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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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...

> 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.

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

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.

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