We are writing to inform you about important changes to the tariff structure of our Cloud servers (CCX and CPX lines) and our Load balancers at our US locations in Ashburn and Hillsboro.
What will change?
Starting on 1 December 2024, 01:00 am CET, we will begin charging new prices for newly-created Cloud servers and introduce new amounts for included traffic for Cloud Servers and Load balancers at the US locations in Ashburn (ASH) and Hillsboro (HIL). This also applies to existing Cloud servers and Load balancers that are switched to a different tariff using the “Rescale” function. For any existing Cloud servers and Load balancers you have at these locations, the new prices and the new amounts for included traffic will apply later, starting on 1 February 2025, 01:00 am CET. The price for traffic overage will remain unchanged in the new price structure.
What are the new prices and amounts of included traffic?
Below, you can see a list of the old and new prices and the included traffic.
Product Old price New price Old included traffic New included traffic
CPX11 € 3.85 € 4.49 20 TB 1 TB
CPX21 € 7.05 € 8.99 20 TB 2 TB
CPX31 € 13.10 € 15.99 20 TB 3 TB
CPX41 € 24.70 € 29.99 20 TB 4 TB
CPX51 € 54.40 € 59.99 20 TB 5 TB
CCX13 € 11.99 € 12.99 20 TB 1 TB
CCX23 € 23.99 € 25.99 20 TB 2 TB
CCX33 € 47.99 € 49.99 30 TB 3 TB
CCX43 € 95.99 € 99.99 40 TB 4 TB
CCX53 € 191.99 € 199.99 50 TB 6 TB
CCX63 € 287.99 € 299.99 60 TB 8 TB
LB11 € 5.39 unchanged 20 TB 1 TB
LB21 € 16.40 unchanged 20 TB 2 TB
LB31 € 32.90 unchanged 20 TB 3 TB
All monthly prices are excl. VAT and excl. IPv4 addresses. Why are we making these changes?
With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. The new prices will give our customers the best possible price for the resources they use.
...
So... raising the prices for everybody instead?
They also use the word "tariff" several times without elaborating, as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word.
Seems like intentional deception to hide a standard "we just want more money" price raise.
The word "tariff" has a few different meanings. I'd say they're using it correctly, just not with the same meaning that the word is commonly being used in the news right now.
In my country, "tariff" is seen in several contexts:
* A tax on imports, much in the news since the recent US election.
* A pub or bar's price list is known as the "bar tariff"
* Energy companies offer a selection of "tariffs" i.e. agreed contract rates for usage-based pricing. e.g. a 3-year-fixed-price tariff, a 100%-green-energy tariff, and so on.
* The portion of a 'life' jail sentence which must be served, before a prisoner can be considered for parole.
So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a "tariff", merely unusual.
I am curious if the others are British English? Or Indian? Other?
I'm pretty sure it is in American English. That usage might be ok in British English, but for Americans that terminology is going to be confusing. Before today, I had never heard tariff used for anything other than import taxes. And since this applies to servers in the US, it would make sense not to use terminology that would be confusing to people in that country.
Whereas when talking to consumers they seem to use terms like 'rate' and 'plan'.
When running small companies they still tend to be motivated by other things, such as proving a point, achieving a technical goal or having some cultural influence etc.
It's only when the company grows in size that it becomes this soulless greedy sociopath we are all too accustomed to.
Hetzner grew a lot those last 5 years or so.
Most small and medium size businesses also fit this description. And I don't consider a price hike to be sociopathic or soulless. Greedy, sure. But businesses are always profit focused first and foremost.
So it's not unexpected to use the uncommon in English meaning of the word to describe these changes.
I understand that American english has diverged somewhat, but I would not have expected this word to give so much anguish. I wasn’t even personally aware that americans used it for a particular terminology.
in the meanwhile, us brits will continue using a literal swear word as our most popular version control system and not complain about it. :)
Sucks to pay a dollar per terabyte extra if you're downloading a petabyte per month through your hetzner VPN, but this sure beats raising everyone's prices because two or three companies decided to use Hetzner to build a CDN.
This is why you can't offer unlimited anything, and why we can't have nice things.
It sure reads to me like they raised the base instance price across the board. The biggest increases will be for those using over the new included bandwidth (min 1tb) but they are going up for everyone.
No they're not? AFAICT if I made a CPX11 using 0.1TB/mo, my price just went from 3.85 to 4.49.
> tariff (plural tariffs)
1. A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties themselves.
2. A schedule of rates, fees or prices.
3. (British) A sentence determined according to a scale of standard penalties for certain categories of crime.
...so Hetzner's usage of the word is technically correct™, even though native speakers might not use it in this context.
"I changed electricity provider to one with an EV tariff."
People arguing that’s the only US meaning are just wrong though
The word tariff is often used in telecom to indicate rates and fees for some given quantity of services, and that seems to be the use here.
> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs [...] for other customers who have used much more resources.
It's a classic web host reseller technique of overselling and having it backfire.
I’ve liked using Hetzner before and I’m curious how they’ll go after the market now. This is probably the wrong move though; Cloudflare realized this same fact some time ago but they kept their prices low to avoid cultivating ill will.
News Hacker isnt representative sample that also understands the insustry and the business?
So basically, by getting worked up publicly about this, those people provide free marketing for Hetzner?
It’s very nice to have it called tariff in basically every EU country though. We get green energy tariffs and if it was called something different in each country they wouldn’t be fun.
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.
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
Whatever the reason, rather strange to do this without even a few days of notice.
Am I correct that this only applies to outgoing WAN traffic? Incoming/internal is still free?
Yeah it was cheap - only because the demand was low and they were competing on price.
Now it will only go up.
If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem entirely reasonable.
But some examples of things that are profitable under the old regime, but maybe not at 20x the limit:
API services that consume media, whether to do some business logic specific thing or something specific, e.g. Transcriptions for videos, file conversion API, OCR API provider, etc.
If you try a video app without using WebRTC and peer traffic your bandwidth can blow up too. Even if you use something like push notifications with base64. There are lots of traps that use Bandwidth.
Pulling the price too low in comparison, let's say with AWS, will just make your life harder but will not squeeze them in any way
Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it?
I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?
When people cost twice in one place versus another companies will focus on more expensive but less people intensive approaches.
That is a median "disposable income" (after taxes and transfers), which is not directly comparable to the US figure you cited (which is gross [before taxes]).
I wonder if this has anything to do with how Hetzner operates in each region, they run their own EU datacenters but AFAIK they just rent rack space in the US, so they're more at the mercy of upstream providers.
The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges in the world.
In Europe, and most other regions outside North America, these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of the world.
If you don't care about high upload/download speed from/to NA<->EU then yes, that's a good move. Otherwise closeness in geo is still king.
The real problem is going to be anything more complex than that. Most request-response protocols too chatty and won't send enough independent outstanding requests to fill up the bandwidth delay product of an intercontinental link which will kill the throughput. Also users don't like to wait for slow responses no matter what throughput you can sustain for large transfers.
That is utter nonsense. If the customers who are 'covering the costs' have a problem, they can move? Yet even still they are charging those SAME customers who now actually receive less resources, even if they were using them or not.
Hardly. Some level of cross subsidisation happens in all service of this nature. Depending on use youre either paying or receiving
Most Providers and customers just ignore it as inconsequential though.
Don't increase prices and claim it's to help the little guy.
In the case of data transmission if you were using some data transmission system where you were charged per byte based on the operator's costs (possibly time dependent so the cost per byte might vary depending on the amount of traffic on the provider's network and on the varying real time prices of the networks they connect to) then you would indeed see prices going down over time and performance going up.
Consumers, small businesses, and often even medium businesses generally hate that kind of pricing. They like fixed monthly bills. So providers offer that, setting the amount of data included in that price high enough that most customers won't ever come near it.
That tends to result in the lower bandwidth users actually paying quite a bit more than they would if they had per byte pricing and the higher bandwidth (but not so high as to go over the included data and hit overage fees) paying less than they would under the per byte model.
That can attract more high bandwidth customers and eventually the model of customer bandwidth usage that was used to set the price and bandwidth allowance is no longer accurate and gets adjusted.
Note that this means that price you pay is not just a function of the underlying technology costs--it is also a function of how other people are using the service.
Same thing happens even in non-technology areas. You probably wouldn't go into a fixed price "all you can eat" restaurant just to get a donut and cup of coffee. The fixed price is set to cover people getting full meals. And if a bunch of competitive eaters started coming in every day to do their training at that restaurant you can safely bet that the price is going to go up for everyone or there is going to be an asterisk added to "all you can eat" with a footnote that puts some sort of cap on it.
They are still dirt cheap for cloud and dedicated
If they start fucking people over on the dedicated servers as well, this product is basically dead because I can't find anywhere else that allows me to do this at the current price point...
Unless of course I slap a box under my desk and hook it up to my fiber internet.
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ (bottom of the page)
Hetzner is very cheap and still profitable because classic "economy of scale" and vertical integration. They own, build, and operate all their data centers. This comment goes into more details[1], but it's possible this doesn't really work out in a foreign location like US.
[1]: https://forumweb.hosting/13663-why-are-hetzners-dedicated-ho...
If its mostly the later case they really fucked up their customer communication. They should care enough to provide their customers with time to respond and transparency to (re-)earn the trust a hosting provider requires.
And the bandwidth pricing is still quite cheap, $0.001/GB. Major cloud providers usually charge nearly 100x that (AWS 90x, GCP at 85x or 120x depending on whether you want standard or premium, Azure at 80x or 87x depending on standard or premium).
You used to get 20TB for free and now you get 1-8TB free. If you had to pay for 19TB, that's another $19. If you had to pay for 19TB from a major cloud provider, that'd be $1,556-2,335. Even if you had DigitalOcean, they'd be charging you $0.01/GB (10x) and you'd be hit with a $190 bill.
I think the issue is that in the US, they don't have their own network. They peer with a single company in Virginia for 200Gbps and then pay for transit on 1Tbps. That's a lot of transit to be paying for - and 5x more transit than peering. In Europe, it looks like they have their own network between Finland, Germany, France, Amsterdam, UK, Austria, and Czech Republic. They also have a much better ratio of peering to transit. So they can use their network to carry the traffic to a lot of Europe and then maybe they have peering arrangements to handle most of their traffic when they need to hand it off.
In Europe, they're more likely to face owner economics while in the US, they're effectively renters - and the more their customers use, the more it's going to cost them.
If this were really a cash grab, it's a pretty terrible cash grab. It will certainly impact some users, but the maximum it will impact any user is $19/mo (if they're on a server with only 1TB of included traffic). But most people don't use many TB of traffic. Consuming all Bluesky posts in zstd compressed JSON is 30GB/mo. These weren't servers that had unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps port. They had a 20TB limit. If you were hitting that and intend to continue hitting that, it's another $12-19/mo.
If I had to guess, I'd say that they probably thought they'd expand more in the US and build out a fiber network here (as OVH has done), but that didn't happen and now they're looking at continuing to pay transit for the foreseeable future. Though I feel like the optics of this are pretty bad given that most people probably use less than 1TB and those users will still feel like something is being taken from them (even if they were never using that much anyway).
I have two hetzner shared instances and I am royally pissed by the 20x reduction in traffic allowance. It is also irrelevant to me: over the last 12 months I never exceeded 1TB. My unhappiness on the traffic reduction is purely of a "what if I start using more" type. For which two rational answers is "well you can explore alternatives then" and "d'oh, your average is way under 100GB, it's not going over 1TB". But I still started looking at alternatives.
My feeling is that the reduction is aimed at a small group, but upsets a much larger set of customers who now will start looking for alternatives. Which indicates a typical marketing screwup. My 2c.
But then, I have looked at alternatives before they even offered their US locations (and also for a CA one) and couldn't find anything decent for even nearly the price.
So we can pay a little more and get a little less, or move somewhere else and either pay a lot more or get a lot less
That's not to say they have to keep offering that much traffic if they're losing money (of course they don't), but the way you make changes matters.
AWS EC2: 100GB included and then $90 per TB.
GCP Premium Tier: $120 per TB
GCP Standard Tier: $85 per TB
Expensive by Hetzner standards but still cheap by cloud standards, egress from Singapore EC2 instances is between $80 and $120 per TB for example.
But all prices in this message increase.
It would be so much better if they’d just said “sorry but we need to raise prices”. The attempt to sugarcoat it is insulting to begin with, and it’s only made worse that their backwards excuse comes across as thoughtlessly trampling us.
You purchase a 10Gb/s firewall for $100,000 - you will not be using 10Gb/s traffic for the lifespan of this device.
Applying this to Hetzner:
You sell a service with X bandwidth included free because you know that only Y% is only ever used on average.
Now people exploit the X allowance - spinning up new virtual machines to multiply this already generous allowance to get unlimited bandwidth for a fee 1/10000th of other commercial offerings. Your Y% costing is now completely invalid.
You reduce the allowance 20x to mitigate this.
I can't blame Hetzner at all for this, especially when Google/Amazon/Microsoft are printing money with their insane bandwidth costs. You know they are insane when they then change the rules to say it's completely free if you are migrating to a different provider - suddenly it doesn't cost anything at all for egress? Oh, it was actually upcoming monopoly investigations that might have taken a dim view...
I mean, to pull numbers out of ass, instead of $5 for 1.5 Tb of metered traffic on a 10 Gbps pipe, the $5 pays for 10 mpbs without metering.
I know protecting the client from extra unforeseen charges isn't predatory enough, but maybe some offerings like that still exist.
LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.
I know google has jacked rates (maps etc) and killed services (I used their first paas before it was basically abandoned)
I have argued online with folks about their pricing - my point usually being as soon as you try to do Netflix or YouTube on the “Free” or unlimited or ultra low cost providers - you find out it’s a lie.
My impression was hetzner had started null routing customers for “abuse” who used a lot. No idea if that’s true, but used to be the way the “unlimited” VPS providers did it.
https://www.astuto.ai/blogs/understanding-the-aws-public-ipv... https://www.wiv.ai/navigating-the-rising-tide-of-aws-pricing...
I thought this was to allow them to be more relaxed about the limit (5 per region) which is how they used to control fully free services that cost them.
But an increase for sure - they did note the supply of free ARIN allocations was gone
There are also some EC2 instance classes where upgrading instance types in the same "size" are more expensive, but that is very rare, but I dont believe AWS has ever pulled the rug out from under you.
An increase in price has been the rule rather than the exception for recent upgrades for vanilla instance types, e.g., c, r, m types in the newest generations (6 -> 7 for x86, 6 -> 7, or -> 8 for Arm types).
The increases have been modest though, perhaps around 10%. You get additional CPU and sometimes minor increases in other resources on the newer types.
Also, we live in a time of high inflation. We should expect price increases because they value of the dollar, euro, etc. is going down.
Herzner is an established player, not a startup, this either shows a lack of regards for customers, or that they aren’t very well run.
Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not catastrophic.
Bill increases don't have to be catastrophic to be bad. Remember that businesses/startups range from being well funded to not-funded-at-all-trying-to-survive. Depending on the country, 20€ can be a lot of money.
I've been a big fan of Hetzner for the last decade, and I understand and agree with their motivation for this change. However December 1st is effectively almost tomorrow, they could have easily given us a month's notice instead.
Your traffic bill is increasing by 20 bucks per month and that isn’t ok? If you’re running any sort of business and that isn’t ok I’m not sure what to tell you.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/new-featu...
See notes 1 and 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/
I may know one of the culprits -- whom I will leave unnamed here. But the company, who is fairly popular, built out their own CDN via putting a bunch of nginx caching proxies on various Hetzner servers around the world. It apparently was really cheap and very effective. Given that they were bootstrapped and this was prior to Cloudflare really being that popular, it was a great strategy. This was true like 8 years ago, so maybe it has changed in the meantime.
The engineers said 20TB in aggregate was fine but likely didn’t consider the “bad apples”. Marketing obviously wants to use the biggest numbers and then finance comes in with the hammer and dev points to egress as an simple way to upset rhe fewest number of real customers.
I prefer to assume naivety over malice/negligence.
Like, this is not Netflix tripling the prices over a few years.
I couldn't, don't call it unlimited if it's not unlimited, using what you paid for is not a "misdeed".
It’s the same with cloud storage providers. First give out a massive amount of storage and rapidly gain users, then cut it down after blaming people for “abusing” it. How about you advertise your correct capacity to begin with?
They are simply deflecting blame for their own enshittification.
"Culprits" because it was their (legal) use of the service that made Hetzner rethink and change their service plan.
Having said that, I am usually empathetic to these kinds of 'unlimited' deals because even though they aren't really 'unlimited', they do tend to be generous to the average use-case and average user .. Inevitably, and unfortunately, someone decides to test the limits and the entire thing collapses.
It reminds me of the Blockbuster "No more late fees" policy, which was a really good customer-friendly policy (speaking as someone who regularly returned rentals late) .. but then they were sued because an aspect of the policy had Blockbuster charging the cost of the rental to the customer if it wasn't returned in some period of time .. and because that charge looked like a 'late fee' they got sued. Urgh.
- in USA no peering exchanges exists and you need to pay for your traffic most of the time. Few big operators in US and they enforce this.
Looks like some deal wasn't renewed and they lost a big chunk of cheap pipe or/and some of their upstream providers decided to do something with routing.
The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included
I don't think they know what rights are...
Massive loophole.
And since internal traffic is free, you just need to cycle the ingress servers.
Pay for the cheapest instance, get 20TB of egress. Churn em and burn em.
So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher than that of European and Singaporean customers?
I wonder what it consists of.
* π x thumb = ballpark figure
Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with better pricing than established players, it stands to reason that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be the heavier users.
I wouldn't be amazed if Hetzner benefits significantly from peering, which is much more widespread in US than in Europe. Interesting piece on this from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
It's quite possible that their costs really are significantly lower in Europe. No idea what things are like in Singapore.
They write that transit bandwith costs are similar in Europe and the USA, but Europe has more peering — it's around 50% of their traffic rather than 20%.
> The corollary is that in Europe transit is also cheap but peering is very easy, making the effective price of bandwidth in the region the lowest in the world.
Maybe if the government mandated it at some point, like phone number portability was mandated.
That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books), but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth’s value is highly dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to create a seamless trading market.
There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this problem. I remain highly skeptical.
* they have to pay that much more for (outbound) traffic in the US
* miscalculated their US expansion and are trying to recoup
* they think customers will only bitch, but stay anywaysUntil this thread, I have never encountered the term "bar tariff" for a list of drink prices, or "energy tariff" instead of rate. Those uses are simply not American English, and you would be misunderstood.
Hetzner is a German company so I find myself wondering if this is a British usage, or a mistranslation of the German word "tarif" that should be "rate"? (A common mistranslation category known as "false friends".)
21 occurrences of "tariff" on one of British Gas' pages: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/off-peak-electric... ("Your energy provider may offer time of use tariffs and cheaper night-time electricity rates.")
Is there any further distinction between a "tariff" and a "rate" in British English? The example sentence you provide uses both, which makes me wonder if there's even more to the picture here.
An EV electricity tariff might have a cheap night rate, and a more expensive day rate. Another tariff might be entirely variable rate (price changes every hour).
Wiktionary defines a tariff as "A schedule of rates, fees or prices." so I think my feeling is correct.
Isent this how every ISP works?
You and all your neighbors can subscribe to 1Gigabit because they don't anticipate everyone maxxing out the bandwidth at once?
I'm guessing somehow the traffic usage patterns of their USA customers was very different to their EU counterparts, or the cost of expanding network capacity was a lot higher than anticipated.
It's a bit of a shock for sure but it seems this model is a big part of how they can maintain their slim margins.
It seems like a straightforward way to run a business.
Breath of fresh air in the modern cloud era tbh.
If you are spinning up a $5/mo VM, using 19.5TB of bandwidth on it, then spinning it down and firing up the next, you are a cost center.
This change boots those customers off the service entirely without having to write complicated ToS. The price change for average customers won't even be noticed on the next monthly bill, so it's likely seen as a win/win at the moment.
At some point the marketing dollars stop getting spent as heavily when you reach a certain market saturation. Calling this luxury pricing is certainly a stretch considering it's an order of magnitude less than the large cloud providers still. It's just not below cost any longer.
IMO 2025 will a big year for being forced to run lean (no DevOps teams trying to emulate Google, ditching pointless microservices architecture, reducing JavaScript churn etc) and having to be agile in responding to vendor price changes. And of course CTOs desperately thinking AI will reduce the wage bill with no impact
The price change is one thing, the MASSIVE change in traffic you get for it is another. Together, they suck. to go from 20Tb to 1Tb feels like a massive bait-and-switch.
So would having multiple servers but one going over the 1 TB limit cause an overage, or do they look at the total across all servers?
Fuck.
Literally the business model of every "shared resource service model" on the planet. Hetzner's entire business model is built on this... them acting like they're shocked to discover this is... disingenuous at best.
For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets.
This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable.
I expect Linode to change the price on me, eventually.
I’m immediately saving money with the server I built out of mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS solutions.
The only reason it’s near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS instances have barely any computing power assigned to them.
For the same price as one game server I’m running something like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real CPU cores (Ryzen 3600).
I probably should have been a little more clear that I don’t think VPS systems are bad or anything, it’s just that they aren’t well-suited to game servers and hardware in my closet is well-suited to it.
I was spending almost 20 euros a month for a single Hetzner cloud instance that performed worse than all my gaming VMs on my closet computer.
But if I was serving a public website or app I would probably not want it going through my home internet.
Doesn't seem to pass the "it'll pay for itself in a couple months" claim.
Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).
Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty.
Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of that service for that fee.
On the other hand, a flat out rack takes more power than an idle one. So this isn't the same thing at all.
It's not nefarious: you pay a bit more than the compute you use would cost on a fractional basis, and in exchange the cost of entry is dramatically reduced, spikes in usage get absorbed, etc.
It's a win for everyone involved unless usage patterns shift and suddenly there's never a surplus to go around. At that point prices will quickly climb to roughly what dedicated resources cost.
(*and frankly it's not just VPS, a lot of cloud services rely on everyone not trying to max out their quota at the same time to even function, let alone profit.)
You want to maximize it, the hosting definitely prefers someone who pays and doesn't use, so they can double-book that server.
Hosting companies count on a certain <100% average CPU usage, and this factors in to their business model in the shared CPU plans. That's literally why those plans exist, because they are getting more users on a machine by counting on less than 100% usage. The users get a lower price and the risk of getting throttled in certain situations. Nowhere in their product description do they promise you can use 100% all the time. If you want that, you go to their dedicated plans.
Don't get so emotional, but if you do, at least make sure you aren't wrong first.
The fact a usage is common doesn't mean it is profitable or that it needs to be supported for a hosting service to be profitable.
Mining crypto used to become quite common as well a decade ago and tall hosting services banned this exactly for because there was no way they could be profitable and offer decent QoS.
1. Require 20TB of bandwidth / month
2. That bandwidth can't be shielded by Cloudflare and others?
Is it like... real time video streaming? Gaming servers? I can't imagine a web app getting anywhere close to that.
I run a mid sized NFT art creation website that generates both images and GIF's (https://mintables.club) and with over 100000 users at peak, it only needed about 1.5TB of bandwidth.
1. the demo instance of my OSS software which is a bring your own storage Dropbox like UI for SFTP, S3, FTP, and every protocols imaginable: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash People tend to come in the demo to upload / download tons of stuffs
2. the docker registry for my oss stuff since I was kicked out of the docker open source program and now need to find a new place to store all the images. 10 millions downloads over the last few years, it does add up very quickly way above the 20TB limits if your image isn't super slim and try to selfhost everything
Do you have problems with illegal content shared over your service? I wouldn’t ever offer something like this because I wouldn’t want to deal with someone uploading child porn or stuff like that.
Pet peeve but yes. It should not, in 2024, be considered a niche use case to deal with.. video. We’ve become accustomed to YouTube and their impossible-to-beat free hosting. But it’s really pricey to do streaming and so yes, we should expect large bandwidth being available. “Who needs X” is a question that should be reversed, instead we should ask “why not?”. When we have good affordable infra, we get cool new stuff and everyone benefits.
Cloudflare is not trustworthy and you don't always need to pay the "protection" fee. I.e. B2B where a day offline doesn't matter.
Cloud pricing is insane compared to Hetzner with regards to storage and CPU power. If you have some Linux knowledge it's perfectly stable. Support is top notch.
For 50€ per box you get 10gbe which is also nice. Not everyone needs 100% IaC like the big hyper scaler offer or geo redundancy etc.pp... even Hetzner has an API and you can even terraform their dedicated servers to some degree. It's 15 to 30 minutes vs. seconds but who cares.
https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
For example compare the CPX11 to the cheapest similar offering from DO:
CPX11: 2vCPU, 2GB, 40GB storage (NVMe), 1TB transfer, ~$5 per month
DO Basic: 2vCPU, 2GB, 60GB storage (non-NVMe), 3TB transfer, $18 per month
Add 2TB more transfer at Hetzner and you're at ~$7 per month. Still a bit less storage though, let's also compare it to the CPX21:
CPX21: 3vCPU, 4GB, 80GB storage (NVMe), 2TB transfer, ~$9.50 per month. Add 1TB of transfer and you get more of everything for ~$10.50, ~40% less than at DO. And bandwidth overages at DO are about 10x as expensive.
We can also compare a higher tier:
CPX41: 8vCPU, 16GB, 240GB storage (NVMe), 4TB transfer, ~$32 per month
CPX51: 16vCPU, 32GB, 360GB storage (NVMe), 5TB transfer, ~$63.50 per month
DO Basic: 8vCPU, 16GB, 320GB storage (non-NVMe), 6TB transfer, $96 per month
Looking at their pricing just now, it looks like it's $6/month for that droplet, which changes things a bit. Now, as long as you're willing to get droplets purely for the bandwidth allotment, DO's bandwidth costs $6/TB. That's more than almost every Hetzner option listed by the OP, but not all of them.
I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere.
I don't know how they're still in business.
It's like, imagine a magic wand that, if waved, would make life a little better for 99% of society, but much worse for 1%. Would it be moral to wave that wand?
I think that alone kinda nullifies the threat of an algorithm. The entire reason why they're such a massive problem is because Google et al. refuse to operate proper support hotlines to help people and even if they do have a support line (Facebook infamously doesn't have one and wants you to go through the courts to contact them), the support staff aren't actually equipped to help people beyond regurgitating canned support page links. You can't solve a malfunctioning algorithm with another algorithm or by forcing a human to behave like an algorithm.
It's not a big secret that the best way to get yourself in front of actual support if GAFAM screws you over is to complain about it on HN because this is where SREs lurk that can actually punt your requests through to people that can look into it.
Hetzner at least gave a direct answer to explain the reason.
Just by having a third option, most of the downsides of doing the evaluation incorrectly could be mitigated. Of course, that's generally much more expensive (and often uneconomical) than saying no, so it's usually not done.
I've been on the 1% side of things quite a few times due to having new credit and (presumably) various data brokers not knowing every detail about me yet, and the experience really, really sucks.
I’d rather have $10 permanently lost for a month of VPS than being banned after 5 days setting it up because I’m traveling and my IP is “suspicious”. Which has happened to me.
I have all my stuff on vultr now.
They have 400 GBit/s of DTAG transit.
Showing that they are rich as fuck without saying it.
They are bizarre.
Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in the USA, but they're not anywhere else.
When I pay for something, now the other party has the money, that's how money works. If I trust them that little, I should probably be using escrow but this costs extra and so it imo doesn't make sense to pay that fee for every transaction - as one does with this chargeback guarantee thing. Probabilistic societies where you're excluded based on bad odds or credit scores is what you get with that system (I've been on the losing end of that, not because I've ever had any debt (too little money) but precisely because they had no positive data because I never needed a loan, and so you can't pay for stuff in certain countries because they require a credit card)
I can only speak for Norway, but this doesn't normally mean reversing the charge. It's assumed that, if you bought an X, you wanted an X. So the seller is required to get you an X of good enough quality to actually do the job, and if that isn't what they were trying to sell... well, then they won't be in business for long.
Normally this means repairs or replacement, of course on the seller's bill.
The US seems much more geared to seeing every interaction as... I want to say 'combative'.
They look like "card tasting" payments which fraudsters do to check if a card is valid.
I’ve also had no problems using them in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Korea…
They certainly are very common in much of Europe. Buying stuff on credit might be not that common but plenty of people have credit cards themselves (even of they are effectively used the same way as debit cards)
To be fair not sure if you comment is just sarcasm.. but I’ve never had any issues using a credit card on Hetzner or pretty much any other European company
In fact I don't feel like a hosting service should need to do this at all. If you pay your bills and aren't on the Stasi blacklist you should be good to go. I don't want or expect the likes of Hetzner to be responsible for policing.
It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.
My home DNS server blocks all requests to .ru and .cn, but I can't do IP-address-block blocking because shady Chinese companies or individuals just need to rent some computing on AWS or DigitalOcean in order to become indistinguishable from American companies. And specially DigitalOcean seems to be the favorite platform for doing scams.
We're OK with having license plates attached to our cars, but not to be forced to expose our nationality to infrastructure providers? There's really no privacy-sensitive stuff which needs to be protected in that case.
I think that having a blacklist with some ID (bank account, national ID, CA cert) that's hard to replace is a good compromise.
You could try giving people moral purity tests before you let them in (doesn't some of the tildeverse work like that?) but I think it's a dark road.
It feels like it's a check to get a general feeling if things sound plausible. Like no Russian accent for a German name, some knowledge of the surroundings, a valid phone number.
Seems like a really weird choice of question. Thinking of germans, a bakery seems more likely something they'd know of; perhaps a supermarket works more internationally (I'm sure there's exceptions to that as well). Maybe the distance in driving, cycling, or public transport minutes to surrounding cities could be a universal question to ask
I don’t care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.
My experience in the EU has been nothing but stellar.
Perhaps they could implement some way to do a 1-cent bank transfer from an account with a name which isn't on their fraud list, but as a simple step it seems pretty normal to use your regular internet connection (that ties the IP+timestamp combination to a real-world subscriber) and not some anonymity service
Although it would be nice if we could be anonymous on the web, when abuse traffic is involved (more than posting a comment on some forum as an anonymous source or something), I don't know how that'd be possible to reconcile
I don't want any business critical infra managed by a company willing to be that aggressive in blocking accounts, while also having slow customer service to resolve access issues.
This isn't particularly common, but it's not uncommon either.
Then it worked, and I've had no problems since. I'm concerned about them failing to charge my virtual debit card some month in the future and losing data, but it hasn't happened yet.
If there was anything else nearly as cheap, or if it wasn't for personal use, I probably would have given up and used another service.
In some places companies are happy doing their own thing, don't need every customer, don't need to be everything to every customer, and won't fight for business in the same way. Does that limit them? Maybe? But I suspect not enough to be a problem most of the time.
Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.
If you're used to American customer service, you may find European customer service to be blunt or curt, and many people would perceive that as rude even though it is not intended that way. Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this isn't really a problem.
If the answer is actually "no", then the customer service person will tell you it's "a little difficult". You're supposed to understand that that means "no, we can't do it". Of course, many foreigners don't get this, so then they'll change gears and just say "it's impossible".
>If you're used to American customer service, you may find European customer service to be blunt or curt
I don't see accusing your customer of fraud as simple bluntness or curtness.
>Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this isn't really a problem.
If they don't want to expand their business outside of Europe, I guess that approach is OK.
In my experience a lot of German businesses are like that, they'll woosh you away for any slight (perceived or real). So it is definitely a cultural thing. Of course my small sample doesn't mean anything in regards to german culture, but at the very least it proves that this corporate culture is indeed a thing.
have you met the internet yet
If this is exactly what they said it was probably either language barrier, like mis translation of "try again, making sure it's all spelt correctly" OR just that you really did use fake information, in which case here, folks will just say that. You can get told off for not saying please when ordering coffee, I like it but can understand how anyone conditioned to american customer service would be horrified.
Aside from knowing their sh*t and being available at short notice, you'll get along very well after you learn how to communicate with them. By being concise, precise, and blunt of course...
It's just German bureaucracy. When I wanted to register domains with Hetzner few years back, they asked me to print multiple pages of forms and contract, fill out, sign and... fax it back.
It’s definitely a culture shock for people from these cultures to encounter businesses who reject their business, whether it’s deemed risky or not worthwhile.
It was eye opening to me to spend time working with cultures where I had to convince businesses to deal with me rather than the other way around. Some people get extremely offended when businesses don’t bend over backward for them, but that’s not going to work when you encounter cultures who operate differently.
Last month I tried to create an Instagram account, I kept being instabanned on 5 different devices with different IPs. No recourse possible. HN is full of horror stories like this.
I think most online operators that have "spend $3 with us" tiers have to be super vigilant about card transactions, and when you fall into the cracks you're a bit SOL.
Herzner get flack because they are probably the only German entity that the average HN user has dealings with. Anyone who has had exposure to German bureaucracy will recognise the hostility.
Either way, it’s their process so you’re of course welcome to go elsewhere if you want. I don’t see it as a “bad thing” for companies to require some level of trust.
I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.
Drivers licence as a personal ID is not really a thing in Europe. It's accepted at some places, but either passport or your state provided ID-card is much preferred.
Maybe they just don't want to sell to Americans, which is always allowed I guess, but setting up an American VPS provider and not accepting the standard American KYC verification methods would be a rather incompetent way of doing business. It'd be no different from doing business in Europe and only accepting drivers licenses and not accepting passports/ID cards for identity verification.
And we are talking about 300M people here, which is about 4 times the population for Germany.
If they hate US residents they should declare that clearly on their website, not wasting customers' (and their own) time.
That would still exclude non-driving customers, which means allowing at least one additional form of ID per state - suddenly you have to support at least 100 IDs for US customers, while German customers have exactly 1.
Not sure how you arrive at them "hating US residents", that's a weird conclusion to get to.
When in Rome ...
I'm happy customer for years and will be even with these changes.
The big question is, were you using real information or did you put in fake info?
They're still in business because they're cheap and pretty reliable. But being cheap means there are things you can't get with them but can with others. For example, you can't pre-pay for the entire year ahead of time.
“If you make advance payments by bank transfer to our bank account, the amount will be posted as a credit on your account. We will automatically deduct this credit on your account when we process future invoices.”
Many people didn't even get to the point where they can log in.
Your case is unfortunate, and I totally understand why you'd be taking you business elsewhere, but probably an outlier.
Otherwise, we'd need to ask the same about AWS et. al. as we've definitely seen more than enough wrong account closure complaints on here.
They're growing year after year, so clearly they're doing something right.
I know a few people who use Hetzner, smaller EU registered companies, zero issues. Also extending limits is just one click and gets approved after a few minutes.
And I totally get why they have to be strict. Blocked IPs are becoming an epidemic, I stopped using Digital Ocean, because I always got bad IPs, that were blocked everywhere. Also Hetzner is suffering from that. People are renting servers for little money and do bad things with the 20 TB traffic they get.
They grew their business with this offer, and then degenerated into what you described.
That said, $1/TB for bandwidth overage seems pretty fair. I empathize with the complaining but if the new price is such a ripoff everyone should be recommending what cloud VM provider they're migrating to for a better deal.
When someone runs a dedicated server these days, does this mean a one-off linux install? Or is this more likely to be a docker install so that it's portable?
Would this be a best practice to avoid hosting vendor lock-in?
If you want to run k3s, k8s or docker, you can, but personally I find those too complicated. NixOS is much easier to deal with, and achieves the same result.
A non virtualized Linux install isn't more locked in than a docker install, as for a bare metal server you are choosing your own OS. I have done the docker thing on a bare metal server, but that's because I wanted to run multiple services on it and isolate them operationally.
Again, sorry for my ignorance here, but if not virtualized, how does one move hosting providers otherwise? My experience is limited to either running all the bash commands in an install readme, or installing a docker image.
So there must be something in-between, to recreate a linux install elsewhere?
> Replying here as your other question is at max thread depth:
btw, you can click on the time of the post, and reply there when there is no reply link in the main thread.
There's a class of tools like chef, ansible, puppet.
Or you can just package your services into debs and run a Debian repo to install them from, same as the base OS
Possibly there's something closer to dockerfiles out there by now as well
>btw, you can click on the time of the post, and reply there when there is no reply link in the main thread.
Cool, thanks!
Makes me puzzled about the point of concealing the reply links, I guess it just adds a bit of friction?
If you don't have above options or simply don't want to do it this way, you can also bootstrap via SSH. But instead of manually typing in shell commands, you will automate it in some way with custom scripts and/or tools like Ansible.
Even if you're not using virtualization there are still plenty of ways to migrate your servers.
One of the most common approaches (which was the thing before docker took over) is managing servers with an IaC approach using tools like chef, puppet, ansible, saltstack etc.
With IaC you define your entire infrastructure in configuration files and deploy those configs to your host. It's a bit like docker swarm but for managing physical and/or virtual servers instead of containers.
Another popular option, often paired with IaC, is to create your own pre-configured *nix images tailored to your needs. For example, you might have specific images set up for your load balancers, db servers, file hosts, or other roles in your stack.
I've worked at a company where we handled migrations using dd. Technically that's also an option. Wouldn't recommend it tho.
You'd buy a computer, plug an install USB drive in, and install ubuntu.
Then you'd connect to it via SSH, configure it, maybe install docker and set up your docker containers, etc.
A dedicated server is very similar.
The server is sitting in a datacenter at hetzner, and you usually install an OS with a button in the management UI, sure.
But everything afterwards is the same. You just connect via SSH, install docker or k8s and your services, maybe an nginx, etc.
You also have an option to request KVM access. That allows you to control the server as if you had connected a keyboard and monitor to it. You can even enter the BIOS to diagnose issues, if you'd like.
Personally I've got an install script that automates everything and sets up kubernetes and automated encrypted backups. Then I just deploy everything else with k8s.
But other than that, it's an actual bare metal machine and I installed Ubuntu on it and threw in a giant heap of services that have been running on it for more than a year now.
I am just curious what your options would be now if you wanted to migrate. Would you just copy your bash history to a local text file for reference, and then repeat the steps on a new server?
I definitely recommend using docker compose or similar even in a one node deployment versus just installing and running things on the host linux system like it’s still 1998. Having a single directory to back up and a single file defining all of the services that can easily be redeployed is very convenient.
> At light workload levels, the native host performs better than Docker. However, as the workload increases, both Docker and the native host show similar performance, with the difference getting smaller
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376557310_Comparati...
DNAT, layered file system access, likely duplication of libraries if you don't pay much attention to your containers.
[1] https://www.proxmox.com/en/ [2] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/introduction/
I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad times to come.
But no, last I looked a week ago or so it was still the same price.
$1.50 might very well cover the cost, but even if it’s a loss leader then it’s entirely negligible.
The mythology around the hot dog price makes people think they’re getting a screaming deal, though. It’s perfect marketing material.
And 1.50 is cheap now but was relatively expensive when the combo launched in 1985 (for comparison, a Big Mac combo with fries and a drink was 2.59, a KFC combo was around $3).
Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from 2024: "'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip said." [2].
Sources:
[1] https://www.425business.com/news/costco-ceo-craig-jelinek-on...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/05/31/cos...
Think about. Imagine they sell 100 hot dogs per hour. A $0.25 difference means $25/hr in a store doing many orders of magnitude more revenue each hour.
It’s nothing. The way they play it up in the media gets a lot of attention and builds goodwill, but it’s entirely meaningless to their bottom line.
It’s amazing that people eat these stories up, though. I’ve heard so many people repeating this story as if it’s some amazing secret.
Personal anecdote. A few years ago, I lost a lot of sleep on a domain renewal at OVH. Their incompetence was mind-boggling. A less common tld was the only slightly challenging bit. After a week of calling and emailing, and on the verge of the domain lapsing, I gave up and sent someone to the tld registry with cash.
Also, do search for OVH SBG2 should you have missed that.
As you mentioned I would stay away from them for things like domain hosting. Just use them for cheap compute, etc.
Neither has ever caused me a problem that didn't feel like "potentially having this level of problem occasionally is entirely in keeping with how little I'm paying" basically.
The pain begins when you need support. Just like you, I have lost a lot of sleep over domains held hostage by their incompetence (for almost a year in one instance). Lesson learned, never use OVH for domains.
The support for their dedicated servers is just as bad, mind you, but short of a hardware failure you really don't need them. I have several years of uptime on all my current services.
So for personal projects their vps/dedicated is still a fantastic value.
Well except that time one of their datacenters burned down, likely due to insufficient fire suppression, and the data backups were also lost because they kept them in the same building as the originals.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
These reports criticize OVHcloud for having no fire prevention system and no power cut-off on the site, for using wooden floors, and for a free-cooling design that created airflows that spread the fire. The reports also say that water was detected near electrical systems before the fire broke out.
It takes quite a while to regain trust after shitting the bed that badly.
I asked that question Hetzner support and they admitted doing the same
the OVH contract relating to automatic backup stipulates that a backup of the VPS server is scheduled daily, exported, and then replicated three times before being available in the customer space, and that the storage space allocated to the 'back-up option is physically isolated from the infrastructure in which the VPS server is set up.'
I had packet loss on my server. They asked me several times to reboot my server into rescue mode and leave it there for 10+ hours until their senior technician could look into it at an unspecified time of day.
After a month of doing this 3-4 times, they finally admitted that their switch is overprovisioned and there was no ETA. This problem happened in 2 locations.
Also had a problem with the failover ip failing to move. Again they told me to reboot into rescue mode and leave it like that for hours. No fix.
I've left OVH entirely after being a customer of theirs for over 10 years.
> OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client
but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would they eat those costs for you?
I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history:
> it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then
> I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection advertised to be capable of 500mbps×24h = 5.4TB/day... that's reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a 5$/month VPS
Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to saturate their network switches they’ll add one, to figure out who’s disrupting everyone else’s QoS.
(I think they mostly do this so that customers can see and verify that any DC-level peering relationships, or per-customer site peering contracts [a.k.a. "OVHCloud Connect"] are being taken advantage of to flow the customer's traffic. But it's convenient for other things, too.)
Yes, of course. Having flow data (or monitoring ports/interfaces) for traffic engineering and management is pretty essential, not least for determining when capacity upgrades are needed.
I understand both sides of the argument here. The idea of offering "unlimited" is appealing because most users of a typical 2GB RAM virtual machine (as an example) consume less than 1TB of bandwidth per month. Offering unlimited bandwidth removes the hassle of overage charges/billing queries and eases customer concern/friction. Both sides benefit from this.
However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth?
Should providers avoid offering unlimited bandwidth unless it's truly unlimited? From an engineer's perspective, yes, I agree. But this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"—just to address a handful of users who take full advantage of it.
It's tough, so IME most such providers leave something in their terms that allows them to intervene in extreme cases but typically exercise restraint in doing so, usually only doing it manually if they notice that 'extreme' usage is damaging other users experience e.g it's serious and prolonged usage.
Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either has to raise rates for everyone or they have to start claiming some uses of bandwidth are "egregious".
The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user from paying even more than the too much you are already charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users), you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes out the window :/.
The real reason any of this works is just that people in fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time, and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS than they often do today, but everyone would be paying little enough that this idea that it is a big customer "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over sudden utility overages.
What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not low usage users subsidising high usage users, it’s OVH margins. Nobody is being subsidised. Low usage users just make OVH more money than high usage users. OVH doesn’t mind because per user costs are actually low and they are already competitive at that price without adding more complexity to their product mix. Users which would lead to an actual loss are rate limited.
Personally I would say if Amazon makes a profit selling you a book and makes a loss shipping me some shoes which I return, the loss was paid by Amazon, not by you.
What happens is roughly that:
- You are costing 1$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 4$. They are happy. Nobody offers you a cheaper alternative so you are stuck paying 5$ anyway.
- You are costing 4$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 1$. They are happy as marginal costs are low anyway.
- You are costing more than 5$. OVH severely rate limit your bandwidth to cut their costs and wait for you to leave because the service is now useless to you.
I did not miss this, and it was part of my point: the only reason this makes any sense at all is because these providers are ripping people off on bandwidth, which is how they have a margin so large that they feel a need to hide it from people under this kind of ridiculous pricing abnormality.
What is awkward is just accepting that and helping to make it worse by advocating for making it easier to kind of hide that fact: bandwidth is a commodity product, and these pricing games aren't pro-consumer because they somehow help people not have to worry about one month getting ripped off too much... they are anti-consumer because they enable the perpetuation of the state of affairs wherein people get ripped off in the first place.
The bandwidth providers know this, but they--of course ;P--like their excessive margins... but, if you just stopped claiming this was pro-consumer and realized what was actually going on here, the idea that a margin so excessive as to be able to essentially make the usage for the median user irrelevant should indicate a nigh-unto-ridiculous level of market distortion.
Like, we shouldn't sit around and just tolerate these margins. And that this particular pricing trick helps make these margins a bit more stomached by people really sucks! And in some sense I get it that it does make it easier to stomach... but... only because I think people are just buying into the idea that this must be a reasonable price :(.
And--even then--it doesn't fix the other problem I talked about (which I explicitly hedged as being in the world where the price wasn't set up to gouge everyone): when Facetime came out, it overnight was going to cause everyone with an iPhone to suddenly need more bandwidth, and so network providers temporarily needed to ban it or charge more for it; we see the same thing with the step up to video streaming services from basic web browsing, leading to providers feeling a need to zero-rate.
The reality is that bandwidth IS a limited common resource being shared at that provider--the same as any other product where the price isn't being distorted: this is the whole reason we use markets for this stuff in the first place--and the pricing of it at different providers should encounter market forces to drive it down closer to cost... except we are trapped in a local minimum here by people who refuse to understand that unlimited schemes cost more, not less.
If there was significant gains to be made by being more aggressive on the low end of the market, providers would already be doing it (and they are - OVH 5$ offer is quite aggressive). There is a reason nobody actually offers a better deal.
So you prefer to pay $4.50 for your vm + 47.12126 cents for 460Gb data transfer , rather than $5 for your VM with unmetered data transfer?
I think by the way that the sensible answer is what DO/Linode etc do which is allocate some included data transfer per VM and pool it across your account. That's honestly a very sensible balance from my viewpoint, but they then charge you quite alot for overage around 1-2c per GB which is ~10X the "fair price".
It's reasonable for OVH to prevent that, and it's also reasonable for OVH to explicitly and clearly define the limits up front.
It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers dont understand that transit costs blend with port costs depending on destination, and some destinations are effectively ‘free’ to send/receive from (fixed port costs only, no marginal costs), and other destinations are not (marginal costs associated with transit supplier fees).
The billing model consumers want is a simple BW used calculation, without facing the reality that if they consume their entire BW allowance as quickly as possible, it incurs order of magnitude higher costs than if they consume it at a trickle over the whole month.
Like:
> Generous bandwidth limits*
> *see this link for details
Irrelevant. If you sell a vCPU with enough bandwidth to feed your 1GBps 24/7/365 needs, and you charge $5/month for it, then it matters nothing what's your personal notion of reasonable. What matters is the service plan offered by the cloud provider and the performance indicators they are contractually obligated to meet.
Indeed, and those indicators are specified in the contract, not in the headline product description. There are a lot of people unhappy that those indicators in this contract are not specific enough. Those people shouldn’t buy these contracts.
(Also, if you use your 1Gbps port at full speed at the most peak time for bandwidth utilisation, for 37 hours in a month, and not at all outside of that, assuming 20 cents a megabit with 95th percentile billing, the costs you’ve incurred to your provider are $200. Also it doesn’t matter at all what you do after those 37 hours, the costs to the provider are the same. You doing 300TB in a month costs the same as you doing 16TB, if you do the 16TB the ‘wrong’ way.)
> Yes, of course.
So it's not unmetered as advertised or am I misunderstanding that word?
> this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"
How so? If they want to be relaxed about it, the terms can say that you can burst more (e.g. "you can use 500GB/month, and burst to 5TB for two months of every two-year period; we'll send you a notification email whenever this happens so you're not caught by surprise"). If they don't want to be flexible, they can mention the hard limit that they are going to enforce regardless of whether they call it unlimited without asterisk. Either way, the buyer would know what they can actually use and doesn't have to guess
They don’t put a specific hard limit because doing so both limits their own flexibility as a service provider and creates a target for abuse by users.
Some places will offer a choice between faster metered and slower unmetered. That seems like a good compromise to me. A nice big link should cost the host a single digit number of dollars per 100Mbps, so it's not hard to find an option where everyone is happy with the speed and pricing.
The unmetered issue involves other providers, and plenty of them are up front about it too.
„… data center had wooden ceilings, no extinguisher, and no power cut-out“
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...
AWS is $220 (us-east, r6a.2xlarge instance, 1yr reserved)
70 EUR for 64 GB with 8c/16t, 1 TB local NVMe
123 EUR for 128 GB with 16c/32t, 2 TB local NVMe
But I only pull dedis from hetzner; my VPSen are all ovh based. So please nobody expect my experience to generalise without triple checking the terms just like I did in the process of signing up for those systems.
Their big selling point is that they truly provide unmetered connections.
As someone with the exact same setup, thank you for strengthening my confirmation bias.
How are you handling storage? That is the only issue I'm struggling with for a small 3-node deployment.
A postgres database running on a single node will experience some downtime during (re)deployments or when moving across nodes, but should be pretty quick depending on the size of the database. For true HA database, CockroachDB is supposed to be compatible with postgres, but I haven't had a chance to play with it.
As long as you don't factor in the cost of the effort to make that work as seamless as it sounds.
Trying to be multicloud by choice, unless you have a very unique use case, which you probably don't, is simply admitting you are incapable of calculating the cost of being multicloud. This would get you horrible pricing, as you just showed your hand.
Eco is clever, because they reuse good hardware pieces to assemble new servers, instead of throwing out as garbage...
Have been a very happy user with several servers for quite some time.
Anyone else looking to migrate. https://www.serverhunter.com/
I did panic a bit when it happened but my Linode just keeps working so I’m not unhappy.
With that said, Hetzner's prices are still cheaper and I've never had issues with their service, but I feel gaslit by this announcement.
"I’ve been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they’ve made a feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of “fairness”."
Hetzner is a company know for it's precise pricing structure. An increase in prices would be correlated to an increase in costs, and in fact the next paragraph Hetzner writes:
"With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible "
Bottom line, the US imposes tariffs, this increases the prices of imported products, of which Hertzner is one, (Servers from Europe)
How can you write an entire article to complain about a price increase and not see that it was actually your country that increased the price.
They're using tariff to mean price, which is an unusual choice and likely because it was written by someone from Germany. This would not necessarily sound out of place to a German speaker as "Tarife" is a common way to describe differently priced plans for any kind of service.
Though given the political context, it would probably have made sense to use a different word.
Not only do they share an etymology (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing. It's also used in a bunch of other European languages in essentially the same way, with either a similar or identical spelling.
It's only US English where some of the meanings that are still common elsewhere are no longer used. It's actually kind of amusing that Americans would struggle to understand the meaning of an English word, but a French or Italian speaker would understand it. I wonder if there are any other words like this.
Take "gift", for example: "Gift" means "poison" in German, despite both the English and German word deriving from the same Proto-Germanic root, meaning "to give".
> (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing
In this very thread you can find a pretty good counterexample to that proposition, at least in American English.
US English may have dropped that meaning, but British English still uses it in this way, as do many Europeans when they speak English. It’s a correct translation.
That said, sometimes I'm right so I find a balance in the upswings and downswings of confidence
I think the US has been scaling compute for both AI and mining the last year, so it makes sense
> US imposes tariffs
That didn’t happen yet and isn’t even 100% guaranteed to happen. So maybe it would be reasonable to wait?
Also what makes you think they are shipping their servers from Europe? How is them being an European company even relevant?
Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).
People probably spam-provisioned cheap CPX boxes to get cheap bandwidth.
Also, complaining about a "large 27.52% price increase" is kind of absurd when the absolute value of the increase is just under 2€.
That seems backwards? They're not hogging anything, they're paying for network they're not using; this is excellent for Hetzner.
I wonder if their cost base has changed significantly. Singapore having just 1TB included makes sense because in Singapore traffic is charged differently and costs a huge amount for all companies. I wonder if the colo provider for Hetzner in the US has screwed them over in some way.
So is bandwidth going to the cable?
I am asking that because I never quite understood 3g/4g/5g costs. In my youth it was $0.10US for a text message. Now in my country, no one would pay to send a standard text. It's free even on PAYG.
I'd imagine there is similarity?
Unless you are a big enough fish (FAANG size) in the internet pond to do free peering with all the big boys, the contract with be negotiated for a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth (specified in megabits or gigabits per second), not like the terabyte like in the consumer LTE context.
So yeah, people get ripped off, just like with SMS in the past. Most don't know this or think it's fine, because "cloud" has benefits that justify the costs in the end ("I don't have to pay for sys admin!").
Cellular towers aren't cheap: you need to install quite a lot of them, especially in big cities!
I live in Arizona, but have always rented Hetzner servers or VPNs in Germany. I imagine the service is much the same using servers in the USA?
For what it is worth, I have also have used 2nd-hand resellers like SoYouStart (OVH). You get what you pay for, but ballin on a budget is totally possible.
Back in the day I used 1&1, I wonder how they are faring these days. I am sure there are dozens of other viable providers, you just need to shop around.
"With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced. The new prices will give our customers the best possible price for the resources they use."
I really like hetzner and their service quality, but that does leave a bad taste... I seems like they badly miscalculated.
Only outgoing external traffic is counted.
I'm always afraid to use paid services to host my hobby projects, because what happens when some malicious or stupid actor with huge bandwith hotlinks an image from my site or downloads it in a loop?
What would be perfect would be a way to set an upper limit of say 100 TB per month after which the cloud server does not accept outbound traffic anymore and I get an email.
Or is the network speed already enough of a protection? Their site says it is a 1GB connection. That should limit the traffic to 300TB per month? If so, that would also be fine with me.
This behavior, and the cute little "cancel anytime!" has made me pause suggesting Hetzner in my circles as I re-evaluate their company.
If it was a basic, or private CDN, for example, the lag time might be pretty negligible to stream out of EU for the extra bandwidth.
Not only are the per-server prices higher, but the drastic cut in included bandwidth (without a corresponding option for bandwidth pooling) means I'll be paying significantly more despite my usage being well within "low traffic" by their standards. It’s frustrating that Hetzner never introduced a bandwidth pooling option for customers where it would make sense, especially in scenarios like mine where usage is highly imbalanced across servers.
At this point, Vultr and Linode are starting to make a lot more sense, even with their more expensive traffic pricing, since both providers offer traffic pooling. This feature would have significantly softened the blow of Hetzner's pricing changes, but instead, they’re pushing costs onto loyal customers who don’t fit neatly into their new model.
What's most troubling isn't even the price hike itself, but the 3-day notice period. For those of us running auto-scaling infrastructure, this is essentially immediate - new instances will pull from the new pricing tier right away, even if existing instances have until February. This kind of abrupt change makes it hard to trust them for production workloads.