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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Am I calculating right that 20TB per month means around ~60Mbits per second for 24/7? Not a network expert, but it is hard to see how this could be sustainable for less than €5/month.

Sounds a bit like the usual case where company is able to give a generous offering because most customers utilize just a small portion of it. Maybe with the attention they have been getting, they have attracted more bandwidth hungry customers.

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That is what they (explicitly) said in the email: users using next to no bandwidth were offsetting the costs for the heaviest users. That was no longer sustainable.

I think I'm missing something then. If that were true, wouldn't you lower the network allowance and then make the product cheaper or at least priced the same? This would have the no-traffic users paying "their fair share" and the overage costs (or higher traffic addon) would make up for the heavy users.

The current plan makes everything more expensive for everyone. They would do this if a) they never had a sustainable model in the first place or b) they were just being greedy

They recently entered the US market, so almost surely there was some honeymoon period (ie. investment to gain market share), but likely there's a significant difference between how the IXP/bandwidth/peering market works in the US compared to their home market (EU).

Pricing is fairly similar, particularly in ashburn. Europe can be a little cheaper, but usually not a massive amount in it.

Hm, interesting! Then probably lots of "bandwidth conscious" folks pounced on on their fancy new PoP.

Whatever the reason, rather strange to do this without even a few days of notice.

They already offer it on their European servers and it's still unchanged. Also, just because it's included doesn't mean everyone is using it to their full capacity.

Internet is much cheaper in Europe than in most other regions and there's more of it. Europe is effectively the center of the Internet. Most of the time (in regions like Asia-Pacific and Africa) this is simply due to having more time and money to build it, but when comparing Europe to the USA, it's probably because of regulatory structure - more competition, less monopolization.

What do you mean? Is peering/transit actually more expensive in the US? Residential internet isn't really relevant here, and if it was, it would still not really make sense considering that Germany (where they have their main datacenter) has much worse internet than the US according to most speed/bandwidth averages. Because if you are not referring to residential ISP, I don't think there's any peering/transit provider monopoly in the US

Yes. I suspect that because of the low number of residential ISPs there's less internet infrastructure in general and less competition. Who needs peering if there's only Comcast? You point out that networks can exist that don't serve residential customers, but who do they serve - mostly other networks which don't exist because they can't serve residential customers. The entire US is just the access region for a few networks to backhaul to NYC, Chicago and SF, not a full fledged network itself.

Is that much? I use a German competitor, Contabo, and they offer 32TB even with their entry-level VPS for 4.5€ plus taxes.

IIRC a while back one of the CDNs had a post about their transit costs; they worked out _way_ lower in Europe than in the US. I don’t think Hetzner Germany is increasing prices here, just the US one?

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