Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic

lowendtalk.com

174 pointsworldofmatthew301 comments

To hit 250TB in a month, the person would need to do 809Mbps (assuming a 30 day month). I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better.

That would be $16,691 worth of transfer from AWS (US East pricing for 250TB to the internet). I'm not arguing that AWS isn't overcharging, just putting up a comparison. Even at $0.01/GB, that would be $2,560.

They should probably just say 50TB with overages at $0.005/GB or something like that. They are offering 20TB on their cloud servers so 50TB on the dedicated seems reasonable and $0.005/GB for overages is less than you'll get almost anywhere else while still probably enough for Hetzner to make a profit.

They did have traffic caps a while back but explicitly abolished them.

Yep, it was 20TB from what I recall.

AWS pricing is a rip-off.

... and their systems are designed to make controlling it difficult to impossible while locking people in to their ecosystem.

Free/cheap to get in, expensive to get out. Your data is held at ransom to some degree.

How are their systems designed to make controlling cost difficult? I've found it exceptionally easy to find places where things are suboptimal and it's always quite clear to me how much something will cost before I do it.

I had an engineer run up a $5k sagemaker bill because they didn't realize "stopped" was different from "terminated".

You also can't set a max billing limit (or a soft limit).

If you rent a car and it’s still in your possession but turned off they don’t stop charging you.

Well luckily it's very obvious when I still have a car in my driveway.

It's not obvious that a script got caught in a loop and decided to write up a $5000 bill overnight.

The previous post didn't say a script got caught in a loop overnight, it was that the engineer didn't understand the difference between stopped and terminated.

Even so, I don't think it is AWS's fault that buggy code was left to run unattended overnight in the example you give.

Right, it's not AWS's fault that buggy code ran overnight.

It is absolutely 100% Amazon's decision to give you little to no tooling to prevent this in many scenarios other than going to their billing department and beg for a correction.

I do not use any service that can proceed to bankrupt me for personal use for what could be considered a normal use case. At work I'd pass the issue off to my manager who'd pass it off to a rep and deal with it that way, but there is no way I want to take that responsibility on myself to correct.

AWS has a reasonable defense for charging for that - it costs them money whether you meant to run it or not.

To be fair, it'd be fantastic if there were an option to put an automatic hard stop on services once a billing threshold is reached. I seem to recall AWS explaining how to rube-goldberg something together yourself with lambdas and alerts, but if they're capable of telling me to how cobble together the feature myself with their services, surely they could offer it as a turnkey option.

That aside, I also understand that they can't actually put a hard cap, since usage is measured after the fact occurs, and by the time the system triggers a halt, more usage has likely occurred. At the very least, I'd be fine with paying $X + 1 when I set an auto-shutdown threshold to $X if that was what they had to do to implement it.

Outside of that quibble, I find the other complaints to be less reasonable.

If I rent a car, I see the pricing up front. And the pricing does not depend on how often I open the trunk or how far I turn the steering wheel.

You do see up front pricing. Please look harder, it’s there for every dimension they charge you for (instance type, network traffic, disk size, etc.).

Back to your analogy. You get charge for these other dimensions that vary when you rent a car:

- make, model

- miles driven

- toll usage

- driver’s age

- duration of rental

The more accurate analogy here for the GP is the person returned a rental car to the wrong lot and was charged additional days until they discovered their error.

Just an example: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-free-tier-bill-sho...

> They should probably just say 50TB with overages at $0.005/GB or something like that.

I fully agree. People use more and more bandwidth. It was just a question of time before someone started to use a petabyte a month. "Unlimited" makes no sense unless they are really ready to allow 100% usage of 1Gbps uplink all the time.

I think "unlimited" should just stop being used as a marketing term. Even if they were actually offering the ability to fully saturate the link indefinitely, the data is still limited by the link speed. In my opinion, the marketing is way out of alignment with the actual contracts on offer.

> It was just a question of time before someone started to use a petabyte a month

Nah, even with fully saturating the link you won't get there.

Hetzner is probably paying ~$300/mo/Gbps for their transit capacity. While I’m sure this particular account isn’t profitable for them, they’re not losing a boatload of money from it either. Hard to blame the user if they advertise it as unlimited.

at the size and scale of hetzner an individual 100Gbps IP transit circuit is considerably less costly than $30k a month.

more like 5-6k max at a major IX point.

this also ignores how much of their traffic is settlement free peering to other adjacent ISPs.

From what I remember; FDC has 100Gbit/s for $4,999/month.

fdc is not a transit provider specialist with POPs in every major global city (as measured by CAIDA ASrank size) similar to Cogent or Telia or level3, which a hosting company like hetzner might become a customer of, rather, it's a hosting company

Its their resold transit product (their 100G Dedicated Bandwidth Servers are often cheaper).

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity

Why ever not? If you sell someone something but only let them use less than 80% of it, that feels like fraud.

That's more than a feeling. It's literally bait and switch.

I see my Marianne walking away from this deal.

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

And yet, that’s not how data center bandwidth is typically sold. Weird huh?

It’s total bait and switch, and probably false advertising/fraud.

A lot of colo and DC bandwidth is sold as port speed for the connection with no guarantees at all as to sustained bitrate to any other port including egress.

Yeah, and that's better than lying about the guarantees.

Which is very different than caps and throttles!

Exactly. In my country, an "Unlimited 4G LTE" data plan costs 12 EUR. But without any "fair usage" policy that would be simply impossible. Nobody would expect to use tens of TBs per month without ever being contacted or heavily throttled.

Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits.

Obviously that's not as good marketing. Products usually look better if you lie about them to make them look better. But lying in marketing shouldn't be legal. And this shouldn't be controversial.

> Why would it be a bad thing for it to be illegal to lie? Just don't call the plan "unlimited", and have clearly stated limits.

Maybe because the limits are not fixed and completely depend on the spending of the customer? If a customer is among the top 1% of the biggest users and – at the same time – among the top 1% of the smallest spenders, that simply raises the costs of the service for everyone else. There are only three choices here: a) get rid of the customer; b) make them pay more, or c) raise the prices of unlimited plans for everyone.

What does this have to do with anything? If the user if paying for a service, they should be getting that service. If the operator is offering a service which they can't afford to offer, that's not the user's problem.

A private operator can choose to stop providing any service to any customer at any time. Especially, if it finds it to be economically unsustainable for their business.

For instance, OVH has previously terminated accounts of paying customers simply because it didn't want to do any business with people from an occupied territory[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680251

But what does that have to do with anything? Why can't operators just not lie to their customers?

Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.

Again, the limits are not fixed, and therefore cannot be clearly defined. If a customer is spending $5K / month on dedicated servers, Hetzner might earn enough from renting hardware to cover truly unlimited usage of bandwidth. If a customer is spending only $50 / month, that's a completely different case. Such a customer might simply be not valuable enough to keep.

That case possibly looks like obeying sanctions, although they have failed to explain why they think this customer is in Crimea. For example, OVH may have discovered that the Russian ISP involved was putting fake data into geoip, and if you're aware you can't just pretend you don't know.

BTW, if it was just "we don't want to do business with you any more", that depends on what your contract says. Most consumer ISP contracts allow an ISP to drop a customer for any reason without explanation.

The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits.

Let's say the provider has a 100 Gpbs upstream, 1000 clients, and offers a cheap plan where you pay for 1 Gbps with no limit. The provider obviously can't provide a sustained 1 Gbps to every client 24/7.

Now, how do you honestly advertise that? Because you can give people 1 Gbps service so long not too many clients do that at the same time. And you can tolerate people downloading 24/7 so long they don't all do it at the same time.

How much you have to crack down will depend on how close to capacity you are, and what your clients are doing.

That's a cool story. It sounds like something the marketing and sales departments should probably think pretty hard about. It's not an easy problem.

But a service with a cap also isn't unlimited.

Making a pricing structure which works for the company and is easy to understand for the customer isn't easy. Nobody said it was easy. But I don't understand how you go from that, to arguing in favor of lying to the customer.

Maybe like ADSL was originally advertised in some markets, with the contention ratio?

In your scenario, 10:1 contention ratio, "up-to" 1Gbps throughput, 1Gbps link-speed.

In the UK British Telecom originally offered 'consumer' ADSL at 50:1 and 'business' (more expensive) at 20:1 contention ratio specifically to deal with the backhaul limitations.

Probably the way they do processors, say you get N Mhz as a min that is boostable up to M Mhz.

If they advertised "you get a min of 200kbps, that could boost up to 1Gbps" that would be acceptable, as long as you actually got that 200kbps. The problem is they claim it is 1Gbps, then look at you funny if you expect 70% of what they claim.

> The argument is that there are no easily determinable limits.

But the fact that there is a limit at all, means that you can definitely display it somewhere.

Suppose you have two users, John and Jane, John is in the 1% of most valuable customers, Jane signed up last month. The data center has plenty of free capacity in June, but is closer to capacity in July.

Now suppose that each user has their own dashboard for resources.

  John:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 200 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 160 TB. Please contact customer support if you need to increase it.
  
  Jane:
    June - Your bandwidth limit is 40 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.
    July - Your bandwidth limit is 30 TB. Options to increase this limit will become available after X$ in total spend.

As a matter of fact, Hetzner already has something like that under their "Limits" section:

  Limits
  Limits are set per customer and are counted across all projects that you created. If you need more resources, just send us a request, and we are happy to adjust them for you.
  Outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 are blocked by default on all Cloud Servers. Send a request for unblocking these ports. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone.

You don't necessarily have to advertise the fact that your limits will be dependent on lots of variables and will change (though you should disclose it). What you shouldn't do is say that there are no limits, which is clearly lying. Even if the lie only becomes relevant to a very small part of the clientele who'll be affected by this, it's still lying.

Of course, that's not the world that we live in and "unlimited" offerings will be a mainstay of marketing in the industry, for the better or worse. Probably better for the org and worse for the clients. Kind of why I also hate mobile carriers being dishonest with their data plans. It's like nobody even knows what "unlimited" means.

how about saying "limit: XGB/gbit/whatever, but IF we feel like it, you might be allowed more"

So I buy a gallon of milk, but depending on how much I pay for the gallon of milk, I get some percentage of it?

It's not "unlimited", its "unlimited*". There are additional constraints that are enumerated afterwards. But for the vast majority of users, it will feel like unlimited, so it's not necessary for them to read those additional constraints

Limited shouldn't be called unlimited. That's just straightforward false advertising. But it sounds like Hertzner doesn't even have the asterisk with additional constraints.

The "asterisk" is the Terms and Conditions that you agree to when signing up for the service.

Can you enumerate these bandwidth usage constraints then?

It's not illegal because they don't cut you off but after you go above a threshold they throttle your speed instead.

I've got unlimited 4G/LTE/5G for €2/mo with reduced bandwidth after 55GB but still unlimited, and true unlimited for €5/mo without any bandwidth restrictions.

I'm proxying traffic through mobile proxies and expect nothing less than unlimited.

What herzer do amounts to false advertising when compared to the mobile traffic examples.

Where are you getting these prices?

yes please share any info possible, this will help a lot

Well that's nonsense.

Words have meanings for a reason.

The meaning of the word "unlimited" is not, in fact, "limited, but we won't tell you what the limit is — you'll get to find it out the hard way".

Whatever the terms of the "fair usage" policy are, that's what should be in the description.

Otherwise, is plain old lying and misreading — which for some reason you are OK with.

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

Except buffets do do that. Not that extreme, but if you go into a one and continue to eat for multiple hours, you’ll be kicked out despite having “unlimited food”.

And when it goes to court they usually lose. They can ban you in the future if they want, but they sold an "all you can eat" meal and are expected to provide that meal even if you're extra hungry.

Much like the Hetzner article, there's an obvious physical cap that can't be exceeded, and they're supposedly selling up to that cap.

Hetzner sell dedicated server with Unlimited and Guaranteed traffic at a 1Gbit port (As per the product pages).

> If you want guaranteed volume and throughput, sign a contract for it.

I think that what a lot of people have problems with, is the fact that Hetzner doesn't actually tell you what is okay and what isn't. Would using 70% of the link's capacity be okay? What about 60%? Or maybe 50% is where they draw the line?

Here's another host that I use, Time4VPS, which have more clear terms: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (remove affid for non-affiliate link if you don't want me to get a kickback in case anyone buys the services; I also host my blog with them)

Their servers include a guaranteed amount of bandwidth, either at 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. And should you exceed that limit, they're also clear about what will happen:

> What happens if I run out of bandwidth?

> We reduce your VPS server’s port speed 10 times until the new month starts. No worries, we won’t charge any extra fees or suspend your services.

So if I'd exceed the amount that's given to me with any of their services, my 1 Gbps link would become a 100 Mbps link, or my 100 Mbps link would become a 10 Mbps link. On a technical level, it's obviously worse than Hetzner's offering (speaking of how much data you can actually move), but the transparency is nice and I wouldn't ever have to worry about my services being suspended because they don't automatically enforce any limitations just so they'd get to claim "unlimited" in their marketing materials.

Disclaimer: I still use Hetzner personally, they're one of the more affordable platforms (pretty much the same pricing tier as Time4VPS) out there. Though it's also nice when service providers have some provisions in place to automatically introduce limits for those things that could cause problems, like the amount of bandwidth that's available to you. Or just charge you for it outright, so there are fewer unknown variables.

You appear to be projecting your experiences in your country as "the consumer world".

For example, Australia:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/06/spintel-acma-unlimited-si...

ISPs in Australia regularly sell 'unlimited' connections that aren't unlimited, and ACMA allows it. [1]

I'm surprised my own residential grade connection hasn't been flagged, given I consume over 10TB a month.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/nbn/comments/hwz7l4/abb_cancels_ser...

We live in the real world. You're right but that's not worth basing strategy on.

"We had a good team on paper. Unfortunately, the game was played on grass"

Gigabit Ethernet usually lands around 80% fully utilized due to overheads and such. That’s not fraud.

Even in a private data center, you’d typically move a workload like that to avoid disruption to neighbors.

You should try that at your local fast food place that has free unlimited refills. Drive up a tanker trunk and trying filling it up with unlimited soda.

This is a horrible analogy.

At a fast food places they advertise unlimited refills on the cup they sold you as part of the meal.

Here you are being advertised unlimited traffic on the port they sold you as part of the server.

Trying to liken using the port you are being sold as part of the server to driving up a tanker trunk to a fast food place is silly.

They are both transfer services. You either take your cup and refill at their drink fountain, or use your server to transfer data through their network. Seems like a fine analogy to me

Then presuppose that you walk up with a garbage bag, fill your cup, and dump it into the garbage bag. Rinse and repeat.

You will probably not stay in the establishment very long.

Why do we keep coming up with these bizarre ways to try and make this work?

It is the normal operating mode of an internet connected server to send traffic to the internet - often even 100% of the time! It is the normal operating mode of drinks at a restaurant to be drank by the person while there, and maybe one refill for the road.

Trying to liken "Using the 'Unlimited' 1gbps port that was advertised "to "Refilling a cup and dumping it into a garbage bag" is ludicrous.

I don't understand why people are doing mental gymnastics to defend a bad advertising practice.

> It is the normal operating mode of an internet connected server to send traffic to the internet - often even 100% of the time!

It is? I've been admining servers for a long time and I've never run one using 100% of it's upload bandwidth 100% of the time. I've never even run one at 80%. Being that near capacity means your service is about to fall over. Frankly for most services it's probably flagging.

There are plenty of workloads where 20% slack in the workload would result in massive (both relative and in absolute terms) additional costs. In these sorts of workloads, it's incredibly common to run any individual server in the fleet very close to maximum capacity. And even if any individual workload isn't, virtualization and containers letting you bin-pack servers makes it even more common.

Such as? Sure if you are operating on massive scale or have a remarkably steady load that 20% margin might be feasible, but that's the exception not the rule. Especially for a lone piece of physical hardware that can't scale up/down.

I'd be interested in an example of this, too, because I've been doing this for a while and I can't think of many--particularly in a modern, scalable environment (because Hetzner's APIs aren't great but you absolutely can scale automatically in their environment if you want to).

It is only fraud if it is intentional deception.

In this case I suspect they assumed reasonable interpretation and customer interest: No realistic hosting provider can have the capacity to have every server utilize network 100%, but despite this the customer still benefits from increasing the uplink speed.

In my opinion, their limits are perfectly reasonable, the configuration is in the interest of the customer, and what is provided seems to be a reasonable interpretation fitting with existing definitions. It is only lacking documentation or unclear policy (one rarely plans for the unlikely, and I don't think they expected this), and something that should just be resolved by their customer service department.

> It is only fraud if it is intentional deception.

Are you implying that this unintentional? That things like this are marketed without the full knowledge that such a service is impossible?

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

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

What if I offer "unlimited ice cream, up to 1 cone per day for a month", and then after you pay for a month and ask for an ice cream cone every day for three consecutive weeks, I refuse and say your demands are excessive?

Sure, I might be within my legal rights to drop you as a customer the next month, but isn't it still a scummy and misleading way to advertise my service?

This is pretty much how MoviePass went bankrupt. The unifying gist is, the business model depends on acquiring customers that don't use the advertised service. But customers are smart and want to maximize the value they receive for their money.

Eventually, you either get an ISP-like situation where everyone has caps on their "unlimited" service and there is no room to disrupt the market, or you get MoviePass.

There is not going to be a free-market solution to this problem, because no service with defined limits will be able to compete with the "unlimited" service at the same price point, and there are no consequences to simply dropping the expensive customers.

What nonsense. A 1gbps connection has a limit of traffic it can push in a month, that is the limit of their "unlimited" offer.

They are advertising that you can use 100% of your 1gbps link in a month then cutting TFA OP off at 80%.

> A 1gbps connection has a limit of traffic it can push in a month, that is the limit of their "unlimited" offer.

If your interpretation of basic words is so wildly different from the norm that you already consider "1Gbps unlimited" a contradiction then surely you would never find yourself in a contract where subtler terms are in question.

How else would you interpret "Unlimited bandwidth @1gbps"?

1gbps maxed out for a month (you know, unlimited usage of a 1gbps line) equals 330TB (give or take depending on the length of the month).

If you signed up for a service which offered 50TB of upload then they cut you off at 35TB then you would be rightly annoyed.

If you have caps on your sevrvice? Cool. Don't use the word unlimited and inform customers of those limits.

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

Yes, if that's truly what the typical customer would want. But I doubt a typical customer would want only an ice cream cone after seeing that offer. However, if you offer "unlimited* ice cream", adding in the terms and conditions that it can't exceed 1 gallon per day, and 99.9% of users don't eat over 1 gallon per day, then I think it's fair to serve only 1 gallon per day.

The actual situation here is more like: you're told you can have up to a gallon per day, but if you actually try to take a gallon every day, you're told that doing so is harming their operations, because you're taking up too much of the workers' time and forcing them to buy ingredients too frequently.

1 gallon per day is not unlimited ice cream!! It's limited to one fucking gallon per day. "English motherfucker! Do you speak it?"

that argument doesnt hold, I will give you a realworld example of why.

Some years ago I purchased a (what I thought to be) huge backpack from an ebay store. it said 200 liters. What I got, I estimate to generously be around 75 liters. (by measuring the outer dimensions)

I complained, and they refused to budge, even after I showed them photos of the measurements, and they responded with "we have sold 3597 of these backpacks and nobody else complained about the volume, you must be wrong!!!" (i dont recall exactly if it was 3597, but it was thousands, and a specific number).

Clearly most people got what they expected, a reasonably large backpack, but not a HUUGGEE backpack. Was this okay? Was it acceptable I had to argue countless times and in the end contact paypal to get my money back?

Why is it okay because its hosting services?

edit: and it wasnt just misprint on the listing, the 200L was embroided into the backpack itself, and similarly on their smaller models, with the smaller number

That's an absurd strawman.

If you really want to use this analogue, then the provider is getting upset after continuously providing 8000 gallons of ice cream every month to an individual who bought a single ice cream cone with "unlimited refills".

It's hard to respond to stuff like this. I get the attitude: "I'm due what I paid for!"

There are so many ways in our society where there's unwritten expectations. In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate. Likewise, I'd interpret it to mean that if I had a heavy month, I'd be fine.

If I'm a student paying for a dorm in college, should I be allowed to set up a mining rig pulling 10 kW and costing around $720/mo to run? Electricity is included in my dorm fee! I'm paying for it and I'm going to use it!

This is kinda why AWS nickle-and-dimes customers for every little thing - they had people who would find any area of weakness in their pricing model and go after it. I'm not even saying that people did it maliciously. Jungle Disk was a really cool idea: a mountable disk that used S3 to store the files. The problem was that it started doing loads of S3 operations. At the time, AWS didn't charge for operations and now there's this popular program doing a lot of operations compared to its storage and transfer charges.

As someone that has created SaaS software, some customer always comes along and finds an interesting use of your software. Sometimes it's a customer not really understanding the product. Other times a customer has found a weakness in the pricing model and they want to exploit it.

I get it the attitude. It's a war between you the buyer and the company selling a product to you. Personally, I'd rather have a more amicable relationship in my dealings. Yes, that means having realistic expectations about offerings including what might be marketing "puffery" (whether it meets the legal definition of puffery or not; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery). I'm not going to say that you're wrong to want 100% of the link 24/7, but then you're just talking about being in a situation where the company exercises their right to terminate your account (which you would have agreed to when signing up). Looking at Hetzner a bit more, it looks like they charge €1 per TB or $0.001/GB on their plans that have overages - 10x better than cheap places like Digital Ocean.

Yea, there's lots of places in this world where you can cause headaches for other people by using something in a way it wasn't intended that you're entitled to do - but you're going to have an unhappy time fighting for what you're due all the time. Instead, I'd rather focus on using things the way they were intended such that I don't create adversarial relationships with those I work with. Yes, in this case it would mean that I'd probably buy a few servers or just offer to pay them €200 for the extra bandwidth. Or I could fight, they could give me 30-day notice, and I could find another "unlimited" provider until they see me as a toxic customer and I start it all over again. Again, you're not wrong. You're just going to have an unhappy time trying to enforce your rights and get something better than the company expected to be giving you.

And of all the scummy things out there, Hetzner seems to be pretty decent. €0.001/GB overage on their limited plans is really cheap even compared to good deals like Linode and Digital Ocean (which charge 10x that). Their servers are really cheap. Their pricing is mostly very straightforward - maybe with this being an exception. I'll take a nebulous "it's unlimited, but don't push your luck" over what most hosting providers are offering. I could probably do 250TB for a month and they'd ignore it if it wasn't consistent. I can transfer way more than I get Linode or Digital Ocean and they'd ignore it. Maybe you just want me to say that you're right and that Hetzner is being evil and the person is due their 250TB of transfer every month, but I'd rather go through the world thinking that things are run by humans who want to do the right thing and sometimes don't anticipate all the consequences and then something like this happens - especially when the company doesn't seem to be doing evil stuff. Like, we've all seen surprise AWS bills in the tens of thousands without enormous usage. In this case, we're talking about a pretty small bill compared to the usage.

Yep, that person has the right to use that bandwidth - and Hetzner has the right to terminate a customer for any reason with 30 days notice. I'd just rather try and work with a company in a reasonable fashion if they're willing to work with me in a reasonable fashion. The alternative is becoming the customer that the company hates.

> but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate

They do not state that anywhere in their advertising or terms of service.

They are advertising 1gbps/24/7/month as implied by their "Unlimited" terminology this is a perfectly measurable value and then cutting people off if they use 80% of that limit.

While I wholeheartedly understand that they can't offer that level of service for all customers and they expect most user to not use the full rate 24/7 and price their products as such.

If I'm being sold 1tb of transfer and am cut off that 800gb that is unacceptable, that is what's happening here (give or take some gigabytes).

If this is a problem for them then they need to change their advertising or terms orservice to state their Fair Use or AUP to list these limits.

This so much.

> In this case, the unwritten expectation was that they weren't going to meter you and you didn't have to worry about overage charges, but that the 1Gbps should be thought of more as a burst rate than a 24/7 sustained rate.

Actually the written expectation was "unlimited" - without limitation. These so called "unwritten limitations" exist solely in your head, and are not suitable for companies to assume users inherently know.

IMO hetzner is missing a golden opportunity to offer a dedicated or more powerful colocated data center solution to this client. being able to service the tenants needs should be their only concern. throttling just leaves sour grapes for everyone, and might mask hetzner having capacity issues supporting their workload..cost clearly isn't the problem here.

Combining statistical multiplexing, fixed WAN bandwidth and SLAs with penalties are basically a recipe for massive losses.

> Even at $0.01/GB, that would be $2,560.

That's still overpriced by a factor of 10. Hetzner overage price for the 10G link is 1 euro / TB or about $0.001/GB. That seems pretty reasonable.

So we're really looking at something more like $250/month.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic

Hetzner still makes a good profit on that $0.001/GB.

I'm guessing a lot of that money is being reinvested into the network. At the point in time their business levels off, they can take profit.

Likely in this case, they can't upgrade their network fast enough, I'm guessing. And they don't have the funds to do it.

This would be a different story than my local cableco say. They will sell you 5TB of data for $100/mo. Or about $0.02/GB. But that money isn't going into network upgrades. And won't until they're forced to, since that's the cable company business model and has been for decades.

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity, but I also agree that stated limits are better.

There is in fact a very clearly stated limit. It's unlimited.

If you set some kinda limit, people will be trying to get close to it. Thus actually increasing overall traffic.

"Unlimited 1 Gbps" should be unlimited. Otherwise it's downright fraud to label it "unlimited".

> I personally would assume that "unlimited 1Gbps" wouldn't include using 80% of the link's capacity

I would personally assume that it would include 100% 24/7 (barring reasonable service outages). That's what "unlimited" means.

People in this thread: unlimited means what I want it to mean, and today, it means "limited". Why, that's just how the world works!

People who own dictionaries: this is a completely idiotic line of thinking. By which I mean "reasonable". Why, is there a problem?

If some large American ISP did this people would be at pitchforks. Hetzner gets a defense

Actually all cheap "unlimited" hosting is like that. Someone just noticed it on Hetzner. Next month someone else will notice it on $LARGE_AMERICAN_ISP.

Although I bet $LARGE_AMERICAN_ISP will not warn you, but just shut down your site and lock you out of your data.

AWS is overcharging badly. I wouldn't even take them seriously if you want to do something with e.g video. Charging per GB is a joke in a world where my (expensive) ISP doesn't even offer anything less than 30/30mb.

IMHO Hertzer is the only hosting company that get what business it is in. AWS makes a ton of sense if you need to rent serious iron to do OCR on 100+ GB of scans of corporate documents, you need GPU power to train your AI model, or you are a startup that needs to grow 50% a month.

If you are an established company with a normal demand model, AWS will rip you alive.

> AWS makes a ton of sense if […] you need GPU power to train your AI model,

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

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

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

So you basically read that as nobody would actually mean "unlimited" or "1Gbps".

Do you live your day-to-day telling people lies or what?

None of that behavior sounds rational to me.

I can only imagine 'what? you thought I was going to paint the ENTIRE house!'

That says more about AWS than anything. It’s not hard to get wholesale transit under $0.1/mbps 95%ile.

809Mbps costs $81/mo for a small provider.

I used to work for a visual effects studio in Los Angeles, we setup a Canadian office and wanted to do offsite backups from Canada to LA and from LA to Canada for redundancy. We found a provider who would give us dedicated unmetered 1gbps and then setup a simple rsync. It worked great, we hit 800mbps (the theoretical maximum with TCP overhead) and then 5 days later we got a call from the provider who was absolutely floored that we wanted to actually use the bandwidth we had paid for. Since we had signed a contract they were f'ed but we did come to some agreement in the end. They told us we were affecting all of their other customers.

Now that is a shitty hosting company, since you told them what you were going to do in advance and wrote a bandwidth commitment into the sales order.

I think it was a classic case of "sales person will do anything to get the deal done, including things that are harmful to their employer"!

assuming this person is paying at least $200 a month (not $40-50 like for a hetzner server) it's probably not even harmful economically.

Not sure if you mean me or the OP; for us this was a LONG time ago so if memory serves (and it might not) I think we were paying $2,000+/month.

A better way to do it is to simply prioritize traffic in order of whoever has used least traffic this month.

So if a link is congested and a packet has to be dropped, then it is dropped from whichever user has sent the most packets in the last 30 days.

The end result is light users will get great service. Heavy users will start to see congestion at busy times, but will still be able to download as much as they like, contending with other heavy users at busy times.

Actual implementation can consist of say 10 QOS queues, where each customer is assigned a queue based on their decile of traffic sent in the last 30 days. Ideally you'd do strict priority on the queues, but I actually find it works better to say each queue has 2 packets delivered for each one of the queue below. That ensures that if a low use customer has a big burst of traffic, other clients still get a few packets delivered, which helps flow control adapt better. Also, rather than just ranking on 30 day traffic volumes, it works better to rank on 30 day traffic, plus 7 day traffic, plus 24 hour traffic, plus 1 hour traffic. That effectively means traffic sent in the last hour is counted 4x. That means users get faster feedback.

Do this and your company gets better utilization of network hardware too - every link will be 95+% full all the time. Thats better than the traditional model of building for peak usage and having links sit idle at 3am. There are plenty of customers who would love to use that cheap 3am capacity!

Do I love your answer, nice weighting bro

The correct thing is to just token throttle to the max you're willing to offer for the fixed price. Then when a small minority figure out 1Gbps really is like 100Mbps, then whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are at least two other posters in the linked thread that say they've received the same notice today (page 7). From the post history, one of them appears to work for a provider that I'd bet is reselling Hetzner boxes/slots on their boxes.

I definitely hadn't made it all the way to page 7 on that thread, so that is good to know, and it lends more credibility to the OP's claim. It would be nice if Hetzner would release a statement about this apparent policy change.

I don't get it. If you're paying for 1Gbps then why does it matter how much you use up to that amount? If they're overselling their capacity then they should just stop doing that. If they can only handle 80% of the sustained capacity, only sell up to that amount.

You pay for pipe capacity, you don't pay for usage according to sales page. If they want to change their business model they can. It's not my fault that I'm using what I bought to its full capacity

every isp ever since the dawn of the commercial internet oversells its capacity, you rely on 98% of the users not actually trying to max out their circuit at near line rate 24x7.

if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud, and doesn't make it okay. If you can't actually sell that capacity, just say up front what you're actually selling people.

there are plenty of much more expensive dedicated hosting companies that are totally upfront about real costs.

heztner and OVH and other bottom of the barrel pricing hosting companies are their own special breed of thing.

you're not going to get for $40-50/mo what you would get for $250/mo.

their TOS/AUP almost certainly covers this (you think that a company the size of hetzner didn't run this by real legal experts first?). it's not fraud.

Blessing from legal team doesn't mean it's not fraud. Blessing from legal team means they are willing to defend this position in court

More explicitly stating the limits would be good, but declaring “fraud” is rather exaggerating.

You go with Hetzner knowing you’re getting bargain prices, so they’re cutting corners somewhere. This would be like saying Walmart are committing fraud when it turns out their ham is not “finest quality”.

Not even Walmart, hetzner is the ABSOLUTE bottom of the barrel on pricing for no-SLA dedicated servers, this is more like buying a kitchen knife from Dollar General for $1.75 and then complaining it doesn't stay sharp very long.

While they are very cheap I have never had a problem with the quality of their service. Just saying that comparing with dollar general cutlery might not be fair.

You're forgetting the true bottom, OVH

Eh, the customer should get to know where they are cutting corners aka what they are paying for. A better example is a Walmart selling spam as ham. How does your example make false advertisement okay?

“We’ll of course they are cutting corners!” doesn’t seem like a defense at all to me.

If you buy ham from a bargain supermarket, you are effectively buying spam. I’m ok with that, yes. As a consumer, I should my use my judgement as to why the price is what it is.

I find it bizarre that you are okay with misleading sales, so long as the price is low. The only judgement you should need when making a purchase is what the product claims to be. If it claims to be one thing, but turns out to be another, then that is fraud. It's not okay to lie to your customers because you're not asking for as much money as your competitors.

Fraud is when you tell a lie to get business. It doesn't really matter if the victim can be blamed because they should have totally known better. Yes, if Walmart advertises ham for an impossibly low price and then proceeds to sell a product that's labeled ham but is actually 95% chicken by volume it's still fraud even if the customer should have known something was up.

Ah if only law was so clearly black and white.

Your analogy is just flat out wrong. This is like Walmart saying their ham is 100% pork and then it turns out there is 20% chicken in there. And then there are apologists going around saying "oh but if it was 100% pork it would be more expensive, you really should expect your counterparty to be dishonest and cheat you at that price point."

If the sales page says "1 gigabit unlimited", I don't care about any other considerations. It either is or isn't "1 gigabit unlimited". If any part of that statement is untrue, then the the provider should be honest and say so.

I'm so fed up with the normalization of this slimy behavior.

Then don’t buy from cheap providers! Those who won’t use anywhere near the traffic cap get cheaper prices, you get more certainty from your supplier. Everybody wins.

cheap is not a license to lie. I don't understand why people are defending this, if these companies weren't lying about what they're selling then nobody would be complaining. "1gbps for 250TB" or whatever it is simply the honest way to sell a product.

Is it unethical or illegal?

I believe it is probably "merely" unethical, as I'm sure that was stated somewhere in the fine print. However, I personally don't believe the distinction matters to the kinds of discussion we're seeing in this thread, which seems to be a lot of "everyone does it, so it's really the customer's fault that they didn't expect the party on the other side of the transaction to be deceptive."

The way I see it, this conduct is antithetical to the spirit of the free market and harmful to society at large, regardless of whether or not it can be defended in court.

I wouldn't buy from them if they were honest with what they are supplying... It's because that they're dishonest that they get business when it should really be prohibited practice.

Is it still ok if the ham is made from cats and dogs? It's not like you're paying premium for it, so can you complain? Please note that nowhere on the packaging it says anything about cat and dog meat.

You’re rather stretching the analogy in a way that wasn’t there. I said a lower level of quality, not an entirely different product.

They are very explicitly stating the limit: it's 1 gigabit per second. And they're knowingly and specifically advertising that as the only limit on bandwidth, even though what they're actually willing to provide (when averaged over a billing period) is much lower.

> This would be like saying Walmart are committing fraud when it turns out their ham is not “finest quality”.

Just to be pedantic, without disputing your broader point about what customers should expect:

Phrases like "finest quality" are known in marketing as "puffery" and companies aren't liable for these claims. From a quick search, specific factual claims like "unlimited 1Gbps" might be held to a different standard, depending on whether "no reasonable person" would take the claim seriously.

> The Second Circuit explained, "Puffery is an exaggeration or overstatement expressed in broad, vague, and commendatory language. Such sales talk is considered to be offered and understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only, which is to be discounted as such by the buyer."

> One type of puffery is a non-specific claim that one product is better than another The Second Circuit explained it as, "a general claim of superiority over comparable products that is so vague that it can be understood as nothing more than a mere expression of opinion."

> Looking at Starbucks's advertising, the court held that statements such as, "Best coffee for the best you," "taste of inspiration," "Starbucks or nothing," and "heart, soul, craft, pride, love; you won't find that in any other cup of coffee" are all puffery. The court wrote, "These statements vaguely assert that Starbucks's coffee is better than its competitors' in a manner best "understood as an expression of the seller's opinion only." They aren't, the court said, specific enough to "misrepresent an inherent quality or characteristic of the defendant's product."

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ac3f3d65-2e97...

>An entire (sub)industry being predicated on fraud doesn't make it not fraud

'Fraud' is too strong of word. Almost everything in the world has some level of over-subscription. I don't know for sure BUT if every person and business turned all their water taps on full blast, I think we may have a problem.

That just means that almost everything in world has a level of dishonesty and fraud. And just because it happens, it doesn't mean we should just accept it.

>That just means that almost everything in world has a level of dishonesty and fraud.

Words are tools to convey information, if you label everything as fraud, that 'tool' is no longer useful.

Yes words are tools to convey information. If by default all information is dishonest, the entire purpose of using words is no longer useful.

Water is metered in many parts of the world. Leave it full blast and you're footing the bill

It's not fraud. Even slightly.

Overselling capacity is perfectly fine if most of the time* you go to use the capacity it's there for you. If 95% of users under use capacity and you have the stats for it, it's perfectly reasonable to oversell sell with respect to the expected capacity usage. If those stats change, sure - they should adjust how much they oversell or what they advertise.

It's the same way a bank can't handle everyone pulling their money out all at once. It's perfectly reasonable to plan around practical scenarios.

Now if you rarely get what you paid for, sure, go for their heads over it.

* for some definition of most of the time aka get SLAs

> if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

At least in my experience, gigabit fiber is usually $100/mo in fiber markets. I would definitely pay $250/mo if it meant I had a guaranteed line rate, but I can’t. I think a lot of people would take $250 for guaranteed truly unlimited continuously saturated gigabit, actually.

unless you are on an active ethernet fiber last mile circuit, an ISP can't really sell "dedicated" business 1:1 capacity on a GPON circuit.

if you found yourself operating a small regional bank branch or similar and wanted a business circuit in some suburb of a major city you'd more realistically be looking at $700-800/mo for a 1Gbps dedicated business DIA circuit on a 36-60 mo term.

It wouldn't be that hard for them to sell connections as something like "guaranteed 20Mbps, peak 100Mbps" and, if they have to impose limits, impose them at the point where the "guaranteed" would be running constantly.

The problem is they don't want to do that, because it's much snazzier to just market the peak speed.

that is the problem with oversubscribing though. making it possible to say "you have a guaranteed bandwith of X% of the total capacity" is a hard problem to solve, especially inside the core layers of the network, where traffic gets aggregated.

How are you going to make sure every tenant gets its share of bandwith equally? It requires traffic engineering (like RSVP-TE, which in term requires an MPLS network.) and a proper QoS setup. both of which are not trivial to implement at scale.

Going further down the network towards to aggregate layer is far more doable (between switches etc), but doing it across core links it is actually quite difficult to guarantee bandwith.

To be fair most, residential ISPs I've used do only advertise something like "up to X Mbps" [https://imgur.com/a/Qvp8i61] and some will have asterisks that further lead to documentation about things like "soft data caps" after a certain amount of TB transferred per month etc.

Also residential ISPs generally don't even have SLAs so you could have days without Internet... probably also why they do not try to even hint at any guaranteed bandwidth. Depending on the situation, you might have none :)

"up to X Mbps" would imply "up to $y"

Hah. If only corporations were that nice lol.

And we would term the users who did max out their circuit at near line rate 24/7.

If you bring a world eating champion to an all-you-can-eat buffet, they'll end up being refused service and banned from eating there after a few visits.

Attempting to apply a dictionary-literal reading of 'Unlimited' to a business advertisement of 'Unlimited' is unlikely to get very far in a court of law: such a literal interpretation attempts to create and exploit a loophole for one's own benefit at extreme cost to the provider, by refusing a common sense interpretation of 'Unlimited within reason'.

Saturating 1G ethernet continuously for a month exceeds what I consider reasonable, and I would not expect a court to be convinced otherwise.

plenty of hosting companies WILL sell you 1G dedicated to saturate and will be totally happy about doing so, if you're up front about what you intend to do and pay for it accordingly.

it's a very common thing these days to buy something like a 1.5 Gbps average commit of traffic on a 10G 1310 LR hand off port to the ISP, and move traffic in a daily sine wave pattern that varies anywhere between 500 Mbps at 0300 in the morning and 1.5 to 2.5 Gbps in the evening peak.

Correct, but "1G saturated commit" and "1.5 Gbps average commit" are not marketed as "unlimited", since they are quite specific and offered without the human judgment call about whether the "unlimited" usage is reasonable.

also absolutely correct, serious DIA business internet services are negotiated in detail well in advance of a sales order being signed, unlike something such as a $40/mo hetnzer service marketed as "unlimited".

> such a literal interpretation attempts to create and exploit a loophole for one's own benefit at extreme cost to the provider, by refusing a common sense interpretation of 'Unlimited within reason'.

It's not a "loophole" to use 80% of the capacity that was advertised and sold to you. If they want to sell "unlimited within reason" capacity, they should advertise "unlimited within reason", instead of "unlimited".

I really don't understand your viewpoint.

In the UK, my viewpoint is prohibited: companies may not terminate service based on excessive usage on an “unlimited” plan. They may, however, throttle service.

In the US, it’s unclear if my viewpoint is prohibited, and good luck to anyone filing a lawsuit. I would expect my viewpoint to likely survive a US court case.

Hetzner is based in Germany; I am not familiar with whether DE or EU laws prohibit them from terminating service at will when they feel that “unlimited” service is being abused. If you do research into that, let us know what you find.

> if they did not do this an ordinary residential last mile connection would be $250/mo not $50/mo.

Sure? I want stuff that works, damn if it’s cheap lol.

You can oversell capacity in two ways:

1) You have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can utilize what you advertise, and there are enough people not needing it that this is all fine

2) You do not have enough slack that your edge case top-end users can't utilize what you advertise, in which case you are, at best, being deceptive in your advertising practices.

No one cares about the former, and even though the latter is common place, that doesn't mean that it isn't a shitty advertising practice nor should someone making use of a provider have to know that this is common place.

You should be able to reasonably expect to get what a commercial entity is advertising itself as giving as part of your payment to them. Just because this industry has been garbage about it doesn't mean that it should always be garbage about it.

Complaining that ovh or hetzner is garbage is like complaining that a $19 coffee maker you bought at Walmart is kind of crap. You bought the absolute cheapest product on the market that claims to do the job. It's like buying a Nissan micra and then complaining about the compromises inherent in a subcompact economy car.

Ultimately, it's because you're not paying for 1 Gbps. You're paying for 1 Gbps with an arbitrary cut-off switch held by someone else. If you want them to not have the cut-off switch, you have to pay more.

I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP.

This person is probably paying like 50 bucks a month or less and is in the top 1% of bandwidth users as measured by individual ethernet ports from a top of rack aggregation switch or similar.

> I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP.

Raises hand

The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.

reaching out nicely to a customer that's probably in the top 0.02% of your bandwidth users for their package/plan and asking them to move to a more serious/expensive service is not a lie...

i should also note that a very common reason for a dedicated hosting company's server to go wild on upstream bandwidth is something misconfigured or compromised, and being used maliciously by some external 3rd party. not actual bandwidth usage from the paying customer. this is mentioned in a nicer way in the email.

they probably could have just cut them off arbitrarily. nothing obligates them to keep a customer.

this is actually really nice on the part of the hosting ISP in my opinion.

If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.

this is "unlimited" in the same way that an all you can eat buffet restaurant is unlimited, with some caveats.

Of course advertising one thing then saying, "well, actually, no" means you lied. Even if you're "nice" about it.

It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.

no, this is more like running a buffet restaurant with an all you can eat buffet.

98% of your customers show up and eat three gargantuan heaping plates, are totally satisfied, and can barely walk back to their cars.

the other 2% show up at 3 in the afternoon, stay for six hours, eat ten plates of crab legs and roast beef.

maybe you notice those 2% of customers and say nothing.

if the same person comes back every week and loads up on ten plates of crab legs, you nicely remind them of the socially acceptable use of an all you can eat buffet.

Honest all-you-can eat buffets do not cut people off, they post time-limits.

https://blorg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bacchanal-buffe...

to extend this analogy, the posted time limit at the entrance of the buffet is similar to what's in their TOS/AUP that the customer agreed to before ever starting the service in the first place.

I think the biggest difference is that "Please don't stay here more than 2 hours" clearly means that you can't sit around and eat all day.

"[don't do things that] impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" doesn't make it very clear that there are data caps.

This behavior leads me to disregard any advertising of "all you can eat" as a lie, and the speaker of that lie as a dishonest business. American Airlines dealt with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwQr3VcoUvM

yarrr, tis not a man, tis a relentless eating machine

Fine, but getting back to the analogy, you have to specify how your bandwidth is limited from the outset, you can't just offer it as unlimited and then say, "Nooooooo, you obese whale, not like that!" once it disadvantages your business.

No. You accept those 2% as cost of doing business.

Yeah of course you made certain calculations when you started your business, including that most people would start loading up their (small) trays with the first items, which are the cheapest and so not cost you much, but you also accept that not everybody is going to do that.

A business is a business and social acceptableness has nothing to do with one another. One is a business and the other is a social situation. If I know you personally, it is a social situation. If I have paid money, it is business situation.

Yes — the “lie” was before that, when they told the person untruthfully a cheap instance would have a certain bandwidth and unlimited traffic.

Lying to close a deal is fraud: they should have disclosed the limits upfront.

If they want to charge for high utilization of bandwidth, they should bill for traffic — like everyone else.

I’ve also never had a buffet try to restrict “unlimited” in the way you’re suggesting — they’ve been quite upfront about their restrictions.

I guess their routers just run out of packets like buffets run out of crab legs, huh.

There's a difference between saying "unlimited" and "up to n Mbps * t transfer per billing period".

We don't know or care how our packets are being measured. If there's a limit to them beyond the physical link, then it's not unlimited. "Unlimited packets internally but we will reduce the egress rate after a certain amount" also isn't "unlimited".

> reaching out nicely to a customer

Threatening termination for using what was advertised does not seem very nice to me - especially when they specifically removed traffic limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500

What part of, "Don't advertise something as 'unlimited' if it isn't unlimited" is difficult for you?

It seems pretty damn simple. Hetzner used to have transfer limits. It was 20 TB for cheap servers when I was using them (2017-2019). It was bumped up to 50 TB in 2020.

I don't disagree with you that a user consuming 250 TB of transfer should be paying for that transfer, though. I'm disagreeing with the marketing. It's deceptive, and it causes problems that are the genesis of this post. You know what's supremely simpler? Just commit to a hard limit on transfer and be done with it.

> If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.

Well, they could put that in the policies or the offer. Or be more specific in the email.

But 1G isn't really that much. I don't have a use for that much bandwidth at the moment, but it's not like you need that much compute to pump out 1G, so pick the offering with enough compute and enough bandwidth, and there you go. You don't always need an SLA, especially if you can load balance over multiple bottom of the barrel hosts. Unmetetered 1G for not a lot of money is a credible offer, so I'd take an established provider at their word; lots of hosting offers have a port speed and a traffic limit and overage fees listed.

It's not a lie, it's marketing (.. well I guess that is a lie then).

Unlimited plans exist because demand isn't consistent, and shared bandwidth provides a way to lower prices. If I was guaranteed max bandwidth on 5G all the time on my cellular plan, I'd pay a lot more than $40/month.

>If I was guaranteed max bandwidth on 5G all the time on my cellular plan, I'd pay a lot more than $40/month.

Okay, so the ISP expects that people won't use what they're sold. That sounds like their problem and their bad planning.

The actual limits are there and detailed in the terms and conditions, and often the marketing material will say that additional terms apply. It's the customers fault for assuming "unlimited" means actually unlimited, which is unrealistic and also not what a typical customer would think.

"We—on purpose—didn't mean what we said" is identical to "we lied".

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

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

That means a lie was told.

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

As long as they didn't interfere with the plants that were planted, like throttling the connection, they offered exactly what they promised. Hetzner never offered unchanging contracts. Hetzner made a material claim. They fulfilled that claim from all i can see. You can get unlimited 1 Gbit/s traffic at Hetzner for a month at said price.

"Great, so I can sign up for the same plan again, since my use falls within what you're offering?"

"Well, no, because now we know you'll actually use what we say we provide, and we don't really want to provide what we're offering—that part's a lie."

It'd be different if they'd responded by discontinuing that kind of plan entirely.

This seems pretty straightforward to me.

Thats how these unlimited offerings work though?

The 99% pay for the 1% that actually uses the unlimited traffic

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

I have run an ISP network, and I feel their pain. But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract.

The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason. That's a pretty lame way to resolve what is basically a marketing problem -- they want to sell a bandwidth-limited service as unlimited i.e. lie about it.

Say what you will about fair use policies, but at least they spell it out.

But if they sell it as unlimited and have no fair use policy, they need to honor their contract.

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

First you say they need to honor their contract and then say they're honoring their contract. What's the problem? Similarly if someone runs a restaurant with an "All You Can Eat!" special and someone comes in with a 40 gallon drum and starts filling it up from the buffet, that person is going to be asked to leave immediately.

There's no possible way that Hetzner could a) Predict every way someone could abuse their system and b) Put them all in their marketing materials. So they have that clause in their contract and they're using it.

It's not an abuse of a system to use it in the way it was advertised. If it says unlimited, then it's unlimited.

"All you can eat" means all the individual customer can eat (usually within a time frame). If you offer it and then stop offering food when customers (in your opinion) eat too much, then that's fraud.

If unlimited means unlimited then why doesn't "all you can eat" mean all you can eat? Why are you assuming unstated restrictions on "all you can eat" when you aren't allowing unstated restrictions on "unlimited"?

You literally made up the restriction of, "usually within a timeframe".

No, I didn't make up a restriction. You misunderstood. "All you can eat" offers usually contain an explicit time frame, for the obvious reason that they don't want customers to enter in the morning and re-enter in the evening. That's why I wrote "usually". If they don't, then that's their mistake and they have to literally offer all the customer can eat.

The same for hosting. If you make your offer unlimited and don't make any exceptions explicit, then your offer is unlimited. The least thing you have to do is to add a little * and list the exceptions in every advertisement. Otherwise it's deceptive advertising and bait-and-switch fraud. It's really very simple.

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

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

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

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

> have no fair use policy

you think an ISP the size of hetzner or OVH or similar has no TOS/AUP that they put a lot of time and thought into before publishing, and putting in the customer new-order workflow?!??!

Perhaps you could point to the document that spells out their fair use policy? Hetzner certainly didn't.

There are terms and conditions and, there's no "fair use" clauses for bandwidth in the terms and conditions.

It feels a bad-faith interpretation of the "Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" portion of section 2.7.

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

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

I doubt they have ever advertised that you can saturate your link 24/7 for multiple months.

No, they just advertised unlimited usage on 1Gbps

Guaranteed 1 Gbit/s

What's on the order page is the following:

Connection: 1 GBit/s port Guaranteed bandwidth: 1 GBit/s Traffic: Unlimited *

*Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon. In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.00/TB. (The basis for calculation is for outgoing traffic only. Incoming and internal traffic is not calculated.) There is no bandwidth limitation.

If they want to say, "you can't saturate your link 24/7 for multiple months" then they should say that.

Yeah, and I doubt many customers would have an issue with the same cap and overage terms of the 10G variety.

Assuming they are in the top 1%, that means 99 other customers are happy to overpay and subsidize them (and the provider pockets the difference).

What's the problem, exactly?

If there's a limit, just post it. Don't lie and say unlimited. What's hard about that?

Why does it matter? Lying is lying.

That's quite irrelevant.

The point is that advertising "unlimited 1Gbps" pretty much explicitly says that it is OK to continuously run at 1Gbps.

> top 1% of bandwidth

Closer to top .1% in all honesty

Why not say that you guarantee 50TB of bandwidth and use above that is subject to AUP or throttling on the pricing page? If I buy "unlimited" something, I do expect to use it without limits.

This is not to say that I don't think 250TB is excessive, but sales transparency is important.

That's easy to solve; just don't promise unlimited bandwidth. Don't lie and people won't complain that you lied.

Yes, they provided a very good service for the money they received. One would be hard pressed trying to find a better deal. Yet, they did lie.

How did Hetzner lie? They offered unlimited 1Gbit interconnect to this user every month they are subscribed. They did not offer "unlimited contract not subject to change you are entitled to the same conditions forever".

They never had the intention of letting him use his unlimited bandwidth. So, claiming it's unlimited is a lie.

Specifically, it's misleading publicity. AFAIK, that's an issue in Germany. They did the bare minimum to not get into any legal issues, but if they insist on the publicity message, they will very likely have problems.

They really shouldn't try to mimic an US company.

Why can't we have some transparent unlimited traffic contracts?

We give you unlimited depending on overall network saturation and conditions. Offer a live dashboard and prediction on where you are and how you may be throttled.

Otherwise also offer pricing per GB transfered.

I have, doing all 3.

I agree, this person is for sure costing the company significantly more than they're worth.

The correct solution is to fire the marketing team, and grandfather "unlimited" plans.

"Unlimited" really should mean fully unlimited.

I also take issue with "up to" and other vagueness. There should be clear metrics and sizes that are precise and not abbreviated in all ads and offers; and offers should also be public and non-discriminatory. A 'service check' for an address should also constitute a 'binding offer' (I.E. the ISP had better be very sure service can be provided at that address!)

Not using 'up to' is opening up all kinds of other cans of worms.

Ok, 100mbps.... to where? The switch you're plugged into? The router at the data center? Some other random host in the network? Some other random host outside the network?

So yea, everything on almost every network without a dedicated circuit is 'up to' simply because you can make no other guarantees.

also, what do you count as bandwith?

Simply sending packets down a wire usually limits one to the physical speed of the interface, but even then some kind of packets might get dropped by various filters/mechanisms along the way.

For instance, should i be able to use my full bandwith of my connection by sending purely BUM traffic down the link? Somewhere in the network, some policer is going to start dropping BUM traffic to protect the network against flooding.

I remember years ago working with ISPs and many of their monitoring systems assumed that packet = 1500 bytes as a fixed measure. Running a DNS server at full throttle could lead to a situation where you'd get bandwidth charges for amounts higher than could be served at line rate.

I'm assuming modern systems do this better, but I've learned never to make assumptions when they benefit the billing party more.

it gets even more fun if you think about what people are actually paying for.

For instance, do you charge for the overhead of the Ethernet frame? What about additional size thanks to tunneling/encapsulation?

One could argue that no, you should not charge a customer for that because that is part of local transport inside a layer 2 domain, which is not in control of the customer.

But what about things like MPLS labels? you could go and on and on..

"Unlimited" is a marketing gimmick. There is no way to provide unlimited of anything. In most cases, "Unlimited" means you won't be cut off at a specific threshold, but the limits are to the provider's discretion.

The other case is that you buy a specific usage tier, but that is probably going to cost a lot more, which is why "unlimited" plans exist.

Please understand you are in the minority. We have been very happy Hetzner customers for years. I don't want any of what you advocate. I know very well that "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited. But for us, it is unlimited for all intents and purposes. When we deploy new jobs, or change backup routines, and burst tons of traffic one month, I don't have to worry about it because over the long run we are using a totally reasonable amount of traffic.

And that's the thing: most people don't want to worry about this stuff. It's a minuscule fraction of people who care. And you just need to recognize that you're in the minority.

I work for a cloud provider (not hetzner), and sorry, but this is normal behaviour for them.

Every infrastructure is based on the principle that nobody will use all of their ability at the same time. Road network? Good luck with a whole city in their cars at the exact same time. Power distribution? Tell that to the british grid when all of britain turns on their kettles at the same time during sports events (live broadcasts are out of phase from regions to the next to alleviate this issue). Or to their sewage system, where all toilets flush at the same time once the human byproduct of said kettles is produced.

So yes, this is a hosting provider where the bandwidth is shared, they overcommit it, otherwise they would not be able to do them for that cheap (in case of hetzner), or at all at a profit (for other providers that are not bottom-end). Here they tell it is unlimited, because there is no data cap. The same goes for virtual machines in a cloud environment, those too are overcommitted, and I can guarantee you that if you spawn AWS instances and use 80% flat of CPU 24/7/365 you'll get the same kind of email directing you to the cpu dedicated instances.

Actually, they even did you a favor for not kicking you out due to "trust and safety" flagging you as fraud (like sending spam or ddos, which they 100% should have btw).

For 1Gbps? That’s bullshit.

Some of our GCP machines use far more than 80% CPU 24/7/365 on both preemptible and non-preemptible instances. We've yet to be asked to move to dedicated machines. It was pretty much the same when we were on AWS.

I don't see how a cloud provider can complain about high CPU-usage if they bill by the machine and by the minute. Otherwise 20% of your bill is for idle CPUs.

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

It really boils down to the business impact you have on them. Sure, you pay for the resource, but they are not guaranteed. And it is up to their discretion to de-prioritize your VMs on the HV, so that you're the last to get scheduled when the host's CPU is starved. This is the whole 'CPU credits' thing on AWS that they document in [0] where you can burst above the baseline. Interestingly, note that the baseline is in the 30% ballpark in their illustration on the bottom of the page :)

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...

Fuck that. I'm paying for time on an agreed amount of vCPUs as specified in the instance templates. I'm using them 100%, I'd be a moron not to.

It's also fraud because AWS get to charge me when I'm not scheduled, but they also charge the users who are scheduled on the contended CPU. They should bill by the CPU cycles I consume.

Anyway, we've moved from AWS. Lucky escape.

This only applies to T type instances, that you likely wouldn't be using for something serious.

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

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

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

> The same goes for virtual machines in a cloud environment, those too are overcommitted, and I can guarantee you that if you spawn AWS instances and use 80% flat of CPU 24/7/365 you'll get the same kind of email directing you to the cpu dedicated instances.

Yeah, that's bullshit.

> Here they tell it is unlimited, because there is no data cap

There literally is a data cap...and it is one which Hetzner refuses to specify. The unspecified data cap is "drastically lower" (in Hetzner's own words) than even the 80% usage which the customer was hitting.

If you have to use drastically less than 100% usage, then those numbers should absolutely be published and using the term "unlimited" instead of publishing the limits is highly unethical.

The "other companies do it too" argument is silly since the behavior shouldn't be normalized in the first place.

>I can guarantee you that if you spawn AWS instances and use 80% flat of CPU 24/7/365 you'll get the same kind of email directing you to the cpu dedicated instances.

This is a pretty significant claim that I think we're going to need evidence of. I would be flat out shocked if any of the major cloud providers gave you this sort of notice.

All of them have burstable instance types with various mechanisms for limiting that burst, but I have never heard of anyone ever getting this sort of email just for heavily and consistently utilizing CPU on a regular instance.

However, I will agree that this sort of thing around "unlimited bandwidth" is normal in the hosting industry. People talked all the time on webhostingtalk about all of the different dedicated server and colo providers that advertised "unlimited" bandwidth and would cut you off if you actually tried to use eit.

We avoid "unlimited" if we possibly can. The moment it comes up that provider generally flips from being "a good deal" to "the most expensive in the region". Then you're stuck looking for alternatives while you're in a bad situation. You don't always get an email, sometimes you're just suspended and they'll let you know if you email them.

(We work with >200 different hosting providers around the world)

Whenever I see that some resource is "unlimited", my take is that the company either doesn't know what the limit is, the company is gambling that users won't run into the limit, or they are just pretending that the limit does not exist.

Oversubscription is normal and I am happy to pay for a service that is oversubscribed. I just want to know what I am paying for. Am I paying for "guaranteed X GB/month, up to X+Y GB/month"? Cool, I love it. Are you gambling that enough users will sign up and pay you to subsidize unlimited bandwidth / unlimited storage / unlimited anything? I want to know.

A normal business relationship with a vendor should be profitable for the vendor. Yes, I have an interest in paying less money for services--but being able to use those services at all is usually more important than squeezing a few bucks in discounts out of the vendor. If my deal with a vendor is unprofitable for the vendor, it creates a risk that the vendor will in the future terminate the relationship, discontinue the service, or even go out of business.

It's up to the company to figure out what the right SLOs/SLAs/SLIs are. That's actually a core part of what I am paying for when I sign up for cloud services or colo services or whatever. There's a delicate balance where you figure out an SLO that is possible for the company to support, while still looking good in marketing materials, and understandable by technical end-users.

If your company provides infrastructure without SLOs, or if key SLOs are missing, then I'm going to be a bit hesitant. A missing SLO is a sign that your company hasn't done the work of figuring out how supportable a particular feature is (like "unlimited bandwidth").

250TB/month is about 770 Mbps sustained. And you still only get a strongly worded letter!

Does not matter. Hetzner say Unlimited and Guaranteed traffic at 1Gbit/s with no fair use policy mentioned for that port speed.

Although I agree, when you look around, and especially when you look at AWS, Hetzner's offer is still excellent in terms of value for money.

cloud traffic pricing is a massive ripoff, especially in europe where bandwidth is cheap

True, but Hetzner has no obligation to serve every customer. I would say this customer has gotten more than their money's worth and Hetzner is well within their rights to no longer provide service.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1499/

But they also have a responsibility not to lie in their marketing, don't they?

Did or did Hertzner not offer this person an unthrottled 1 GBit/s every month they were an user.

have you ever used a "free refill", or an "all you can eat" buffet?

You cannot fill up your car's tank with soda at a "free refills" place, neither can you camp and eat 24/7 inside an "all-you-can-eat" buffet.

I don't think it's unreasonable to still call those services "unlimited" and let the restaurant/internet provider decide when to drop a customer that they don't want in their premises/on their infrastructure...

I suppose the difference is that it would be understandably unreasonable for someone to start filling extra containers at an unlimited soda refill, they would probably understand that they are pushing their luck.

If the restaurant sold 'Unlimited Soda, 2 liters per minute, £50/month' I would expect them to deliver on the very specific quantities they promised at the price they offered. If they tell me I'm over-dispensing, I think I'd be rightfully annoyed that they have over-promised.

Exactly. Hetzner doesn't sell you "850mbit/s for 24/7, 50€ a month". If they did, I agree with you that the OP should be rightfully annoyed about this letter.

Instead, Hetzner sells "unlimited bandwidth" the same way McDonalds sells "free refills". It's also understandably unreasonable for someone to start pushing data at the max rate for months non-stop, the same way it is unreasonable for people to fill 50 large cups with soda.

If people have accepted the "...within reason" argument for free refills and all-you-can-eat buffets, why not also accept it for data usage?

You are wrong. The product he had was for unlimited traffic on a guaranteed 1Gbit/s port. There are no limits listed, just a provider who offered something too cheaply and wants out.

False Advertising. Simple as.

That still doesn't explain why this seems to be tolerated with "free refills" but not with "unlimited bandwidth".

And even if you were right, even if it's just a case of false advertising and the provider wanting to get out, there is nothing wrong (neither morally nor legally) for them to unilaterally terminate the contract, which they could have well done instead of writing that notification letter. They explicitly state this in their TOS. Most companies can still (luckily) decide which customers they serve and which they don't

250TB/month is still way, way below "unlimited" though.

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

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

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

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

They also said the use averages above 250TB.

The supposed quote says "We’re writing to you today because of your traffic use, which currently averages above 250 TB/month on some of your servers."

It averages on multiple of their servers, which indicates to me that the average was taken over the course of some months (?). They may well have reached 320TB in some months on some servers.

I'm not surprised by this. For me, unlimited traffic (with 1 gbps) means i can spike in some months without having to worry about costs exploding, but if I'm maxing it out consistently, then I might be asked to move to a different service or upgrade.

I don't understand why everyone in this thread is being so pedantic, accusing Hetzner of "lying", etc.

If you are subscribing to something and the subscription price changes, that's not "lying", that's one party renegotiating. Furthermore, Hetzner's legal agreement allows them to do this.

Sure, Hetzner could publish "up to X TB / month" (and it sounds like it should considering their apparent audience). But let's have a little empathy here, sheesh.

What is being renegotiated? The contact isn’t being rewritten. It still states they have unlimited bandwidth. They’re just being told to not make use of contracted resource or the contract will be terminated. That’s not a renegotiation.

they're not obligated to keep anyone as a customer. saying "we don't want your money anymore" is a form of renegotiation.

I think part of the frustration is the asymmetry of the situation. Good luck telling Hetzner that you'll be paying "up to $20 per month" for your server. The moment you under-pay, they drop you. But somehow it's OK that they can arbitrarily cut back on the service they promised and you just have to accept it?

Whether or not something is technically allowed in the fine print is different from whether or not it's a shitty thing to do. Having secret, unpublished limits on a supposedly-unlimited service is shitty. They'll be getting no empathy from me.

> and you just have to accept it?

No, just as you said with your underpaying hypothetical, the customer is free to drop Hetzner. A rolling term contract protects both parties. If this person pushing 250TB/mo can find a better provider, then they should move.

If they can't find a provider willing to offer cheaper bandwidth than Hetzner...well, that tells you everything you need to know about this situation.

Sympathy for a company misrepresenting their offerings and cutting people off for using what was sold to them?

Pull the other one.

For those of you working at companies with "unlimited" vacation time... pay close attention. :D

Well, I'd be satisfied with only being able to be on vacation about 75% of the time.

On the bright side: if this was Google, I wouldn't be surprised to see his account terminated immediately without giving an exact reason.

250TB/month means this person is, basically, saturating a 1Gbps link 24/7. It's 761Mbps, which probably accounts for some overhead/latencies (f.e. downloading many pieces of a torrent or many articles of an NZB).

This is blatantly NOT fair use. I doubt that they in fact have a specific limit (having worked for large hosting companies with "fair use" policies in the past, it was "you'll know it when you see it"), but whatever limit you might choose is frankly well below this.

Yes, calling it unlimited is a bit misleading, but they truly can't compete with everyone else (who do the same thing!) if they don't. At this point, with how widespread it is, you should frankly assume that unlimited = fair use, and be working for it to change politically, not getting mad at companies.

I would also note that it sounds like their use has been consistently high over several months, which (IMHO anyway) lends some credence to calling it unlimited (as opposed to f.e. AT&T where "unlimited" means a set number of GB each month...).

>It's 761Mbps, which probably accounts for some overhead/latencies (f.e. downloading many pieces of a torrent or many articles of an NZB).

Hetzner tracks outbound bandwidth only, the relevant servers are uploading, not downloading, >250TB/mo.

If I’m doing my math right, Hetzner advertised approximately 298TB/month on a 1Gbps link (1Gbps * 30.4 days = X Tebibyte). This user is only at 250TB/month.

This feels a bit like a case of "this is why we can't have nice things".

It's the same reason why one of my jobs switched from unlimited PTO to limited PTO. 98% of employees took sane amounts of time off. 2% (if that) abused it rather extensively.

It might just be a tale as old as time.

It’s probably their right to end the contract (with a one month notice). A company is not forced to do business with anyone. And I’m quite sure they will gladly offer a package with some additional traffic for an extra charge.

The autobahn also has no general speed limit. That does not mean you are welcome to go 300 km/h all the time. Unfortunately some peoples stupidity makes it necessary to impose fixed rules for everyone.

Sorry but that's a really bad analogy. Autobahn speed limit is related to safety and a lot of factors.

Here it's simply a matter of money. If more than 200TB/month triggers an angry email, then just state they have a limit of 200TB instead of stating unlimited. It's not so complex.

> Here it's simply a matter of money.

Lol, as if that is unimportant.

> then just state they have a limit of 200TB

They don't have a limit of 200TB. They take issue with sustained saturation over a long period of time.

> It's not so complex.

Can you imagine how complex it would be to publish a schedule of every single consideration? They certainly won't take issue with 250TB of internal traffic. So now they need to start differentiating egress. Would they take issue with 250TB of ingress? It's less likely, but they would probably have higher tolerance for that. So now you have another schedule. What about cross-datacenter traffic? Boom, another policy.

Have you seen AWS bandwidth pricing? How in the world is that less complex than just addressing abuse on a case-by-case basis.

But why they want to cancel the contract and won't offer the customer to pay for the traffic?

The customer is already paying for the traffic.

They have many options where they allow you to do that and its very reasonably priced https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

Do usage limitations actually affect the bottom line vs throttling?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine it doesn't cost much more to run a network that is 80% saturated vs a network that is 5% saturated?

Basically, why can't they just fairly throttle high usage users when utilization ramps up, and then unthrottle them when usage lowers?

Edit: I'm not talking about them reneging on their guarantees, which they've already done by asking the user to cut their usage.

They claim the bandwidth is guaranteed on servers costing less than 50 euros a month. They appear to have simply got caught out by people actually using what they paid for.

Sure, I just mean regardless of their guarantees, why network operators don't seem to operate like this, instead they look at total transfer over a period of time, and cut you off or charge more, even if the bytes you're sending were essentially free and didn't affect other users.

And this would be fair to your customers how? Where you draw the line who is who? How would you feel if your services started to be less responsive for no apparent reason, even though you paid for them and did nothing wrong?

Imagine the AWS EBS bursting/credits applied to networking. It would be awful.

(It's also awful with EBS)

Many do, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-inst... :

> Typically, instances with 16 vCPUs or fewer (size 4xlarge and smaller) are documented as having "up to" a specified bandwidth; for example, "up to 10 Gbps". These instances have a baseline bandwidth. To meet additional demand, they can use a network I/O credit mechanism to burst beyond their baseline bandwidth. Instances can use burst bandwidth for a limited time, typically from 5 to 60 minutes, depending on the instance size.

Traffic prioritization is expensive, but traffic accounting isn't.

It's a lot less work to bill on usage (or cancel accounts for high usage) than to throttle high usage users to keep the network responsive for all users.

The operators are likely paying for usage as well on their paid connections, or indirectly in that as connections fill up, they need faster or more ports and that comes at a cost. It's one thing if your peak traffic comes at their off peak times, but it's more typical to have peaks around the same time as everyone else.

The traditional solution to this problem is to sell a fractional circuit with bursting and average billing for overage to let the economics work things out. It actually is quite a bit harder to run a network _well_ at 80% than at, say, 60% because you have to deal with reboots/etc. in your network as well as routing issues if your peering changes and the excess capacity hides a world of sins. Lots of issues.

It looks to me as if they know that the content is violating their terms and conditions.

>... We will routinely check your traffic use. If we continue to see such a high amount, we may choose to cancel your contract. (Please see 2.7 of our Terms and conditions ...

>2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among other reasons, if the Customer fails to meet its payment obligations or violates other important customer obligations. A further important reason which may result in us locking or terminating the Customer’s services or account without notice is if the Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product, or violates paragraphs 8.1. - 8.3. of these Terms and Conditions.

>8.1. The Customer is obligated to check and comply with the legal provisions arising from the use of the contractually agreed services, in particular the Telecommunications Act, the Telemedia Act, as well as national and international industrial and intellectual property rights, personal rights, and the requirements of competition and data protection laws on their own. The Customer indemnifies us against all claims of third parties arising from infringements of these obligations.

>8.2. The Customer is obligated not to publish any content that infringes on the rights of third parties or otherwise violates applicable law. This includes in particular, but is not limited to, pornographic or obscene material, extremist content or content that offends common decency, gambling, material that could seriously endanger the morals of children or young people or violate the rights of third parties (copyrights, name rights, trademark rights and data protection rights). This also includes the publication of defamatory content, insults or disparagement of persons or groups of persons.

>8.3. The transmission of spam mail is prohibited. This includes in particular the sending of unauthorized, unsolicited advertising to third parties. When sending emails, it is also prohibited to provide false sender data or to disguise the identity of the sender in any other way. The operation of applications for mining cryptocurrencies remains prohibited. These include, but are not limited to, mining, farming and plotting of cryptocurrencies. We are entitled to lock the Customer’s access to their Hetzner services or account in the event of non-compliance.

Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

I was just saying that they are citing a specific section of their terms and conditions which would allow them to terminate the contract.

Since we don't know what causes that much traffic my guess is as good as yours. Those servers are like Schroedingers cat in a superposition, hosting legal and illegal content at the same time.

But Hetzner didn’t cite what you’re describing. They only cited the “LMFAO fuck you got mine” section of the agreement.

I wonder at what point an all you can eat buffet would kick you out? And how does this situation compare.

They absolutely do kick you out. Some have time limits. Others have managers who just stand awkwardly over your table and calmly ask you to leave and not be an asshole. I know this because I know two guys who were once very hungry teenagers and who also don’t have the genes that allow them to pick up on social cues.

Slightly OT: Suppose you want to deliver a couple of 100’s Mbps to people in EU on the cheap, how would you do it? Assume it’s static files, so the server doesn’t need to be that beefy.

Hetzner would probably be my first choice. Even though I’ve hade some strangely slow connections there sometimes.

Other more enterprisey providers like Datapacket seem to be significantly more expensive.

Cloudflare is an option, unless there’s a reason that it’s a bad idea in the EU?

I front my Hetzner instance w/ then, works great.

cheap vps , there are many good options including hetzner i suppose

I rent a VPS with Leaseweb. Their prices aren't the lowest, but their performance is better than many cheaper alternatives.

There is no unlimited data. Either data centers are lying to you, or they're going to end your contract the month after you start sending hundreds of TB.

Their data plans clearly state the traffic limits and their terms state the overcharge you can expect. If you need more network traffic than the 15TB they offer VPS servers, you can probably just ask, set up some dedicated , or set up a CDN (listing price: "contact us", though Cloudflare is likely cheaper) or rent yourself a full colo rack.

Other VPS providers are similar, but always check the uplink speed (I've noticed German and French providers tend to stick to only 100mbps) and the data limits; anything that sounds like "unlimited" isn't and should be avoided if you're worried about data cost. Your only real option is to avoid the cheap market and go midrange or high end because data is expensive, especially at over 800mbps consistently.

I mean FDC offers 1Gbs unmetered[1] (and I do think they actually mean unmetered), dedicated for $199 / month . While being ≈ 4 times more expensive than a cheap Hetzner dedicated box mentioned in OP, I don't think OP would have gotten an email from them.

I was thinking that maybe some provider basically was reselling ≈FDC dedicated boxes with VPS's that tailored to high bandwidth usage. Of course being more expensive than run of the mill VPS's. But maybe the server performance per price, and bandwidth price equation doesn't make it so attractive. Even if you're just pushing static files, you need some CPU to saturate it (especially considering tls termination)

[1]: https://www.fdcservers.net/budget-server-1

It's interesting to read semi-permanent HN comments recording how well individuals adapt to practical realities.

By not specifying a limit, not even in the warning letter, buyers are encouraged (or threatened) to overprovision, and then not use the excess capacity they paid for, lining Hetzner's pockets with the difference.

Claiming "Guaranteed bandwidth" and no extra charges. In fact Hetzner listed a generic we may cancel at any time clause, not a fair use one.

Scammers.

If there were a government enforcement action woukd it fall under the FTC as a contract issue, or the FCC as an internet thing?

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