortunately, someone decides to test the limits and the
| entire thing collapses.
|
| It reminds me of the Blockbuster "No more late fees"
| policy, which was a really good customer-friendly policy
| (speaking as someone who regularly returned rentals late)
| .. but then they were sued because an aspect of the
| policy had Blockbuster charging the cost of the rental to
| the customer if it wasn't returned in some period of time
| .. and because that charge looked like a 'late fee' they
| got sued. Urgh.
| immibis wrote:
| Looked like? Sounds like it _was_ a late fee. Look at us,
| we 've got the cheapest plane tickets by $25 ($50 booking
| fee applies).
| altairprime wrote:
| It's not any more possible to correctly anticipate all
| pricing structure vulnerabilities, than it is to
| correctly anticipate all program and API security
| vulnerabilities. There is always a statistical chance of
| novel outcomes when humans are involved.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Then why does this only apply in the US? Are they saying EU
| customers are well behaved?
| Hilift wrote:
| Isn't Hetzner impacted in Europe at the moment from a cable
| cut? Wouldn't surprise me if there is a wave of people moving
| stuff over to the US because of that. I don't know much about
| cloud though. I believe "The Ship has arrived and repairs are
| underway, which will still take some time." and "the repair
| may take up to two weeks.".
| mrweasel wrote:
| Hetzner did pay somewhere around 20% of the cost of
| C-Lion1, so it wouldn't be surprising if it has hurt hem.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Last I heard from Cinia was that the cable should be fixed
| by the end of November, so sometime within the next 55
| hours.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Seems done https://www.cinia.fi/en/news/cinias-c-
| lion1-submarine-cable-...
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| probably streaming platforms have better content on the US
| and everyone wants to exit there? so they are mostly serving
| US traffic for several vpns all over the world connecting to
| CDNs in the US.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| It also may depend on peering arrangements Hetzner has. If EU
| ISP more inclined to peer with Hetzner than US one bandwidth
| in EU will be cheaper for them.
| freefaler wrote:
| - in EU there are large peering exchanges to swap traffic
|
| - in USA no peering exchanges exists and you need to pay
| for your traffic most of the time. Few big operators in US
| and they enforce this.
|
| Looks like some deal wasn't renewed and they lost a big
| chunk of cheap pipe or/and some of their upstream providers
| decided to do something with routing.
| Slartie wrote:
| Also, Hetzner is way bigger in the EU than in the US.
| Good access to services hosted by Hetzner is thus more
| relevant to EU ISPs, because customers in the EU will
| probably use more services hosted on Hetzner infra. This
| gives Hetzner more leverage in the EU to negotiate
| beneficial conditions with regard to its uplinks and
| peering agreements.
| eatery1234 wrote:
| Hetzner colo's for their US servers/locations. Perhaps their
| US bandwidth rates are much higher than their own DCs?
| BonoboIO wrote:
| 8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings
|
| The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included
| lostmsu wrote:
| Do they have dedicated servers in US?
| no_wizard wrote:
| In Hillsboro, OR they been building up their data centers
| but this hasn't converted to dedicated servers in the US
| yet
| nik736 wrote:
| Do you have a source for this? My last info was they
| rented space in an existing data center.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| What? Afaik they are unmetered. And real unmetered - there
| are people who are saturating their connections 24/7 while
| using them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Well, I doubt an extra $1/TB is going to stop Hetzner from
| being very price effective.
| Havoc wrote:
| The old allowance always struck me as unusually generous tbh
| conartist6 wrote:
| Wow. You literally cannot pay them 10 times the price to give you
| that much bandwidth now. If you were using 20TB they just don't
| want you as a customer anymore
| rvnx wrote:
| Literally quoting billing support: "It is a privilege to have
| the right to be a Hetzner customer"
| conartist6 wrote:
| What the... "a privilege to have the right?"
|
| I don't think they know what rights are...
| trollied wrote:
| They recently changed to bill by the hour. Not hard to destroy
| and reprovision once you're near the traffic limit.
|
| Massive loophole.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| They don't pro-rate the included traffic quota for servers that
| don't run a full month?
| rmoriz wrote:
| No.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Yeah but if you're running something that is using a ton of
| bandwidth, presumably it's a service that needs to be online
| and reliable. Being cheap and constantly cycling out servers
| introduces complexity to your system. Hetzner could also easily
| change their terms to close this loophole if it's an actual
| problem.
| qeternity wrote:
| You can automate it with zero downtime on kubernetes.
|
| And since internal traffic is free, you just need to cycle
| the ingress servers.
|
| Pay for the cheapest instance, get 20TB of egress. Churn em
| and burn em.
| socksy wrote:
| I bet that costs more than 20EUR to do
| johnisgood wrote:
| [dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668
| jgalt212 wrote:
| As a Hetzner client, any price rise is disappointing. We are
| compute-heavy, not egress-heavy, user so will be largely
| unaffected by these changes, but I'm still a yuge Hetzner fan.
| jimminyx wrote:
| Same here - their compute pricing and performance were
| excellent value compared to the major cloud providers.
| qwertox wrote:
| > for other customers who have used much more resources
|
| So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a
| bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher
| than that of European and Singaporean customers?
|
| I wonder what it consists of.
|
| * p x thumb = ballpark figure
| xmodem wrote:
| Hetzner has been an established player in Europe for a long
| time. It seems plausible that they have enough customers who
| use small amounts of bandwidth to subsidise the heavier users.
|
| Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with
| better pricing than established players, it stands to reason
| that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be
| the heavier users.
| mrgaro wrote:
| EU transit costs and peering agreements are much more relaxed
| and cheaper than in US
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Europe is also a lot smaller network wise. Hetzner only
| have to get their traffic to Frankfurt to get connected to
| practically the whole of Europe. For the US, Ashburn
| N.Virginia is good but it's still only a single coast.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| They are definitely paying under 2c/TB for traffic
| though.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Routers, optics & interconnects aren't free. $0.01/GB is
| very reasonable.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Wait. That's cheaper than my CDN. Maybe I should do some
| shopping
| rsynnott wrote:
| > So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a
| bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher
| than that of European and Singaporean customers?
|
| I wouldn't be amazed if Hetzner benefits significantly from
| peering, which is much more widespread in US than in Europe.
| Interesting piece on this from Cloudflare:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
|
| It's quite possible that their costs really are significantly
| lower in Europe. No idea what things are like in Singapore.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Really? Peering is very big in Europe, we have like 10+ CIX
| operators with 20+ locations in Germany alone.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You've written that the wrong way around. You've written the
| opposite of what Cloudflare writes.
|
| They write that transit bandwith costs are similar in Europe
| and the USA, but Europe has more peering -- it's around 50%
| of their traffic rather than 20%.
|
| > The corollary is that in Europe transit is also cheap but
| peering is very easy, making the effective price of bandwidth
| in the region the lowest in the world.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oops, yep, so I have. Should've read "much more widespread
| in Europe than the US". Sorry, long day.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I would think an auction system would be the best system to price
| bandwidth.
| bhouston wrote:
| Theoretically would be cool. Basically you have a docker that
| can run anywhere and you automatically migrate it based on
| prices between different service providers. The issue is there
| isn't incentives for the cloud providers to do this, because it
| wouldn't benefit the incumbents.
|
| Maybe if the government mandated it at some point, like phone
| number portability was mandated.
| brookst wrote:
| It's also bad for customers because you wouldn't have
| predictability in your cost structure.
| simplecto wrote:
| Enron tried this in the late 90s/early 2000s.
|
| That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books),
| but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities
| such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth's value is highly
| dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network
| conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize
| bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to
| create a seamless trading market.
|
| There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this
| problem. I remain highly skeptical.
| remram wrote:
| That could work for some use cases where you transfer in bulk,
| like backups, CDN sync, research data transfer, etc. Either
| auction or off-hours or "spot"/low-QoS.
| crest wrote:
| I would like to know more about their bandwidth costs to learn
| if: * they have to pay that much more for
| (outbound) traffic in the US * miscalculated their US
| expansion and are trying to recoup * they think customers
| will only bitch, but stay anyways
| repple wrote:
| I wonder what proportion of traffic is AI model weights being
| served. They are huge files, lots of mostly duplicated + fine
| tuned versions, lots of interest to download the latest and
| greatest, lots of ML aficionados grabbing them.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| This thread is where I'm learning that American English uses
| tariff mainly for import tariffs. Here in India, the most common
| usage of it is to talk about telecom tariffs - mainly mobile,
| sometimes broadband. So it didn't even occur to me when reading
| the question that it might have anything to do with import
| tariffs, until I read some comments that misunderstood it that
| way.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not just mainly, but exclusively in my experience.
| (Import/export tariffs.)
|
| Until this thread, I have never encountered the term "bar
| tariff" for a list of drink prices, or "energy tariff" instead
| of rate. Those uses are simply not American English, and you
| would be misunderstood.
|
| Hetzner is a German company so I find myself wondering if this
| is a British usage, or a mistranslation of the German word
| "tarif" that should be "rate"? (A common mistranslation
| category known as "false friends".)
|
| TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_(disambiguation)
| hyperpape wrote:
| Unclear to me why you're being downvoted. I previously knew
| non-US people refer to rates as "tariffs", but I never heard
| it in a US context. It's not rare, it's just not a meaning of
| the word Americans typically know.
| willyt wrote:
| One of the most frustrating things about Duolingo is that
| they refuse to have an International English setting for the
| language you are learning from. I'm trying to learn french
| but WTF is a 'stroller' or an 'eggplant' or even more
| frustrating are the ones where the word is almost the same in
| the UK as in France e.g 'athletique' in French is 'athletics'
| in UK English but 'track' in US English.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's perfectly acceptable British English.
|
| 21 occurrences of "tariff" on one of British Gas' pages:
| https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/off-peak-
| electric... ("Your energy provider may offer time of use
| tariffs and cheaper night-time electricity rates.")
| crazygringo wrote:
| Good to know, so it's an American vs. British thing.
| Thanks!
|
| Is there any further distinction between a "tariff" and a
| "rate" in British English? The example sentence you provide
| uses both, which makes me wonder if there's even more to
| the picture here.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Without checking, my feeling is a "tariff" is the whole
| contracted agreement, and a "rate" is a part of it.
|
| An EV electricity tariff might have a cheap night rate,
| and a more expensive day rate. Another tariff might be
| entirely variable rate (price changes every hour).
|
| Wiktionary defines a tariff as "A schedule of rates, fees
| or prices." so I think my feeling is correct.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It's not really that. On PG&E's website it also uses the
| word tariff to refer to prices for electricity and gas.
| https://www.pge.com/tariffs/en.html
| fuzztester wrote:
| hotels in India also use the word tariff for room rates, as in,
| see the tariff chart on the wall behind the reception desk.
| thayne wrote:
| Ah, at first I wondered if this had something to do with Trump
| getting elected and his claims that he will implement massive
| (import) tariffs.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I vaguely remember the word tariff being used to refer to fees
| or duties in a history class growing up, but as you've noted,
| it's not used this way in American English anymore. When I got
| the email from Hetzner this morning, I thought they were taking
| preemptive action against some tariff/sanction that Trump must
| have announced against EU data companies.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >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.
|
| Isent this how every ISP works?
|
| You and all your neighbors can subscribe to 1Gigabit because they
| don't anticipate everyone maxxing out the bandwidth at once?
| josephcsible wrote:
| For speed that's how it works, but not for data caps.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| "data caps" aren't real though from a networking perspective.
| A router or switch will push packets at line rate speed, not
| based on the total amount of storage or cap.
| dpeckett wrote:
| 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's a bit of a shock for sure but it seems this model is a big
| part of how they can maintain their slim margins.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I have no complaints at all about this model. They work out the
| cost of providing a service, then they charge that cost plus a
| markup. They keep doing things that make them money. They stop
| doing things that don't make them money.
|
| It seems like a straightforward way to run a business.
| dpeckett wrote:
| Yep they're the technology equivalent of a discount
| supermarket. Everything is commoditized to the extreme.
|
| Breath of fresh air in the modern cloud era tbh.
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| They're giving two business days' notice for new product
| and three months for existing product?
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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.
| tayiorrobinson wrote:
| To be fair, given how cheap a lot of Hetzners products
| (especially Server Auction, my beloved) are compared to the
| competition, not wanting to have loss leaders seems reasonable
| to me
| Moru wrote:
| The bandwidth market is very different between EU and USA,
| maybe they weren't prepared for the much higher prices in USA?
| I'm pretty used to having a 100 Mbps connection to our servers
| that we can use without any strings attached. Even on the
| lowest tier. (Not Hetzner customer but been thinking about it)
| dumbledoren wrote:
| 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.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Is this a signal of a larger pivot in their business model
| towards targeting a higher-cost US enterprise market? A lot of
| brands have successfully transitioned to selling the same goods
| at luxury prices recently-maybe a webhost with a decent enough
| reputation can do the same.
| phil21 wrote:
| Probably more they don't need or want the companies gaming this
| pricing at scale any more.
|
| If you are spinning up a $5/mo VM, using 19.5TB of bandwidth on
| it, then spinning it down and firing up the next, you are a
| cost center.
|
| This change boots those customers off the service entirely
| without having to write complicated ToS. The price change for
| average customers won't even be noticed on the next monthly
| bill, so it's likely seen as a win/win at the moment.
|
| At some point the marketing dollars stop getting spent as
| heavily when you reach a certain market saturation. Calling
| this luxury pricing is certainly a stretch considering it's an
| order of magnitude less than the large cloud providers still.
| It's just not below cost any longer.
| switch007 wrote:
| Nobody likes price rises but many companies are doing it due to
| disappointing year end financials and needing some positive news
| for next year.
|
| IMO 2025 will a big year for being forced to run lean (no DevOps
| teams trying to emulate Google, ditching pointless microservices
| architecture, reducing JavaScript churn etc) and having to be
| agile in responding to vendor price changes. And of course CTOs
| desperately thinking AI will reduce the wage bill with no impact
| usernamed7 wrote:
| I went from being a big fan of hetzner to being pretty angry
| because of this change and how it was communicated.
|
| The price change is one thing, the MASSIVE change in traffic you
| get for it is another. Together, they suck. to go from 20Tb to
| 1Tb feels like a massive bait-and-switch.
| nature556 wrote:
| lol, it's wierd
| dark-star wrote:
| I wonder what's so special about Ashburn and Hillsboro... Did the
| local ISPs suddenly increase the prices or what?
| christophilus wrote:
| I think OVH has a more logical bandwidth policy. They give you a
| certain Mbps cap, and that's that. I haven't used them
| personally, though, so can't vouch for the experience. I'm
| curious to hear from folks who have used both providers.
| apitman wrote:
| From what I've heard if you actually saturate the link they'll
| get in touch. I'm not aware of any truly unlimited data
| transfer plans from VPS providers.
| koolba wrote:
| Is the traffic pricing per instance or aggregated?
|
| So would having multiple servers but one going over the 1 TB
| limit cause an overage, or do they look at the total across all
| servers?
| bakugo wrote:
| Per instance.
| quickslowdown wrote:
| I finally gave in to all the word of mouth marketing and moved to
| Hetzner about a month ago.
|
| Fuck.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I did 4 days ago! Very upsetting email.
| ouEight12 wrote:
| > customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs,
| in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources
|
| Literally the business model of every "shared resource service
| model" on the planet. Hetzner's entire business model is built on
| this... them acting like they're shocked to discover this is...
| disingenuous at best.
| apitman wrote:
| I would love to see a VPS with transparent upstream costs so we
| have some idea of what's fair.
| atomic128 wrote:
| 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 Linode to change the price on me, eventually.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't find that to be all that impressive.
|
| I'm immediately saving money with the server I built out of
| mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS
| solutions.
|
| The only reason it's near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS
| instances have barely any computing power assigned to them.
|
| For the same price as one game server I'm running something
| like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real
| CPU cores (Ryzen 3600).
| Aeolun wrote:
| Completely unrelated, but I'm surprised how many people
| actually use the Ryzen 3600, from desktops to servers, it
| seems to be everywhere.
| terribleperson wrote:
| I expect to see the same thing from the 5600. With AMD
| still selling 5000-series CPUs and their prices so low,
| they must be incredibly tempting to anyone who needs a lot
| of CPUs.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What is your annual electricity cost for that server in your
| closet?
| christophilus wrote:
| I'd like to know this too, along with how you mitigate
| traffic spikes while using the internet connection as both
| your home internet and your public internet.
| dangus wrote:
| There are no traffic spikes, it's not serving web content
| to the public internet.
|
| I probably should have been a little more clear that I
| don't think VPS systems are bad or anything, it's just
| that they aren't well-suited to game servers and hardware
| in my closet is well-suited to it.
|
| I was spending almost 20 euros a month for a single
| Hetzner cloud instance that performed worse than all my
| gaming VMs on my closet computer.
|
| But if I was serving a public website or app I would
| probably not want it going through my home internet.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't know but probably a bit under $5 a month if 35
| watts is my guess at the system idle. I haven't bothered
| metering it.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| What's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with
| some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote
| access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.
| Firerouge wrote:
| Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect
| buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you
| finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
| viraptor wrote:
| Any decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than
| $5 linode. For example search for optiflex
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30
| They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to
| go for i7s
| dboreham wrote:
| But it'll cost $100+/yr in electricity.
| viraptor wrote:
| There are optiplex models running at 14W or less when
| idle. In my area that's ~$20 per year. (It close to half
| of that in practice with solar)
| rsanek wrote:
| Based on your ebay link, the cheapest PCs are around $50
| shipped. Including the electricity, that's $70/year. So
| you'd need more than a year to have this approach pay
| off, and additionally you will have saddled yourself with
| managing a physical machine rather than have someone else
| abstract it for you.
|
| Doesn't seem to pass the "it'll pay for itself in a
| couple months" claim.
| viraptor wrote:
| That link sets the max price to $30. (I see a few at $18)
| I'm not sure how you found a $50 item there. Ignore
| shipping if you're adding that in, there's lots of local
| ones you can find on Facebook market and similar sites.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| ...no? My NUC draws about 18 watts under load, which is
| about $24 per year at typical American energy rates. It
| cost me 30 bucks. So, it's paid for itself after about 10
| months (5n = 2n + 30), _and_ it 's way faster than a $5
| VPS.
| immibis wrote:
| I understand Tailscale is the new Hamachi.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I'm aware, but I stick with Hamachi because I know how to
| use it, and I have yet to run into a situation that would
| motivate me to replace it.
| gear54rus wrote:
| Don't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get
| the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're
| willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel.
|
| Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that
| cache is shared).
| dizhn wrote:
| Oracle has people jumping all kinds of hoops to get that
| service too. Just like Hetzner. Took me a few tries with
| different credit cards then tried to get one for my friend
| with their card and nothing would work. Great free service
| though. That ampere vm with 24 gb ram is quite capable.
| qwertox wrote:
| It's most likely a vCPU. So even the caches are shared.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If I recall Linode has a "dedicated core" feature which
| reserves a CPU core for you, but I doubt that is $5/month so
| you're likely right. User must be quite lucky to have no
| utilization on host for process to not get cache-evicted.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Hetzner, in volume, is about 5x cheaper than limped for my
| workloads. Limped is 2-3 times cheaper than AWS, but AWS has a
| few things going for it that make it worth it for some
| workloads.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Linode. Decking autocarrot.
| shrubble wrote:
| You have a CPU? Or a core, that is 1 of many cores on a system
| where your VM can be and will be pre-empted by the host node's
| scheduler without your VM having any control or insight into
| the process?
| edm0nd wrote:
| Couldn't you just buy a used decent PC and run this on its CPU
| + GPU and get faster/better results?
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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 that service for that fee.
| keyle wrote:
| I'm not sure why you compare this to airplanes. Airplanes
| fuel consumption is very expensive if the plane is empty
| relative to profit. They need to put bums in seats for the
| flight to be viable commercially.
|
| On the other hand, a flat out rack takes more power than an
| idle one. So this isn't the same thing at all.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Yeah, the GP comment is so dumb. Most commercial aircraft
| are owned by a few leasing companies. They would _love_ if
| lessors didn 't fly the aircraft, but paid leasing fees!
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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.)
| mr_toad wrote:
| On the other hand airlines regularly overbook flights, and
| residential ISPs don't have nearly enough bandwidth for every
| customer to max it out.
| fastball wrote:
| 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).
| dastbe wrote:
| in mba brain, but hosting providers want as much
| utilization because it means people are going to use more
| over time.
| nafey wrote:
| They want more users, not more utilization. Utilization
| is the effect of users not its cause. They are happy to
| have utilization increase as long as they keep getting
| more users. If the utilization increases while number of
| users remain constant because people (like OP) are using
| CPU intensive programs then that is not in their
| interest.
| fastball wrote:
| 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.
| sureIy wrote:
| 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.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| 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).
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| You seem oddly emotional about this. Also, you're wrong.
|
| Hosting companies count on a certain <100% average CPU usage,
| and this factors in to their business model in the shared CPU
| plans. That's literally why those plans exist, because they
| are getting more users on a machine by counting on less than
| 100% usage. The users get a lower price and the risk of
| getting throttled in certain situations. Nowhere in their
| product description do they promise you can use 100% all the
| time. If you want that, you go to their dedicated plans.
|
| Don't get so emotional, but if you do, at least make sure you
| aren't wrong first.
| keyle wrote:
| Off topic, your website is interesting, I wish I knew how to
| interpret it "commitment of traders". Maybe there is a blog
| post somewhere?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more
| common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable.
|
| The fact a usage is common doesn't mean it is profitable or
| that it needs to be supported for a hosting service to be
| profitable.
|
| Mining crypto used to become quite common as well a decade ago
| and tall hosting services banned this exactly for because there
| was no way they could be profitable and offer decent QoS.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| One core isn't very expensive, and when we look at modern super
| dense CPUs full load is less than 5 watts per core.
| czhu12 wrote:
| What are some examples of applications people are running that:
|
| 1. Require 20TB of bandwidth / month
|
| 2. That bandwidth can't be shielded by Cloudflare and others?
|
| Is it like... real time video streaming? Gaming servers? I can't
| imagine a web app getting anywhere close to that.
|
| I run a mid sized NFT art creation website that generates both
| images and GIF's (https://mintables.club) and with over 100000
| users at peak, it only needed about 1.5TB of bandwidth.
| ironhaven wrote:
| BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent
| tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month
| to be in good standing within that tracker's community
| lysace wrote:
| Yeah, this is it.
| Filligree wrote:
| I've always wondered how ratios like that are supposed to
| work. Surely the ratio has to be 1.0, averaged over all
| users.
| kiney wrote:
| most trackers have some kind of bonus point system
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think certain torrents being marked freeleech to not
| count against accounts' ratio is what causes the bulk of
| the imbalance in total uploads versus downloads. It's
| necessary too, to increase availability on torrents.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Good thing I pay only 30 EUR a month for symmetric 1 gbit
| fiber. Right now with BF you can find BF deals cheaper than 2
| USD a month, and then there's Usenet.
| fransje26 wrote:
| What's BF for the laymen?
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Black Friday
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Is this legitimate data or pirated media?
| fransje26 wrote:
| Yes.
| Figs wrote:
| PeerTube comes to mind.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| blockchain nodes
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| I have 2 services that run above those figures:
|
| 1. the demo instance of my OSS software which is a bring your
| own storage Dropbox like UI for SFTP, S3, FTP, and every
| protocols imaginable: https://github.com/mickael-
| kerjean/filestash People tend to come in the demo to upload /
| download tons of stuffs
|
| 2. the docker registry for my oss stuff since I was kicked out
| of the docker open source program and now need to find a new
| place to store all the images. 10 millions downloads over the
| last few years, it does add up very quickly way above the 20TB
| limits if your image isn't super slim and try to selfhost
| everything
| arccy wrote:
| github's registry (ghcr.io) is the other big free one
| echoangle wrote:
| > the demo instance of my OSS software which a bring your own
| storage Dropbox like UI for SFTP, S3, FTP, and every
| protocols imaginable: https://github.com/mickael-
| kerjean/filestash People tend to come in the demo to upload /
| download tons of stuffs
|
| Do you have problems with illegal content shared over your
| service? I wouldn't ever offer something like this because I
| wouldn't want to deal with someone uploading child porn or
| stuff like that.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| Not really scared as I take action the second I hear about
| nasty things. The most recent events were people creating
| shared links pointing to FTP servers that had revenge porn
| and sharing those on a whacky telegram account, another
| annoying one is people who keep trying to brute force other
| people accounts on cloud providers even though there's a
| protection in place to throttle to 20 connection attempt
| per second, effectively degrading the free service for
| everyone else and getting me kicked off from cloud provider
| like the most recent one being Hostinger
| akudha wrote:
| Is there a way to scan files/images as they are uploaded
| for illegal content?
| viraptor wrote:
| There are many data streams you may want to process that take
| lots of network traffic. CT logs, monitoring aggregators, web
| crawlers, etc. For the traffic you initiate, there's no
| proxying/caching you can do.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Besides needing it: Not having to fear that an attacker
| spamming the machine with Mail or web requests or something
| incurs a bug traffic bill gives better sleep at night.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > video streaming?
|
| Pet peeve but yes. It should not, in 2024, be considered a
| niche use case to deal with.. video. We've become accustomed to
| YouTube and their impossible-to-beat free hosting. But it's
| really pricey to do streaming and so yes, we should expect
| large bandwidth being available. "Who needs X" is a question
| that should be reversed, instead we should ask "why not?". When
| we have good affordable infra, we get cool new stuff and
| everyone benefits.
| nisa wrote:
| Structural monitoring in engineering for example. You need high
| quality pictures and have lots of drone data and files need to
| move to hyper scaler or on premise for GPU processing.
|
| Cloudflare is not trustworthy and you don't always need to pay
| the "protection" fee. I.e. B2B where a day offline doesn't
| matter.
|
| Cloud pricing is insane compared to Hetzner with regards to
| storage and CPU power. If you have some Linux knowledge it's
| perfectly stable. Support is top notch.
|
| For 50EUR per box you get 10gbe which is also nice. Not
| everyone needs 100% IaC like the big hyper scaler offer or geo
| redundancy etc.pp... even Hetzner has an API and you can even
| terraform their dedicated servers to some degree. It's 15 to 30
| minutes vs. seconds but who cares.
| Hilift wrote:
| More people setup VPN servers these days. Spiked with the Iran
| protests. Wireguard makes it eas-ier. Circumventing some rules
| like content distribution.
| veeti wrote:
| 1.5TB isn't much at all but keep in mind that if a
| "disproportionate percentage" of your Cloudflare bandwidth is
| used for images they reserve the right to boot you off [1].
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| It's now more expensive for bandwidth than Digital Ocean,
| completely destroying what was its value proposition previously.
| jorams wrote:
| 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: 2vCPU, 2GB, 60GB storage (non-NVMe), 3TB transfer,
| $18 per month
|
| Add 2TB more transfer at Hetzner and you're at ~$7 per month.
| Still a bit less storage though, let's also compare it to the
| CPX21:
|
| CPX21: 3vCPU, 4GB, 80GB storage (NVMe), 2TB transfer, ~$9.50
| per month. Add 1TB of transfer and you get more of everything
| for ~$10.50, ~40% less than at DO. And bandwidth overages at DO
| are about 10x as expensive.
|
| We can also compare a higher tier:
|
| CPX41: 8vCPU, 16GB, 240GB storage (NVMe), 4TB transfer, ~$32
| per month
|
| CPX51: 16vCPU, 32GB, 360GB storage (NVMe), 5TB transfer,
| ~$63.50 per month
|
| DO Basic: 8vCPU, 16GB, 320GB storage (non-NVMe), 6TB transfer,
| $96 per month
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| 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 costs $6/TB. That's more
| than almost every Hetzner option listed by the OP, but not
| all of them.
| jorams wrote:
| 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.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| That's the key thing I missed. It's nowhere near the deal
| it was but it's still clearly ahead of DO.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Those are some steeeep drops. I'm curious how they settled upon
| such numbers.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Presumably by looking at their competition, and realizing
| they're still a better option.
| veeter wrote:
| Staying competitive swings both ways.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| 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.
| vdfs wrote:
| I've been reading about how great Hetzner for years but i
| couldn't get past the sigup page where they require a credit
| card just to create an account.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Honestly if you are providing computer resources, that's
| pretty standard now and one of the only lines of defence
| against abuse
| megous wrote:
| Is that a US thing? I'm reasonably sure I did not give them
| my debit card.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| That's a particularly, but unfortunately good example of how
| awful they are as a company. The sooner they get pushed out of
| business the better.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's always a balance between how much fraud you allow and how
| many real customers you reject. They set their threshold at an
| interesting level, but maybe they're happy with that choice.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| You're right. But unfortunately this mindset moves us closer
| and closer to having algorithms exclude people from society
| and life. And as the stories already told here show, it can
| happen to any of us for no apparent reason.
|
| It's like, imagine a magic wand that, if waved, would make
| life a little better for 99% of society, but much worse for
| 1%. Would it be moral to wave that wand?
| johnfn wrote:
| Arguably, we wave that magic wand every time we decide
| _not_ to donate to starving children in third-world
| countries. Which is pretty often!
| tshaddox wrote:
| There's nothing particularly scary about "algorithms"
| making these choices since it's just people at these
| companies choosing and implementing the algorithms. It
| wouldn't get better if those humans weren't allowed to use
| algorithms to make these choices since decisions.
| viraptor wrote:
| You're making choices like that every single day. Sometimes
| with reversed percentages. Even posting this message may be
| on average a tiny loss for the world. (It's meaningless in
| the end and burned some energy to give one person a mini
| dopamine boost)
| noirscape wrote:
| Well you got a human answering the support hotline.
|
| I think that alone kinda nullifies the threat of an
| algorithm. The entire reason why they're such a massive
| problem is because Google et al. refuse to operate proper
| support hotlines to help people and even if they do have a
| support line (Facebook infamously doesn't have one and
| wants you to go through the courts to contact them), the
| support staff aren't actually equipped to help people
| beyond regurgitating canned support page links. You can't
| solve a malfunctioning algorithm with another algorithm or
| by forcing a human to behave like an algorithm.
|
| It's not a big secret that the best way to get yourself in
| front of actual support if GAFAM screws you over is to
| complain about it on HN because this is where SREs lurk
| that can actually punt your requests through to people that
| can look into it.
|
| Hetzner at least gave a direct answer to explain the
| reason.
| Aachen wrote:
| How does that human nullify anything if they don't unlock
| the account? Presuming GP entered real information, which
| we can only assume at this point
| lupire wrote:
| _The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas_
| lxgr wrote:
| The problem with this mindset (incredibly common in the US;
| much more so than in the European countries I've lived in,
| at least) isn't thinking probabilistically, and trying to
| determine the likelihood of a prospective customer being a
| fraudster. It's really just that there are only two
| possible outcomes: Yes and no.
|
| Just by having a third option, most of the downsides of
| doing the evaluation incorrectly could be mitigated. Of
| course, that's generally much more expensive (and often
| uneconomical) than saying no, so it's usually not done.
|
| I've been on the 1% side of things quite a few times due to
| having new credit and (presumably) various data brokers not
| knowing every detail about me yet, and the experience
| really, really sucks.
| klabb3 wrote:
| What type of fraud exactly? You mean like stolen CCs? It
| feels very medieval as a financial trust system if every
| little vendor can't trust payments, even when you _pay up
| front_? Like this is in some ways worse than cold hard cash.
| And then we pay VISA premium on top of that, for the
| convenience of being mistrusted..
| akerl_ wrote:
| Paying up front doesn't really mean much, because if the
| credit card info is stolen, the actual owner will report
| the transaction and it will be reversed.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I wonder if they tried a debit card...
| klabb3 wrote:
| Right but that sucks. So CC companies/banks are simply
| shifting risk from one side of the transaction to the
| other. Sure, as a consumer you don't have to worry
| because you'll get your money back. But if the merchant
| has to worry and reject customers who are "suspicious" to
| protect themselves then you're back to square one, except
| more kafkaesque. That's why I said cash is better.
|
| I'd rather have $10 permanently lost for a month of VPS
| than being banned after 5 days setting it up because I'm
| traveling and my IP is "suspicious". Which has happened
| to me.
| kassner wrote:
| Hetzner is actually worse. Current EU directives allow
| liability shift in online payment when the customer is
| authenticated via 3D Secure, meaning the risk is
| extremely low and the onus of proving the fraud is on the
| card owner. Yet Hetzner will not accept your money if
| your name doesn't look correct for the country you are
| accessing from.
| viraptor wrote:
| If they pay up front then dispute, the company will suffer
| extra charges. With enough of reports, their payment
| processor fee% goes up and impacts all their payments.
| dan353hehe wrote:
| Yep. Same thing happened to me. I was not able to get my
| account working. Ever.
|
| I have all my stuff on vultr now.
| Salmonfisher11 wrote:
| > I don't know how they're still in business.
|
| They have 400 GBit/s of DTAG transit.
|
| Showing that they are rich as fuck without saying it.
| haolez wrote:
| Same with me a few years ago. Their support told me that they
| didn't want me as a customer. It was my first interaction with
| them. I swear I'm just a regular nerd with a credit card :D
|
| They are bizarre.
| Filligree wrote:
| A credit card? That... makes some sense, then. I'd be wary if
| anyone trying to pay with one of those as well; they're much
| too rare, and I've heard it's easy to unilaterally reverse
| charges.
|
| Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in
| the USA, but they're not anywhere else.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| If they don't want any customers outside of Germany, they
| should just say so.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I haven't done business in Germany or used German banks --
| is it hard to get them to reverse charges?
| Aachen wrote:
| 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. Probabilistic societies where you're
| excluded based on bad odds or credit scores is what you
| get with that system (I've been on the losing end of
| that, not because I've ever had any debt (too little
| money) but precisely because they had no positive data
| because I never needed a loan, and so you can't pay for
| stuff in certain countries because they require a credit
| card)
| dpkirchner wrote:
| 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.
| Filligree wrote:
| They're mainly designed to make it so you don't need to.
| If you buy something, it's going to work; and if it
| doesn't, the seller is required to make up for that.
|
| I can only speak for Norway, but this doesn't normally
| mean reversing the charge. It's assumed that, if you
| bought an X, you _wanted an X_. So the seller is required
| to get you an X of good enough quality to actually do the
| job, and if that isn 't what they were trying to sell...
| well, then they won't be in business for long.
|
| Normally this means repairs or replacement, of course on
| the seller's bill.
|
| The US seems much more geared to seeing every interaction
| as... I want to say 'combative'.
| mort96 wrote:
| And to add to this, if the seller is _unable_ to make the
| thing work as it 's supposed to, either through repairs
| or replacements, they are of course obliged to give the
| customer their money back. But yeah, that's not the first
| resort.
| mort96 wrote:
| I can't edit this anymore but "obliged" was supposed to
| be "obligated" of course
| wqaatwt wrote:
| You can still do chargebacks if you pay with a credit
| card from a German or other European bank (experience of
| course might vary but you can just switch to one that
| offers better customer service)
| haolez wrote:
| Never had an issue with credit cards on AWS, Azure, GCP,
| Digital Ocean, Vultr and Scaleway.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I've had problems with a Danish corporate credit card
| making very small payments, a dollar or so.
|
| They look like "card tasting" payments which fraudsters
| do to check if a card is valid.
| sgarland wrote:
| They are literally the preferred way to pay in the U.S. for
| damn near everything.
|
| I've also had no problems using them in Britain, Canada,
| Ireland, Korea...
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > but they're not anywhere else.
|
| They certainly are very common in much of Europe. Buying
| stuff on credit might be not that common but plenty of
| people have credit cards themselves (even of they are
| effectively used the same way as debit cards)
|
| To be fair not sure if you comment is just sarcasm.. but
| I've never had any issues using a credit card on Hetzner or
| pretty much any other European company
| qwertox wrote:
| When I ordered a VPS at Netcup (a Hetzner alternative) they
| called me and asked me for the name of the hotel next to my
| place to check if I really lived at the address I provided. I
| guess that if i would have needed to look it up, that is,
| struggled a bit with the answer, they would have denied me as a
| customer.
| this_user wrote:
| I had the same thing, but this was a business address while I
| was working remotely and had no idea about the area. Told
| them as much on the phone while looking the answer up on
| Google Maps. They just accepted that and opened the account.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I thought Netcup either colo'ed at or rented servers at,
| Hetzner? Maybe this was a ways back or have they always had
| their own DC?
| Y_Y wrote:
| If they can look it up then so can you! Maybe it filters out
| lazy scammers, but it doesn't sound like solid KYC to me.
|
| In fact I don't feel like a hosting service should need to do
| this at all. If you pay your bills and aren't on the Stasi
| blacklist you should be good to go. I don't want or expect
| the likes of Hetzner to be responsible for policing.
| foxylad wrote:
| As someone who runs mail servers, I wish they'd be MORE
| strict to stop the drive-by spammers. Every so often our
| servers get blocked because someone starts sending spam
| from a machine on the same netblock.
|
| It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting
| service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I agree. I'm currently using Linode. If they started
| requiring every account to have a valid US passport, I'd
| happily comply.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wish these companies were forced to get the nationality
| of the person or the companies owners and be forced to
| assign them to IP address blocks which identifies these
| nationalities.
|
| My home DNS server blocks all requests to .ru and .cn,
| but I can't do IP-address-block blocking because shady
| Chinese companies or individuals just need to rent some
| computing on AWS or DigitalOcean in order to become
| indistinguishable from American companies. And specially
| DigitalOcean seems to be the favorite platform for doing
| scams.
|
| We're OK with having license plates attached to our cars,
| but not to be forced to expose our nationality to
| infrastructure providers? There's really no privacy-
| sensitive stuff which needs to be protected in that case.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I don't think you can KYC your way to stopping spammers
| without stepping on some protected classes.
|
| I think that having a blacklist with some ID (bank
| account, national ID, CA cert) that's hard to replace is
| a good compromise.
|
| You could try giving people moral purity tests before you
| let them in (doesn't some of the tildeverse work like
| that?) but I think it's a dark road.
| qwertox wrote:
| Sure, it's not solid, but they knew I was a private
| customer, so what should they do? Do a request to a private
| credit bureau like the SCHUFA (like Equifax) to check if my
| provided details are valid?
|
| It feels like it's a check to get a general feeling if
| things sound plausible. Like no Russian accent for a German
| name, some knowledge of the surroundings, a valid phone
| number.
| Aachen wrote:
| Just today, a remote colleague mentioned staying at whatever
| hotel near the office. I had never heard of it: as a local, I
| don't tend to use the hotels here!
|
| Seems like a really weird choice of question. Thinking of
| germans, a bakery seems more likely something they'd know of;
| perhaps a supermarket works more internationally (I'm sure
| there's exceptions to that as well). Maybe the distance in
| driving, cycling, or public transport minutes to surrounding
| cities could be a universal question to ask
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| Always felt like they were in the business of blaming and
| hating their customers. Cloud providers that nitpick and judge
| every aspect of their customers' business details and
| technicalities are a huge operational risk. This archaic
| practice is the reason generic cloud orchestration was a must,
| and it's just not needed anymore.
|
| I don't care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.
| Aeolun wrote:
| There's nothing about cheap that implies terrible customer
| service. Or rather, the reverse isn't necessarily true.
| jorvi wrote:
| Are Hetzner Europe and US run by different companies or
| something?
|
| My experience in the EU has been nothing but stellar.
| rahkiin wrote:
| I believe so, so that it does not run foul of the CLOUD
| Act.
| crowcroft wrote:
| 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.
| Aachen wrote:
| That seems fair to me though. If that ISP (whatever the WHOIS
| resolves to for your VPN) gets a high rate of fraudulent
| customers, how is Hetzner to know if you're the same
| fraudster again or a new customer? Especially if you share
| not just the ISP but even your IP address with someone... we
| also rate limit logins for example based on IP address. If
| you're coming from the same origin as an attacker, there's no
| way for me to tell who's who
|
| Perhaps they could implement some way to do a 1-cent bank
| transfer from an account with a name which isn't on their
| fraud list, but as a simple step it seems pretty normal to
| use your regular internet connection (that ties the
| IP+timestamp combination to a real-world subscriber) and not
| some anonymity service
|
| Although it would be nice if we could be anonymous on the
| web, when abuse traffic is involved (more than posting a
| comment on some forum as an anonymous source or something), I
| don't know how that'd be possible to reconcile
| crowcroft wrote:
| I get it, but you'll get a lost of false positives as well.
| My experience is that they also had slow customer service.
|
| I don't want any business critical infra managed by a
| company willing to be that aggressive in blocking accounts,
| while also having slow customer service to resolve access
| issues.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Why were you using a VPN?
| faet wrote:
| Apple Private Relay is on by default for a lot of Apple
| products these days. This is why my account was banned.
| crowcroft wrote:
| My company had a policy that any infrastructure should be
| accessed through our internally managed VPN.
|
| This isn't particularly common, but it's not uncommon
| either.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I had a similar problem, followed by getting blocked for
| using an IP owned by a mobile telecom, followed by being
| unable to credit the account via a bank transfer. At each
| step trying to explain my situation to support.
|
| Then it worked, and I've had no problems since. I'm concerned
| about them failing to charge my virtual debit card some month
| in the future and losing data, but it hasn't happened yet.
|
| If there was anything else nearly as cheap, or if it wasn't
| for personal use, I probably would have given up and used
| another service.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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, don't
| need every customer, don't need to be everything to every
| customer, and won't fight for business in the same way. Does
| that limit them? Maybe? But I suspect not enough to be a
| problem most of the time.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I'm not advocating for anyone being a nasty person, but
| there are significant cultural differences again for what
| it means to be rude. In Japan the cultural expectation is
| that saying "no" is rude in a customer service situation,
| which is far beyond the expectations of most of the world.
| This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually
| "no".
|
| If you're used to American customer service, you may find
| European customer service to be blunt or curt, and many
| people would perceive that as rude even though it is not
| intended that way. Again, if they aren't trying to win
| every customer, this isn't really a problem.
| lxgr wrote:
| "Try again, and this time provide real data" would be
| considered very rude even in Germany.
| Filligree wrote:
| Well, we haven't seen the data.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Without reading the actual wording sent, and knowing
| which culture the sender was from, this is all just
| speculation. I'm more interested in challenging the
| assumptions that we have about our own expectations in
| customer service being universal. From the rest of this
| thread it sounds like there is a commonly held opinion
| that Hetzner customer service is blunt, and my point is
| that that may be fine and maybe customers should not
| expect to be treated in a particular way all the time.
| Moru wrote:
| Since I wasn't there I can't say what happened. Can be a
| language thing too, I can imagine that the intended
| meaning would be "Try again, making sure you spell
| everything exactly as the data on the card" but it came
| out as "Try again with the real info". In germany the
| English language is very optional, it's not needed for
| any media consumtion since everything is being dubbed
| and/or translated. This leads to less experience using
| the language.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually
| "no".
|
| If the answer is actually "no", then the customer service
| person will tell you it's "a little difficult". You're
| supposed to understand that that means "no, we can't do
| it". Of course, many foreigners don't get this, so then
| they'll change gears and just say "it's impossible".
|
| >If you're used to American customer service, you may
| find European customer service to be blunt or curt
|
| I don't see accusing your customer of fraud as simple
| bluntness or curtness.
|
| >Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this
| isn't really a problem.
|
| If they don't want to expand their business outside of
| Europe, I guess that approach is OK.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Really? In France you're treated most of the time as a
| potential fraudster first, then maybe when planet aligns as
| customer in some services like train, tramway, post, banks
| (the state mandates to justify things like moving and using
| your own money you already paid taxes on) and various
| administrations.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of
| committing fraud their first interaction.
|
| In my experience a lot of German businesses are like that,
| they'll woosh you away for any slight (perceived or real).
| So it is definitely a cultural thing. Of course my small
| sample doesn't mean anything in regards to german culture,
| but at the very least it proves that this _corporate
| culture_ is indeed a thing.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good
| expectation of people.
|
| have you met the internet yet
| matt-p wrote:
| 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.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| 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...
| voytec wrote:
| > I think this might be a cultural thing.
|
| It's just German bureaucracy. When I wanted to register
| domains with Hetzner few years back, they asked me to print
| multiple pages of forms and contract, fill out, sign and...
| fax it back.
| UberFly wrote:
| I'm fine being fed up with the bureaucracy in my own
| country without also having to deal with Germany's. A big
| no-thanks to ever dealing with Hetzner.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong
| desire to make the customer happy
|
| It's definitely a culture shock for people from these
| cultures to encounter businesses who reject their business,
| whether it's deemed risky or not worthwhile.
|
| It was eye opening to me to spend time working with cultures
| where I had to convince businesses to deal with me rather
| than the other way around. Some people get extremely offended
| when businesses don't bend over backward for them, but that's
| not going to work when you encounter cultures who operate
| differently.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| FAANG has exactly the same behavior. When you have billions
| of users and no customer support, no one cares about the
| customer being right.
|
| Last month I tried to create an Instagram account, I kept
| being instabanned on 5 different devices with different IPs.
| No recourse possible. HN is full of horror stories like this.
| mtmail wrote:
| I was customer for 10 years, but for business I needed a second
| account. Banned immediately even after I submitted a passport
| copy. Worked after contacting their support. Still happy
| customer (with both accounts). I think they're just very strict
| and get their (un)fair share of stolen credit card or stolen
| identity signups.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Hetzner values its old customers a LOT for some reason...
| rtpg wrote:
| I mean your transaction probably got flagged as fraudulent
| (like if your postal code didn't match your card), it's not
| that mysterious.
|
| I think most online operators that have "spend $3 with us"
| tiers have to be super vigilant about card transactions, and
| when you fall into the cracks you're a bit SOL.
| o11c wrote:
| It's been ages, but once I got something cancelled due to a
| site not properly distinguishing between shipping address and
| card billing address.
| isodev wrote:
| I'm not sure what was your concern - Hetzner is obliged by law
| to make sure their signing up a real person or a company and
| that their servers are not used for malicious intent.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| 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 see it as a concern, I guess.
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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.
| woodson wrote:
| 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).
| isodev wrote:
| A credit card is "low trust" confirmation of identity.
| Usually for this kind of services, you also have to submit
| your ID for verification. Perhaps you're based in a country
| where this is not possible so they didn't ask upfront?
|
| Either way, it's their process so you're of course welcome
| to go elsewhere if you want. I don't see it as a "bad
| thing" for companies to require some level of trust.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I'm based in the UK where we all have credit cards. I
| also did give them my ID - which is NOT typical for other
| hosting providers, actually, but I'm happy to provide it
| - but that still didn't satisfy them.
| n144q wrote:
| Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real
| drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't
| convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on
| the ID.
|
| I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.
| ihateolives wrote:
| > real drivers licence
|
| Drivers licence as a personal ID is not really a thing in
| Europe. It's accepted at some places, but either passport or
| your state provided ID-card is much preferred.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Very few Americans have personal ID so if they intend to do
| business in America, they should be prepared to accept
| drivers licenses.
|
| Maybe they just don't want to sell to Americans, which is
| always allowed I guess, but setting up an American VPS
| provider and not accepting the standard American KYC
| verification methods would be a rather incompetent way of
| doing business. It'd be no different from doing business in
| Europe and only accepting drivers licenses and not
| accepting passports/ID cards for identity verification.
| n144q wrote:
| In the US, DL works as an ID for almost anything other than
| voting in an election. You can fly to almost any US
| territory with that plastic card. And it _is_ state-
| provided ID -- nobody questions that.
|
| And we are talking about 300M people here, which is about 4
| times the population for Germany.
|
| If they hate US residents they should declare that clearly
| on their website, not wasting customers' (and their own)
| time.
| Timon3 wrote:
| But you don't just have one type of drivers license for
| 300M people, do you? As far as I'm aware each state has
| their own. So it's not 300M vs. 80M, but 80M vs. 50x 6M
| people (incredibly simplified and wrong numbers, but you
| get the gist). Far more effort to verify each document.
|
| That would still exclude non-driving customers, which
| means allowing at least one additional form of ID per
| state - suddenly you have to support at least 100 IDs for
| US customers, while German customers have exactly 1.
|
| Not sure how you arrive at them "hating US residents",
| that's a weird conclusion to get to.
| TrickyRick wrote:
| Contrary to the belief of a lot of Americans, just
| because it works in the US doesn't mean it works
| elsewhere. In the rest of the world a driver's license is
| used for proving your right to drive and we have a thing
| called passports for proving your identity. Hetzner isn't
| an American company so why should they accept American
| drivers licenses?
| mijkal wrote:
| > Hetzner isn't an American company so why should they
| accept American drivers licenses?
|
| When in Rome ...
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| An EU drivers license should be fine, as that is an
| official form of ID. But for anyone else, they'd need an
| international form of identification.
| wooque wrote:
| They are still in business because 99.99% of customers are not
| affected by this.
|
| I'm happy customer for years and will be even with these
| changes.
| jweir wrote:
| OTOH there is Azure where a very sophisticated Twillio phishing
| service was hosted. When reported to abuse Microsoft replied
| they were a valid customer. A week later it finally came down.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Because they're so cheap they have to worry about spammers and
| other sorts of abuse. It's more cost effective for them to
| refuse dodgy-looking accounts.
|
| The big question is, were you using real information or did you
| put in fake info?
|
| They're still in business because they're cheap and pretty
| reliable. But being cheap means there are things you can't get
| with them but can with others. For example, you can't pre-pay
| for the entire year ahead of time.
| NicoHarms wrote:
| You can actually pre-pay them. Under the transactions section
| in your account, it says:
|
| "If you make advance payments by bank transfer to our bank
| account, the amount will be posted as a credit on your
| account. We will automatically deduct this credit on your
| account when we process future invoices."
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| They must have changed that. I remember reading on their
| site at some point that they didn't accept that.
| n144q wrote:
| In order to pre-pay, you need to have an account first.
|
| Many people didn't even get to the point where they can log
| in.
| lars_francke wrote:
| Because they provide good service to most customers.
|
| Your case is unfortunate, and I totally understand why you'd be
| taking you business elsewhere, but probably an outlier.
|
| Otherwise, we'd need to ask the same about AWS et. al. as we've
| definitely seen more than enough wrong account closure
| complaints on here.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I don't know how they're still in business.
|
| They're growing year after year, so clearly they're doing
| something right.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| You also don't know the strain brought by continual streams of
| fraud that their support has to deal with, all for being a
| relatively cheap option.
| andix wrote:
| Did you sign up as a private individual or was it a company
| account? I think they are extremely strict with private
| accounts, especially outside of EU. Most individuals only get a
| few resources for a few bucks per month, which probably isn't
| worth the business at all.
|
| I know a few people who use Hetzner, smaller EU registered
| companies, zero issues. Also extending limits is just one click
| and gets approved after a few minutes.
|
| And I totally get why they have to be strict. Blocked IPs are
| becoming an epidemic, I stopped using Digital Ocean, because I
| always got bad IPs, that were blocked everywhere. Also Hetzner
| is suffering from that. People are renting servers for little
| money and do bad things with the 20 TB traffic they get.
| Sebguer wrote:
| Were you using your real information when you signed up? Were
| you using a disposable / privacy-first credit card? Did you try
| to obscure your name or register from a VPN? You're very upset
| at them accusing you of abuse or fraud, but you haven't
| actually made it clear whether any of the signals you provided
| them when signing up were aligned with what they'd usually see
| from abusive or fraudulent users.
| linsomniac wrote:
| This was between 2000-2010, but when I ran a linux
| consulting+hosting business our "provision a VPS with a credit
| card" was where we experienced the largest amount of fraud, by
| probably 100x. Certainly well over 10x. Might be why Hetzner
| was touchy?
| mattl wrote:
| Were you on a VPN or Tor at the time?
| tomr75 wrote:
| OVH did the same thing to me...
| mort96 wrote:
| You're leaving out a crucial detail: did they just assume your
| real information was incorrect because the name is unusual or
| something, or did you actually provide incorrect information?
| acheong08 wrote:
| I've had the exact thing happen to me. Real information they
| deemed fake for whatever reason.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| don't use a gmail account
| indulona wrote:
| same. fuck 'em. they are not even that cheap to begin with.
| they used to be, not today.
| cjaackie wrote:
| It's kind of not the brightest to both raise prices and reduce
| services at the same time, who's in charge over there? Maybe I'm
| missing something ?
| StressedDev wrote:
| What if their choice was either raise prices or lose money?
| consumer451 wrote:
| Is anyone old enough to remember 1and1? Similar arc?
| dindresto wrote:
| They still exist, called ionos now: https://www.ionos.com/
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yes, I should have been more clear. It was another Germany?
| based provider that gave excellent, even free prices... until
| they didn't.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Maybe I'm too young to remember the good times, but to me 1and1
| were just the European GoDaddy. Mostly targeting small
| businesses who didn't know any better and ripping them off with
| bad services at inflated prices, through a lot of well targeted
| marketing. Selling things like email with a 250MB inbox and 2MB
| attachment limit far beyond the time when that was a reasonable
| offering, and at a far higher price than that was worth (being
| worth roughly zero).
| consumer451 wrote:
| They started with free .com registration.
|
| They grew their business with this offer, and then
| degenerated into what you described.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 1and1 were also notorious for aggressively trying to collect
| on "debts" - more than one person I know had 1and1 send debt
| collection letters _to their parents_ over renewal fees for
| hosting plans they didn 't even want.
| themgt wrote:
| 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.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| As someone who's already using the dedicated server for a ton
| of things, I have been really grateful. But now, I have a new
| question, are they going to do this to their dedicated servers
| as well?
| dantillberg wrote:
| This change only affects VPS services in the US, and for what
| it's worth, Hetzner does not offer dedicated servers in the
| US.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I am very ignorant here, so my apologies, but...
|
| When someone runs a dedicated server these days, does this
| mean a one-off linux install? Or is this more likely to be a
| docker install so that it's portable?
| fabian2k wrote:
| For Hetzner you rent actual physical servers. There is
| nothing virtualized there, it's real hardware without
| abstractions.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thanks, I guess what I meant to ask is that is it normal
| for people to virtualize their own dedicated server these
| days by default?
|
| Would this be a best practice to avoid hosting vendor
| lock-in?
| Filligree wrote:
| There's no lock-in possible. It's a bare metal Linux
| machine, you do whatever you want with it; you can
| replace it with the PC under you desk if you want.
|
| If you want to run k3s, k8s or docker, you can, but
| personally I find those too complicated. NixOS is much
| easier to deal with, and achieves the same result.
| conradfr wrote:
| Sure, I use CapRover on mine.
| ajb wrote:
| 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > 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 at max thread
| depth:
|
| btw, you can click on the time of the post, and reply
| there when there is no reply link in the main thread.
| andai wrote:
| Isn't a Docker image an OS image and a bunch of shell
| commands?
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| Talos Linux, Flatcar Container linux...
| lupire wrote:
| You can use a configuration manager like Puppet.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_(software)
| ajb wrote:
| >So there must be something in-between, to recreate a
| linux install elsewhere?
|
| There's a class of tools like chef, ansible, puppet.
|
| Or you can just package your services into debs and run a
| Debian repo to install them from, same as the base OS
|
| Possibly there's something closer to dockerfiles out
| there by now as well
|
| >btw, you can click on the time of the post, and reply
| there when there is no reply link in the main thread.
|
| Cool, thanks!
|
| Makes me puzzled about the point of concealing the reply
| links, I guess it just adds a bit of friction?
| djbusby wrote:
| It's a fire extinguisher feature; for when the thread has
| too many, too fast replies.
| Phil_Latio wrote:
| If the server hoster supports it (Hetzner apparently
| does), you can enable KVM and install a previously
| prepared image. If the server hoster & hardware supports
| it, you can login remotely to the server management
| interface (like HP iLO) and install an image this way.
|
| If you don't have above options or simply don't want to
| do it this way, you can also bootstrap via SSH. But
| instead of manually typing in shell commands, you will
| automate it in some way with custom scripts and/or tools
| like Ansible.
| 0xFEE1DEAD wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| Imagine you'd set up your own server at home.
|
| You'd buy a computer, plug an install USB drive in, and
| install ubuntu.
|
| Then you'd connect to it via SSH, configure it, maybe
| install docker and set up your docker containers, etc.
|
| A dedicated server is very similar.
|
| The server is sitting in a datacenter at hetzner, and you
| usually install an OS with a button in the management UI,
| sure.
|
| But everything afterwards is the same. You just connect
| via SSH, install docker or k8s and your services, maybe
| an nginx, etc.
|
| You also have an option to request KVM access. That
| allows you to control the server as if you had connected
| a keyboard and monitor to it. You can even enter the BIOS
| to diagnose issues, if you'd like.
|
| Personally I've got an install script that automates
| everything and sets up kubernetes and automated encrypted
| backups. Then I just deploy everything else with k8s.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| 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
| now.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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?
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| The performance impact seems completely unjustified for
| most of the things people do with a personal machine
| however.
| consumer451 wrote:
| What is the performance impact? Going one page into
| Google results, I found this paper. Is there a better
| reference?
|
| > At light workload levels, the native host performs
| better than Docker. However, as the workload increases,
| both Docker and the native host show similar performance,
| with the difference getting smaller
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376557310_Compar
| ati...
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > What is the performance impact?
|
| DNAT, layered file system access, likely duplication of
| libraries if you don't pay much attention to your
| containers.
| sneak wrote:
| The performance impact is approximately zero.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| No, I wouldn't have started differently and I like the
| performance and the dedicated hardware I get for the
| money I spend. I have a custom backup solution that will
| upload daily backups of all my data to remote drives and
| I should be able to restore the setup on another machine
| without much problem.
| BrutalCoding wrote:
| Yeah, it's a one-off install. In my case, I did Proxmox[1]
| for a while with VM's and LXC's, with some of my VM's and
| unprivileged LXC's running Docker (compose) too because it
| made the installation of said software easier. It's great,
| but I'm moving over to switch to Debian with Incus[2]
| instead of Proxmox. Just for fun mostly.
|
| [1] https://www.proxmox.com/en/ [2]
| https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/introduction/
| ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
| It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2
| followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it
| because it is still damn cheap!"
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Wait what? Did they actually raise the hotdog price?
|
| I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad
| times to come.
| kadoban wrote:
| Costco hotdogs have been underpriced for decades. It's an
| intentional choice, a loss leader. It raising would be
| mostly meaningless.
|
| But no, last I looked a week ago or so it was still the
| same price.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's a warmed hot dog, a bun, some self-serve condiments,
| and it's served by people who can do hundreds of them an
| hour.
|
| $1.50 might very well cover the cost, but even if it's a
| loss leader then it's entirely negligible.
|
| The mythology around the hot dog price makes people think
| they're getting a screaming deal, though. It's perfect
| marketing material.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| It's not a loss leader. They still make a profit on the
| combo because the ingredients are cheap and it takes
| almost no labor to prepare on a per-dog basis.
|
| And 1.50 is cheap _now_ but was relatively expensive when
| the combo launched in 1985 (for comparison, a Big Mac
| combo with fries and a drink was 2.59, a KFC combo was
| around $3).
| BrutalCoding wrote:
| I remember reading something about the Costco hot dog story,
| quite funny IMO, here's what I just found from 2018: "I came
| to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, 'Jim, we can't sell this
| hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.' And
| he said, 'If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you.
| Figure it out.' That's all I really needed. By the way, if
| you raised (the price) to $1.75, it would not be that big of
| a deal. People would still buy (it). But it's the mindset
| that when you think of Costco, you think of the $1.50 hot dog
| (and soda)." [1].
|
| Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot
| dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from
| 2024: "'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also
| want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip
| said." [2].
|
| Sources:
|
| [1] https://www.425business.com/news/costco-ceo-craig-
| jelinek-on...
|
| [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/05/31/
| cos...
| Aurornis wrote:
| These stories are marketing mythology.
|
| Think about. Imagine they sell 100 hot dogs per hour. A
| $0.25 difference means $25/hr in a store doing many orders
| of magnitude more revenue each hour.
|
| It's nothing. The way they play it up in the media gets a
| lot of attention and builds goodwill, but it's entirely
| meaningless to their bottom line.
|
| It's amazing that people eat these stories up, though. I've
| heard so many people repeating this story as if it's some
| amazing secret.
| Moru wrote:
| It's also Free Marketing worldwide. Can't compete with
| that price.
| immibis wrote:
| When the price does increase, you'll know that there's a
| new CEO who's lost all connection to reality (in the same
| way that always happens when you put a person in front of
| an abstraction without obvious leaks).
| fastily wrote:
| 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
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I've only ever been on OVH and was surprised to discover a
| few years ago that bandwidth is not only unlimited but also
| costly at most other hosting companies (including cloud
| ones).
| silisili wrote:
| OVH is the most set and forget experience I've ever had. They
| email me maintenance notices 3 or 4x a year, but I don't
| think I've ever had any downtime. It just stays happily
| humming along for years. I think I pay something like 60 a
| year for it.
| markvdb wrote:
| 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 cash.
|
| Also, do search for OVH SBG2 should you have missed that.
| tyingq wrote:
| They can be terrible. But it is dirt cheap. So if you use
| their stuff in a way that you can recover somewhere else if
| they have issues, you save a lot.
|
| As you mentioned I would stay away from them for things
| like domain hosting. Just use them for cheap compute, etc.
| rapind wrote:
| Would you recommend vultr for dedicated metal? I'm lazily
| shopping around for a decent dedicated metal setup, but I
| need something reasonably reliable.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Hetzner and Ovh are very reliable unless you need to
| reach to support.
| mst wrote:
| I keep my whois and NS entries elsewhere and my
| nameservers sufficiently distributed that I find the risk
| acceptable, but both hetzner and ovh are firmly in the "I
| have always felt I got a very cost effective 'exactly
| what I paid for' - and in the case of my rare
| interactions with their support more than I'd hoped for"
| category for me.
|
| Neither has ever caused me a problem that didn't feel
| like "potentially having this level of problem
| occasionally is entirely in keeping with how little I'm
| paying" basically.
| tredre3 wrote:
| OVH's infrastructure is absolutely very reliable.
|
| The pain begins when you need support. Just like you, I
| have lost a lot of sleep over domains held hostage by their
| incompetence (for almost a year in one instance). Lesson
| learned, never use OVH for domains.
|
| The support for their dedicated servers is just as bad,
| mind you, but short of a hardware failure you really don't
| need them. I have several years of uptime on all my current
| services.
|
| So for personal projects their vps/dedicated is still a
| fantastic value.
| jsheard wrote:
| > OVH's infrastructure is absolutely very reliable.
|
| Well except that time one of their datacenters burned
| down, likely due to insufficient fire suppression, and
| the data backups were also lost because they kept them in
| the same building as the originals.
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-
| ordered-...
|
| _These reports criticize OVHcloud for having no fire
| prevention system and no power cut-off on the site, for
| using wooden floors, and for a free-cooling design that
| created airflows that spread the fire. The reports also
| say that water was detected near electrical systems
| before the fire broke out._
|
| It takes quite a while to regain trust after shitting the
| bed _that_ badly.
| ggeorgovassilis wrote:
| > data backups were also lost because they kept them in
| the same building as the originals.
|
| I asked that question Hetzner support and they admitted
| doing the same
| jsheard wrote:
| Better to be honest about having weak backups so users
| can plan accordingly, than to lie about how safe the data
| is and lull users into a false sense of security...
|
| _the OVH contract relating to automatic backup
| stipulates that a backup of the VPS server is scheduled
| daily, exported, and then replicated three times before
| being available in the customer space, and that the
| storage space allocated to the 'back-up option is
| physically isolated from the infrastructure in which the
| VPS server is set up.'_
| fl0id wrote:
| Yeah,just hope you never have to interact with support
| dabedee wrote:
| 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.
| codexon wrote:
| 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.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 they eat those costs for you?
|
| I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history:
|
| > it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if
| they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd
| cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of
| 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for
| them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need
| to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then
|
| > I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised
| with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying
| "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection
| advertised to be capable of 500mbpsx24h = 5.4TB/day... that's
| reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a
| 5$/month VPS
| derefr wrote:
| > is a meter attached
|
| Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to
| saturate their network switches they'll add one, to figure
| out who's disrupting everyone else's QoS.
| derefr wrote:
| Forgot to mention, OVH makes the current topology and
| traffic saturation of their network switches public:
| http://weathermap.ovh.net/
|
| (I _think_ they mostly do this so that customers can see
| and verify that any DC-level peering relationships, or
| per-customer site peering contracts [a.k.a. "OVHCloud
| Connect"] are being taken advantage of to flow the
| customer's traffic. But it's convenient for other things,
| too.)
| matt-p wrote:
| > 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.
| saurik wrote:
| 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 more than the average.
|
| Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already
| being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an
| ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average
| user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either
| has to raise rates _for everyone_ or they have to start
| claiming _some_ uses of bandwidth are "egregious".
|
| The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user
| from paying even more than the too much you are already
| charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users),
| you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price
| discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes
| out the window :/.
|
| The real reason any of this works is just that people in
| fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time,
| and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from
| all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not
| only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS
| than they often do today, but everyone would be paying
| little enough that this idea that it is a big customer
| "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or
| water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over
| sudden utility overages.
| ghssds wrote:
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| This is only relevant because the cost of bandwidth is
| excessively high--much higher than it should be--and so
| people essentially need to pay for this gouging-
| insurance.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| This is a for profit business not a limited common
| ressource being shared.
|
| What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not
| low usage users subsidising high usage users, it's OVH
| margins. Nobody is being subsidised. Low usage users just
| make OVH more money than high usage users. OVH doesn't
| mind because per user costs are actually low and they are
| already competitive at that price without adding more
| complexity to their product mix. Users which would lead
| to an actual loss are rate limited.
| immibis wrote:
| If you pay $5 and use $100 of bandwidth costs, you are in
| fact being subsidized by other users, not by margins. We
| don't know what OVH pays for bandwidth though.
| michaelt wrote:
| If I order some shoes from Amazon, I find them
| uncomfortable, and I return them for a full refund
| causing Amazon to incur a loss - have I been "subsidised"
| by other customers?
|
| Personally I would say if Amazon makes a profit selling
| you a book and makes a loss shipping me some shoes which
| I return, the loss was paid by Amazon, not by you.
| wang_li wrote:
| Yet book prices will be adjusted so, on net, Amazon does
| not lose money.
| Aachen wrote:
| The comparison is more apt if you gained something
| (because the bandwidth user gets a product out of it),
| say by having worn the shoes for a day and doing this
| every day so you get free shoes for life. Then, yes, it's
| pretty clear the paying customers are the ones footing
| your bill
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| But nobody can do that. OVH doesn't let you be a large
| net negative.
|
| What happens is roughly that:
|
| - You are costing 1$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 4$.
| They are happy. Nobody offers you a cheaper alternative
| so you are stuck paying 5$ anyway.
|
| - You are costing 4$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 1$.
| They are happy as marginal costs are low anyway.
|
| - You are costing more than 5$. OVH severely rate limit
| your bandwidth to cut their costs and wait for you to
| leave because the service is now useless to you.
| saurik wrote:
| > What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not
| low usage users subsidising high usage users, it's OVH
| margins.
|
| I did not miss this, and it was part of my point: the
| only reason this makes any sense at all is because these
| providers are ripping people off on bandwidth, which is
| how they have a margin so large that they feel a need to
| hide it from people under this kind of ridiculous pricing
| abnormality.
|
| What is awkward is just accepting that and helping to
| make it worse by advocating for making it easier to kind
| of hide that fact: bandwidth is a commodity product, and
| these pricing games aren't pro-consumer because they
| somehow help people not have to worry about one month
| getting ripped off _too much_... they are _anti-consumer_
| because they enable the perpetuation of the state of
| affairs wherein people get ripped off in the first place.
|
| The bandwidth providers know this, but they--of course ;P
| --like their excessive margins... but, if you just
| stopped claiming this was pro-consumer and realized what
| was actually going on here, the idea that a margin so
| excessive as to be able to essentially make the usage for
| the median user _irrelevant_ should indicate a nigh-unto-
| ridiculous level of market distortion.
|
| Like, we shouldn't sit around and just tolerate these
| margins. And that this particular pricing trick helps
| make these margins a bit more stomached by people really
| sucks! And in some sense I get it that it _does_ make it
| easier to stomach... but... only because I think people
| are just buying into the idea that this must be a
| reasonable price :(.
|
| And--even then--it doesn't fix the other problem I talked
| about (which I explicitly hedged as being in the world
| where the price wasn't set up to gouge everyone): when
| Facetime came out, it overnight was going to cause
| everyone with an iPhone to suddenly need more bandwidth,
| and so network providers temporarily needed to ban it or
| charge more for it; we see the same thing with the step
| up to video streaming services from basic web browsing,
| leading to providers feeling a need to zero-rate.
|
| The reality is that bandwidth IS a limited common
| resource being shared _at that provider_ --the same as
| any other product where the price isn't being distorted:
| this is the whole reason we use markets for this stuff in
| the first place--and the pricing of it at different
| providers _should_ encounter market forces to drive it
| down closer to cost... except we are trapped in a local
| minimum here by people who refuse to understand that
| unlimited schemes cost more, not less.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| You don't actually tolerate high seller margins. Hosting
| is a competitive market.
|
| If there was significant gains to be made by being more
| aggressive on the low end of the market, providers would
| already be doing it (and they are - OVH 5$ offer is quite
| aggressive). There is a reason nobody actually offers a
| better deal.
| matt-p wrote:
| 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".
| rendaw wrote:
| > 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.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| 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 port costs only, no marginal costs), and other
| destinations are not (marginal costs associated with
| transit supplier fees).
|
| The billing model consumers want is a simple BW used
| calculation, without facing the reality that if they
| consume their entire BW allowance as quickly as possible,
| it incurs order of magnitude higher costs than if they
| consume it at a trickle over the whole month.
| matt-p wrote:
| kind of true except if you've got 1000's of customers it
| all evens out and your traffic profile is actually quite
| smooth if you've got say 6 X 100G transits, 4 X 100G IXP
| ports and 5 X 100G PNIs then the impact of an individual
| 1G customer is not even noticeable, honestly. We can work
| to 1Mbps 95%ile being about 250GB of total transfer at
| scale.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| I completely agree. The product being sold has only a
| loose connection to the cost incurred by the provider.
| This is why the product being sold is being sold in a
| vague / loose-ish way, because for the overwhelming
| majority of customers, the product being sold can be sold
| for a profit.
| rendaw wrote:
| 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
| oarsinsync wrote:
| It's worth going back to the start of this thread and
| seeing that this all started with someone complaining
| that their provider had reduced the BW allowance and
| wanting somewhere with more generous allowances. When the
| provider sells things for what it actually costs, the
| customer gets upset and looks for someone selling a
| subsidised product in a misleading way. Leading to other
| people getting upset about the mislead. Those people
| should go to the original provider, who is doing exactly
| what they asked for!
| chipdart wrote:
| > 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 performance
| indicators they are contractually obligated to meet.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > 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 full speed at the
| most peak time for bandwidth utilisation, for 37 hours in
| a month, and not at all outside of that, assuming 20
| cents a megabit with 95th percentile billing, the costs
| you've incurred to your provider are $200. Also it
| doesn't matter at all what you do after those 37 hours,
| the costs to the provider are the same. You doing 300TB
| in a month costs the same as you doing 16TB, if you do
| the 16TB the 'wrong' way.)
| matt-p wrote:
| 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).
| oarsinsync wrote:
| I completely agree. The product being sold has only a
| loose connection to the cost incurred by the provider.
| This is why the product being sold is being sold in a
| vague / loose-ish way, because for the overwhelming
| majority of customers, the product being sold can be sold
| for a profit.
| Aachen wrote:
| > > 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 every
| two-year period; we'll send you a notification email
| whenever this happens so you're not caught by surprise").
| If they don't want to be flexible, they can mention the
| hard limit that they are going to enforce regardless of
| whether they call it unlimited without asterisk. Either
| way, the buyer would know what they can actually use and
| doesn't have to guess
| whatio wrote:
| "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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| whatio wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| As long as their their wood floor datacenter and your backup
| in the same location does not burn down
|
| ,,... data center had wooden ceilings, no extinguisher, and
| no power cut-out"
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-
| rep...
| jitbit wrote:
| I wouldn't say "affordable". Looking at their pricing page
| right now. A US-based 64GB RAM cloud server in OVH - $539
|
| AWS is $220 (us-east, r6a.2xlarge instance, 1yr reserved)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| If you reserve in AWS for a year, you might as well get a
| dedicated Hetzner server:
|
| 70 EUR for 64 GB with 8c/16t, 1 TB local NVMe
|
| 123 EUR for 128 GB with 16c/32t, 2 TB local NVMe
| mst wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| DataPacket, ReliableSite, HiVelocity, and FDCServers among
| others have great bandwidth prices.
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| Can vouch for HiVelocity under the previous owners anyway,
| not sure what's going on over there now. My companies launch
| was bandwidth and compute intensive and they handled it well.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Shout-out to Microtronixdc, my colocation provider. For their
| $55/month/U colocation package, they provide unmetered gigabit
| for no additional cost.
|
| https://microtronixdc.com/
| Aachen wrote:
| I see terms for hosting and domain registration and managed
| databases, but not colocation. Do you know if they really not
| care if you actually use that connection to the stated
| allowance?
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| https://microtronixdc.com/products/colocation
|
| Their big selling point is that they truly provide
| unmetered connections.
| shlomo_z wrote:
| Bandwidth for these providers is super cheap. The main cost
| is power consumption.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Their option to colocate a Raspberry Pi (or similar form
| factor) for $5/month is also interesting as a VPN exit node.
| diggan wrote:
| Based on their broad "Acceptable Use Policy"
| (https://microtronixdc.com/acceptable-use-policy), I'd
| wager a guess they'll find a reason to shut that down.
| andix wrote:
| Is it an option for you to just move the servers to one of
| Hetzner's Europe location? I guess a lot of high bandwidth
| applications don't require low latency.
| S0y wrote:
| >multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great
|
| As someone with the exact same setup, thank you for
| strengthening my confirmation bias.
| arcastroe wrote:
| 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.
| lysp wrote:
| This is what I also want to do.
|
| How are you handling storage? That is the only issue I'm
| struggling with for a small 3-node deployment.
| arend321 wrote:
| That's indeed the pain point. Distributing a stateless app
| is relatively easy. Distributing the shared file system and
| database over a remote, higher latency, cross-cloud setup
| is hard.
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| I run everything on Longhorn, including databases. Not the
| highest iops but definitely worth the hit for the easy of
| migrating.
| 0xblinq wrote:
| > this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s
|
| As long as you don't factor in the cost of the effort to make
| that work as seamless as it sounds.
| srockets wrote:
| 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.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The OVH Eco-line (Kimsufi, So You Start..) are incredibly good
| and affordable. I have a few beefy servers, which I use to
| create my own VPS service on top of Proxmox. I'm not a sysadm
| and it's still simple to setup and maintain.
|
| Eco is clever, because they reuse good hardware pieces to
| assemble new servers, instead of throwing out as garbage...
|
| Have been a very happy user with several servers for quite some
| time.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| cchance wrote:
| Thats not a bad overage price, but then again cutting from 20
| to 1 while raising prices seems fucking insane
| mobeigi wrote:
| To be fair their pre-change allowances were insanely generous.
| JSDevOps wrote:
| Used Linode for years. Brilliant service. Not sure how the Akamai
| takeover will pan out.
|
| Anyone else looking to migrate. https://www.serverhunter.com/
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Well the Akamai takeover was 2 years ago, so fairly certain
| whatever you have now is how it ended up panning out.
|
| I did panic a bit when it happened but my Linode just keeps
| working so I'm not unhappy.
| JSDevOps wrote:
| Was it two years ago?? I could have sworn it was less than a
| year ago. Anyway yeah I'm happy with Linode
| acaloiar wrote:
| Ironically one of the reasons I abandoned Linode for Hetzner
| was because I assumed Akamai would ruin it. I still have stuff
| on Linode and I don't think Akamai ruined it.
|
| With that said, Hetzner's prices are still cheaper and I've
| never had issues with their service, but I feel gaslit by this
| announcement.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| As an age-old Linode customer from the UML days, I'd say that
| Akamai has done a good job with it. I've had nothing to
| complain about.
| keyle wrote:
| As a long term linode user, I think the enshittification is
| well underway :(
| beefnugs wrote:
| They specifically mention tarifs, maybe its political. Can't
| expect that kind of thing to get thrown around without
| international response.
| TZubiri wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US
| tariffs.
|
| "I've been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they've made a
| feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of
| "fairness"."
|
| Hetzner is a company know for it's precise pricing structure. An
| increase in prices would be correlated to an increase in costs,
| and in fact the next paragraph Hetzner writes:
|
| "With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for
| our customers around the world as fair as possible "
|
| Bottom line, the US imposes tariffs, this increases the prices of
| imported products, of which Hertzner is one, (Servers from
| Europe)
|
| How can you write an entire article to complain about a price
| increase and not see that it was actually your country that
| increased the price.
| fabian2k wrote:
| They're not importing the VMs from Europe. And there are no new
| tariffs yet, inauguration is in January so there are only
| various announcements so far.
|
| They're using tariff to mean price, which is an unusual choice
| and likely because it was written by someone from Germany. This
| would not necessarily sound out of place to a German speaker as
| "Tarife" is a common way to describe differently priced plans
| for any kind of service.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| It's British English. Tariff is used to mean import duties,
| business prices (e.g. "phone tariff") and also prison
| sentences (e.g. "whole life tariff").
|
| Though given the political context, it would probably have
| made sense to use a different word.
| lxgr wrote:
| It's most likely imprecise wording due to a linguistic
| false friend from German (Hetzner is a German company); see
| also my other comment.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| It's not a false friend, it is the same word.
|
| Not only do they share an etymology (the word "tariff" in
| English and "tarif" in German both come from the same
| Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing. It's
| also used in a bunch of other European languages in
| essentially the same way, with either a similar or
| identical spelling.
|
| It's only US English where some of the meanings that are
| still common elsewhere are no longer used. It's actually
| kind of amusing that Americans would struggle to
| understand the meaning of an English word, but a French
| or Italian speaker would understand it. I wonder if there
| are any other words like this.
| lxgr wrote:
| Having the same etymology and even having the exact same
| spelling in two languages does not disqualify a word from
| being a false friend at all!
|
| Take "gift", for example: "Gift" means "poison" in
| German, despite both the English and German word deriving
| from the same Proto-Germanic root, meaning "to give".
|
| > (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German
| both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the
| exact same thing
|
| In this very thread you can find a pretty good
| counterexample to that proposition, at least in American
| English.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I said same etymology AND same meaning. They are the same
| word, not false friends.
|
| US English may have dropped that meaning, but British
| English still uses it in this way, as do many Europeans
| when they speak English. It's a correct translation.
| lxgr wrote:
| This is an announcement targeted at US customers. One
| could assume that at least some of these might assume the
| American English sense of the word.
| lxgr wrote:
| "Tarif" indeed roughly translates to "plan" in this context
| and can be used for all kinds of plans/rates/tariffs, not
| just the import duty kind.
| TZubiri wrote:
| No new tariffs yet. My bad. Misread
| okr wrote:
| Because of announcements of tariffs?
| lupire wrote:
| I hope this experience teaches you to be more polite and open-
| minded even when you think you know what you are talking about.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Yeah. Being wrong is always humbling.
|
| That said, sometimes I'm right so I find a balance in the
| upswings and downswings of confidence
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Cool: then maybe they can precisely explain the full breakdown
| of these changes instead of hiding behind a word that explains
| nothing.
| yesbut wrote:
| Probably more likely has something to do with increased energy
| costs.
| preisschild wrote:
| Pretty sure VA/US energy prices are a lot cheaper than German
| ones.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think it wouldn't be very relevant. A surge in US energy
| prices would be sufficient to cause a rise in US compute
| prices.
|
| I think the US has been scaling compute for both AI and
| mining the last year, so it makes sense
| animex wrote:
| Sorry, is Hetzner a company from Canada, China, or Mexico? Are
| digital goods & services indicated to be under tariff as well?
| TZubiri wrote:
| Ah my bad. Tariffs not implemented yet, and restricted to
| those areas. Might have been a bad choice of word by hetzner
| wqaatwt wrote:
| How do you tax internet traffic?
|
| > US imposes tariffs
|
| That didn't happen yet and isn't even 100% guaranteed to
| happen. So maybe it would be reasonable to wait?
|
| Also what makes you think they are shipping their servers from
| Europe? How is them being an European company even relevant?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yes this hit me. We use a ton of traffic. Any alternatives?
| Although the pricing isn't too bad even with the increase, nice
| to have backups.
| dboreham wrote:
| We use Hivelocity. Not exactly the same service (bare metal).
| getcrunk wrote:
| Good for them! Continue to be profitable and competitive so I can
| keep using them 20 years from now when they still decimate big
| cloud at 100x pricing or big cloud value add layer companies at
| 200x pricing
| hoechst wrote:
| _I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know
| I'm over-provisioned; that's not the point)._
|
| Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't
| actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).
|
| People probably spam-provisioned cheap CPX boxes to get cheap
| bandwidth.
|
| Also, complaining about a "large 27.52% price increase" is kind
| of absurd when the absolute value of the increase is just under
| 2EUR.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't
| actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).
|
| That seems backwards? They're not hogging anything, they're
| paying for network they're not using; this is _excellent_ for
| Hetzner.
| lincon127 wrote:
| Checks out
| anacrolix wrote:
| Hetzner suck. So do Vultr (OVH?). People learn about the bad
| things cloud providers do but still go crawling back
| danpalmer wrote:
| The bandwidth reductions look like they bring the US in line with
| Singapore, i.e. typically 20TB of bandwidth in the EU and 1TB in
| Singapore, US moving from 20 to 1.
|
| I wonder if their cost base has changed significantly. Singapore
| having just 1TB included makes sense because in Singapore traffic
| is charged differently and costs a huge amount for all companies.
| I wonder if the colo provider for Hetzner in the US has screwed
| them over in some way.
| shrubble wrote:
| My take on this is that there's a price increase on power
| consumption and Hetzner decided to bump the prices now; perhaps
| they are facing a power price increase in January 2025. Do
| Ashburn or Hillsboro publish their power prices and have they
| increased in the past year?
| thisiscrazy2k wrote:
| I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of
| bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts
| that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for
| the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the
| streets to lay cable.
|
| So is bandwidth going to the cable?
|
| I am asking that because I never quite understood 3g/4g/5g costs.
| In my youth it was $0.10US for a text message. Now in my country,
| no one would pay to send a standard text. It's free even on PAYG.
|
| I'd imagine there is similarity?
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| On a Hetzner level, you don't quite know, as bandwidth deals
| between large hosting companies and IP transit providers like
| Hurricane Electric, Cogent, Zayo, etc, are typically protected
| by non-disclosure agreements.
|
| Unless you are a big enough fish (FAANG size) in the internet
| pond to do free peering with all the big boys, the contract
| with be negotiated for a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth
| (specified in megabits or gigabits per second), not like the
| terabyte like in the consumer LTE context.
| Phil_Latio wrote:
| Cloud providers make their money with the high bandwith costs.
| I can get 10 gbit/s line for ~$3,000 a month with a dedicated
| server. That's 3 PB of data and according to AWS cloudfront
| calculator it would cost ~$90,000 with them...
|
| So yeah, people get ripped off, just like with SMS in the past.
| Most don't know this or think it's fine, because "cloud" has
| benefits that justify the costs in the end ("I don't have to
| pay for sys admin!").
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| My first smartphone had a data plan which cost 1024EUR/Go. And
| I was happy about how cheap it was (it got more expensive
| shortly after).
|
| Cellular towers aren't cheap: you need to install quite a lot
| of them, especially in big cities!
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have been a fan of Hetzner for many years. $1/terabyte overage
| charges seems reasonable.
|
| I live in Arizona, but have always rented Hetzner servers or VPNs
| in Germany. I imagine the service is much the same using servers
| in the USA?
| tribby wrote:
| hetzner is really known for its german bandwidth prices, a change
| in the US is fairly insignificant IMO. for most applications you
| could just put a free CDN in front of the cheaper german service
| to reach the US
| spl757 wrote:
| If you are procrastinator, Hetzner is not for you.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Hetzner has never really competed well in the US market and I
| often find Lightsail, OVH, and Digital Ocean cover my hosting
| needs pretty well.
|
| For what it is worth, I have also have used 2nd-hand resellers
| like SoYouStart (OVH). You get what you pay for, but ballin on a
| budget is totally possible.
|
| Back in the day I used 1&1, I wonder how they are faring these
| days. I am sure there are dozens of other viable providers, you
| just need to shop around.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I never thought the 20TB of bandwidth was going to last forever.
| I guess here we are.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| While all the guesswork ? They explain clearly why this is
| happening. And it seems fair.
|
| "With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for
| our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that,
| we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe,
| Singapore, and the USA. 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. The new prices will give our customers the
| best possible price for the resources they use."
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| It doesn't seem so fair if you didn't know that in advance. I
| don't do research on what actual costs a provider I sign up
| with has, and whether a product might be subsidized in some
| way. If I relied on those 20TB a month I now got a 100 to 400%
| price increase.
|
| I really like hetzner and their service quality, but that does
| leave a bad taste... I seems like they badly miscalculated.
| bashy wrote:
| If the location (USA) is key, then fair enough but if not,
| just buy one of their dedicated servers and get unlimited[1]
| traffic.
|
| Only outgoing external traffic is counted.
|
| [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
| HelloNurse wrote:
| They _are_ telling in advance: changes are effective from
| February for old contracts.
| mafuy wrote:
| Well, a month ago they did not know that insane tariffs are
| going to exist suddenly. They are telling this pretty much as
| soon as they could.
| christophilus wrote:
| There are no tariffs yet until January, and they don't
| apply to Germany, anyway. This has nothing to do with
| tariffs.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| This increase only affects the US regions, so it very
| likely is in preparation for additional tariffs.
| TekMol wrote:
| Does Hetzner provide a way to limit how much traffic a cloud
| server can use?
|
| I'm always afraid to use paid services to host my hobby projects,
| because what happens when some malicious or stupid actor with
| huge bandwith hotlinks an image from my site or downloads it in a
| loop?
|
| What would be perfect would be a way to set an upper limit of say
| 100 TB per month after which the cloud server does not accept
| outbound traffic anymore and I get an email.
|
| Or is the network speed already enough of a protection? Their
| site says it is a 1GB connection. That should limit the traffic
| to 300TB per month? If so, that would also be fine with me.
| betimsl wrote:
| I don't know why people praise Hetzner. They're not as good.
| indulona wrote:
| charging for bandwidth is theft in the first place. pure scam.
| sure, companies that built the infrastructure had to get heir
| money back, but that was in the past. they are now just milking
| their position where very few companies in the whole world can
| compete. not even patents are exclusive for ever. yet these
| companies treat their cables like they are a goose laying golden
| eggs now and for ever. this is one thing where governments should
| step in.
| urda wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| fusl wrote:
| Their email makes sense, except it doesn't. As someone who
| considers themselves a low traffic usage customer, running
| hundreds of Hetzner Cloud servers - each averaging less than 10GB
| of data transfer, with only a few servers reaching the previously
| included 50-60TB/month - I'm now facing an overall increase in
| costs.
|
| Not only are the per-server prices higher, but the drastic cut in
| included bandwidth (without a corresponding option for bandwidth
| pooling) means I'll be paying significantly more despite my usage
| being well within "low traffic" by their standards. It's
| frustrating that Hetzner never introduced a bandwidth pooling
| option for customers where it would make sense, especially in
| scenarios like mine where usage is highly imbalanced across
| servers.
|
| At this point, Vultr and Linode are starting to make a lot more
| sense, even with their more expensive traffic pricing, since both
| providers offer traffic pooling. This feature would have
| significantly softened the blow of Hetzner's pricing changes, but
| instead, they're pushing costs onto loyal customers who don't fit
| neatly into their new model.
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