Hacker News Reader

Comment by rustc | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call pointing straight up lies as "nit picking".

This is from their FAQ: https://upcloud.com/products/zero-cost-egress

> What exactly does zero-cost egress mean?

> We are eliminating any concerns over data transfer fees. This means you’ll enjoy Internet traffic from our cloud services without any fear of accumulating costs.

> How does this differentiate UpCloud from competitors?

> By pioneering the zero-cost egress model, we’re not just changing the game for UpCloud; we’re challenging the entire cloud industry to reevaluate their pricing models and spearhead the industry towards predictable budgeting on cloud computing costs.

While the actual bandwidth limit (https://upcloud.com/fair-transfer-policy) is the same as DigitalOcean and at least an order of magnitude lower than other EU providers like OVH and Hetzner.

View on HN

Your comment doesn't match what's written on the very page you quote: https://upcloud.com/fair-transfer-policy

> Even if you exceed your monthly share, don’t worry, there are no excess fees. We will simply notify you of reaching the fair transfer policy and may reduce the bandwidth of your Cloud Servers to 100 Mbps for the rest of the month.

EDIT For completeness, there is also:

> If you believe to require more transfer per month than the Fair Transfer Policy provides, you may opt in to a paid transfer model at €0.01/GB. This affords you completely unlimited egress with no restrictions.

> Never pay for network transfer, even when your business takes off. Redirect savings towards accelerating your business growth.

If your network speed is capped, that's a bandwidth limit that can break things, especially "when your business takes off"

While this is technically true, it is almost every time false in this case. The network traffic scales with the CPU resources, you use on UpCloud. I know that, because I used their services.

But it would have been enough to just read the links, that are posted here. I encourage everyone to do the same, before posting stuff that is irrelevant and/or plain wrong.

A soft capped network capacity is different from a hard spending cap. They have different risk models, benefits and drawbacks.

Personally I prefer a cap on spending given that the risk of runaway costs has a bigger impact than the risk of runaway of legit network traffic. I suspect most people feel that they are more cable of catching and addressing runaway success, rather than an runaway network problem caused by an undiscovered bug or attack (often intentionally done during off-hours in the middle of the night).

What do you mean? It is still free, just at a lowered speed. Calling it lies is hyperbolic.

You're misrepresenting UpCloud's offering. Their "zero-cost egress" is completely truthful - they don't charge extra fees for data transfer, unlike other providers.

The fair usage policy you linked sets reasonable bandwidth allocations (just like DO), but crucially, they don't charge as much as AWS/GCP. And this is the main selling point here: the egress fees of the big cloud providers are straight up bonkers. UpClouds isn't.

Calling this "lying" is dishonest. They're transparent about both the policy and its industry context. If you want higher baseline allocations, that's fair feedback. But it's a different discussion than accusing them of deception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com