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.
Raises hand
The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't 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.
It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.
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.
https://blorg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bacchanal-buffe...
"[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.
yarrr, tis not a man, tis a relentless eating machine
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
Okay, so the ISP expects that people won't use what they're sold. That sounds like their problem and their bad planning.
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).
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
You literally made up the restriction of, "usually within a timeframe".
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.
> 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.
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?!??!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is not to say that I don't think 250TB is excessive, but sales transparency is important.
The 99% pay for the 1% that actually uses the unlimited traffic
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
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 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.
What's the problem, exactly?
The point is that advertising "unlimited 1Gbps" pretty much explicitly says that it is OK to continuously run at 1Gbps.
Closer to top .1% in all honesty