As a Hetzner bandwidth enjoyer affected by this, this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great, because if you get rug pulled you just migrate to another provider with better prices.
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.
I use OVH (VPS’s specifically), which offers unlimited bandwidth. In my experience they’ve been both reliable and affordable which is a rarity. I run a few applications that require high amounts of bandwidth, so silly caps like the ones that Hetzner are imposing are a non-starter for me
That's what a friend said also, who was very surprised by the bandwidth bill another friend was getting for hosting a game. I then looked in the ToS:
> 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? It's not clear but I doubt you can incur the equivalent of thousands of euros of bandwidth charges on most other VPS platforms for nearly free (included with a cheap VPS)
OVH and reliable, in the same sentence? They're cheap, so suitable for projects you don't mind going poof.
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.
OVH is the most set and forget experience I've ever had. They email me maintenance notices 3 or 4x a year, but I don't think I've ever had any downtime. It just stays happily humming along for years. I think I pay something like 60 a year for it.
I've only ever been on OVH and was surprised to discover a few years ago that bandwidth is not only unlimited but also costly at most other hosting companies (including cloud ones).
Is it an option for you to just move the servers to one of Hetzner's Europe location? I guess a lot of high bandwidth applications don't require low latency.
As someone who's already using the dedicated server for a ton of things, I have been really grateful. But now, I have a new question, are they going to do this to their dedicated servers as well?
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?
It's an actual entire machine given to you. I remember there were a few options for me from Ubuntu to Debian to Red Hat to choose from, but all of them would also have preconfigured system users and some level of administration done by the provider.
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.
Replying here as your other question is at max thread depth:
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.
> A non virtualized Linux install isn't more locked in than a docker install
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.
If the server hoster supports it (Hetzner apparently does), you can enable KVM and install a previously prepared image.
If the server hoster & hardware supports it, you can login remotely to the server management interface (like HP iLO) and install an image this way.
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.
There's no lock-in possible. It's a bare metal Linux machine, you do whatever you want with it; you can replace it with the PC under you desk if you want.
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.
Can vouch for HiVelocity under the previous owners anyway, not sure what's going on over there now. My companies launch was bandwidth and compute intensive and they handled it well.
It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"
I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the streets to lay cable.
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 created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in.
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 think this might be a cultural thing. HN, SV, and the market for IaaS/SaaS products is a bit of an American monoculture, where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong desire to make the customer happy. I think this is mostly a good thing and especially a good way to build early stage companies, but in my experience it's less present elsewhere.
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.
I'm not advocating for anyone being a nasty person, but there are significant cultural differences again for what it means to be rude. In Japan the cultural expectation is that saying "no" is rude in a customer service situation, which is far beyond the expectations of most of the world. This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no".
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.
>This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no".
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.
Without reading the actual wording sent, and knowing which culture the sender was from, this is all just speculation. I'm more interested in challenging the assumptions that we have about our own expectations in customer service being universal. From the rest of this thread it sounds like there is a commonly held opinion that Hetzner customer service is blunt, and my point is that that may be fine and maybe customers should not expect to be treated in a particular way all the time.
Really? In France you're treated most of the time as a potential fraudster first, then maybe when planet aligns as customer in some services like train, tramway, post, banks (the state mandates to justify things like moving and using your own money you already paid taxes on) and various administrations.
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 always a balance between how much fraud you allow and how many real customers you reject. They set their threshold at an interesting level, but maybe they're happy with that choice.
You're right. But unfortunately this mindset moves us closer and closer to having algorithms exclude people from society and life. And as the stories already told here show, it can happen to any of us for no apparent reason.
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?
The problem with this mindset (incredibly common in the US; much more so than in the European countries I've lived in, at least) isn't thinking probabilistically, and trying to determine the likelihood of a prospective customer being a fraudster. It's really just that there are only two possible outcomes: Yes and no.
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.
There’s nothing particularly scary about “algorithms” making these choices since it’s just people at these companies choosing and implementing the algorithms. It wouldn’t get better if those humans weren’t allowed to use algorithms to make these choices since decisions.
Well you got a human answering the support hotline.
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.
You're making choices like that every single day. Sometimes with reversed percentages. Even posting this message may be on average a tiny loss for the world. (It's meaningless in the end and burned some energy to give one person a mini dopamine boost)
What type of fraud exactly? You mean like stolen CCs? It feels very medieval as a financial trust system if every little vendor can’t trust payments, even when you pay up front? Like this is in some ways worse than cold hard cash. And then we pay VISA premium on top of that, for the convenience of being mistrusted..
If they pay up front then dispute, the company will suffer extra charges. With enough of reports, their payment processor fee% goes up and impacts all their payments.
Paying up front doesn't really mean much, because if the credit card info is stolen, the actual owner will report the transaction and it will be reversed.
I was customer for 10 years, but for business I needed a second account. Banned immediately even after I submitted a passport copy. Worked after contacting their support. Still happy customer (with both accounts). I think they're just very strict and get their (un)fair share of stolen credit card or stolen identity signups.
Same with me a few years ago. Their support told me that they didn't want me as a customer. It was my first interaction with them. I swear I'm just a regular nerd with a credit card :D
A credit card? That... makes some sense, then. I'd be wary if anyone trying to pay with one of those as well; they're much too rare, and I've heard it's easy to unilaterally reverse charges.
Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in the USA, but they're not anywhere else.
Always felt like they were in the business of blaming and hating their customers. Cloud providers that nitpick and judge every aspect of their customers’ business details and technicalities are a huge operational risk. This archaic practice is the reason generic cloud orchestration was a must, and it’s just not needed anymore.
I don’t care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.
When I ordered a VPS at Netcup (a Hetzner alternative) they called me and asked me for the name of the hotel next to my place to check if I really lived at the address I provided. I guess that if i would have needed to look it up, that is, struggled a bit with the answer, they would have denied me as a customer.
I had the same thing, but this was a business address while I was working remotely and had no idea about the area. Told them as much on the phone while looking the answer up on Google Maps. They just accepted that and opened the account.
If they can look it up then so can you! Maybe it filters out lazy scammers, but it doesn't sound like solid KYC to me.
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.
I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.
Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on the ID.
I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.
OTOH there is Azure where a very sophisticated Twillio phishing service was hosted. When reported to abuse Microsoft replied they were a valid customer. A week later it finally came down.
I'm not sure what was your concern - Hetzner is obliged by law to make sure their signing up a real person or a company and that their servers are not used for malicious intent.
It's pretty obvious what the concern is, no? Hetzner's process seems to be blocking real people with no malicious intent (myself included) from creating accounts, even when we try to provide proof. Obviously this means we end up using a different provider instead. Though in my experience attempting to do business in Germany, this kind of forbidden-by-default perspective is quite common there, so they probably don't see it as a concern, I guess.
I mean your transaction probably got flagged as fraudulent (like if your postal code didn't match your card), it's not that mysterious.
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.
Because they're so cheap they have to worry about spammers and other sorts of abuse. It's more cost effective for them to refuse dodgy-looking accounts.
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.
You can actually pre-pay them. Under the transactions section in your account, it says:
“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.”
This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US tariffs.
"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 not importing the VMs from Europe. And there are no new tariffs yet, inauguration is in January so there are only various announcements so far.
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.
It's British English. Tariff is used to mean import duties, business prices (e.g. "phone tariff") and also prison sentences (e.g. "whole life tariff").
Though given the political context, it would probably have made sense to use a different word.
As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay.
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.
You have a CPU? Or a core, that is 1 of many cores on a system where your VM can be and will be pre-empted by the host node’s scheduler without your VM having any control or insight into the process?
What's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.
Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
Any decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than $5 linode. For example search for optiflex https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to go for i7s
Hetzner, in volume, is about 5x cheaper than limped for my workloads. Limped is 2-3 times cheaper than AWS, but AWS has a few things going for it that make it worth it for some workloads.
Don't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel.
Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).
Oracle has people jumping all kinds of hoops to get that service too. Just like Hetzner. Took me a few tries with different credit cards then tried to get one for my friend with their card and nothing would work. Great free service though. That ampere vm with 24 gb ram is quite capable.
My take on this is that there’s a price increase on power consumption and Hetzner decided to bump the prices now; perhaps they are facing a power price increase in January 2025. Do Ashburn or Hillsboro publish their power prices and have they increased in the past year?
The bandwidth reductions look like they bring the US in line with Singapore, i.e. typically 20TB of bandwidth in the EU and 1TB in Singapore, US moving from 20 to 1.
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.
What are some examples of applications people are running that:
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
> the demo instance of my OSS software which 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
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.
Not really scared as I take action the second I hear about nasty things. The most recent events were people creating shared links pointing to FTP servers that had revenge porn and sharing those on a whacky telegram account, another annoying one is people who keep trying to brute force other people accounts on cloud providers even though there's a protection in place to throttle to 20 connection attempt per second, effectively degrading the free service for everyone else and getting me kicked off from cloud provider like the most recent one being Hostinger
Structural monitoring in engineering for example. You need high quality pictures and have lots of drone data and files need to move to hyper scaler or on premise for GPU processing.
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.
BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month to be in good standing within that tracker’s community
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.
There are many data streams you may want to process that take lots of network traffic. CT logs, monitoring aggregators, web crawlers, etc. For the traffic you initiate, there's no proxying/caching you can do.
Besides needing it: Not having to fear that an attacker spamming the machine with Mail or web requests or something incurs a bug traffic bill gives better sleep at night.
> > I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know I’m over-provisioned; that’s not the point).
> Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).
Why would that be a problem? They are paying for their storage, compute and memory. It was mainly the bandwidth that was underpriced and that was what they weren't using.
Maybe I'm too young to remember the good times, but to me 1and1 were just the European GoDaddy. Mostly targeting small businesses who didn't know any better and ripping them off with bad services at inflated prices, through a lot of well targeted marketing. Selling things like email with a 250MB inbox and 2MB attachment limit far beyond the time when that was a reasonable offering, and at a far higher price than that was worth (being worth roughly zero).
As a Hetzner bandwidth enjoyer affected by this, this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great, because if you get rug pulled you just migrate to another provider with better prices.
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.
I use OVH (VPS’s specifically), which offers unlimited bandwidth. In my experience they’ve been both reliable and affordable which is a rarity. I run a few applications that require high amounts of bandwidth, so silly caps like the ones that Hetzner are imposing are a non-starter for me
That's what a friend said also, who was very surprised by the bandwidth bill another friend was getting for hosting a game. I then looked in the ToS:
> 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? It's not clear but I doubt you can incur the equivalent of thousands of euros of bandwidth charges on most other VPS platforms for nearly free (included with a cheap VPS)
OVH and reliable, in the same sentence? They're cheap, so suitable for projects you don't mind going poof.
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.
OVH is the most set and forget experience I've ever had. They email me maintenance notices 3 or 4x a year, but I don't think I've ever had any downtime. It just stays happily humming along for years. I think I pay something like 60 a year for it.
I've only ever been on OVH and was surprised to discover a few years ago that bandwidth is not only unlimited but also costly at most other hosting companies (including cloud ones).
Shout-out to Microtronixdc, my colocation provider. For their $55/month/U colocation package, they provide unmetered gigabit for no additional cost.
https://microtronixdc.com/
Is it an option for you to just move the servers to one of Hetzner's Europe location? I guess a lot of high bandwidth applications don't require low latency.
As someone who's already using the dedicated server for a ton of things, I have been really grateful. But now, I have a new question, are they going to do this to their dedicated servers as well?
This change only affects VPS services in the US, and for what it's worth, Hetzner does not offer dedicated servers in the US.
I am very ignorant here, so my apologies, but...
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?
It's an actual entire machine given to you. I remember there were a few options for me from Ubuntu to Debian to Red Hat to choose from, but all of them would also have preconfigured system users and some level of administration done by the provider.
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.
Replying here as your other question is at max thread depth:
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.
> A non virtualized Linux install isn't more locked in than a docker install
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.
If the server hoster supports it (Hetzner apparently does), you can enable KVM and install a previously prepared image. If the server hoster & hardware supports it, you can login remotely to the server management interface (like HP iLO) and install an image this way.
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.
>So there must be something in-between, to recreate a linux install elsewhere?
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?
It's a fire extinguisher feature; for when the thread has too many, too fast replies.
Talos Linux, Flatcar Container linux...
Isn't a Docker image an OS image and a bunch of shell commands?
You can use a configuration manager like Puppet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_(software)
For Hetzner you rent actual physical servers. There is nothing virtualized there, it's real hardware without abstractions.
Thanks, I guess what I meant to ask is that is it normal for people to virtualize their own dedicated server these days by default?
Would this be a best practice to avoid hosting vendor lock-in?
There's no lock-in possible. It's a bare metal Linux machine, you do whatever you want with it; you can replace it with the PC under you desk if you want.
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.
DataPacket, ReliableSite, HiVelocity, and FDCServers among others have great bandwidth prices.
Can vouch for HiVelocity under the previous owners anyway, not sure what's going on over there now. My companies launch was bandwidth and compute intensive and they handled it well.
It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"
Wait what? Did they actually raise the hotdog price?
I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad times to come.
I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the streets to lay cable.
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?
I created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in.
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.
I think this might be a cultural thing. HN, SV, and the market for IaaS/SaaS products is a bit of an American monoculture, where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong desire to make the customer happy. I think this is mostly a good thing and especially a good way to build early stage companies, but in my experience it's less present elsewhere.
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.
It's not a cultural thing to accuse customers of committing fraud their first interaction.
Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.
I'm not advocating for anyone being a nasty person, but there are significant cultural differences again for what it means to be rude. In Japan the cultural expectation is that saying "no" is rude in a customer service situation, which is far beyond the expectations of most of the world. This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no".
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.
>This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no".
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.
"Try again, and this time provide real data" would be considered very rude even in Germany.
Without reading the actual wording sent, and knowing which culture the sender was from, this is all just speculation. I'm more interested in challenging the assumptions that we have about our own expectations in customer service being universal. From the rest of this thread it sounds like there is a commonly held opinion that Hetzner customer service is blunt, and my point is that that may be fine and maybe customers should not expect to be treated in a particular way all the time.
Well, we haven't seen the data.
Really? In France you're treated most of the time as a potential fraudster first, then maybe when planet aligns as customer in some services like train, tramway, post, banks (the state mandates to justify things like moving and using your own money you already paid taxes on) and various administrations.
> I think this might be a cultural thing.
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 always a balance between how much fraud you allow and how many real customers you reject. They set their threshold at an interesting level, but maybe they're happy with that choice.
You're right. But unfortunately this mindset moves us closer and closer to having algorithms exclude people from society and life. And as the stories already told here show, it can happen to any of us for no apparent reason.
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?
The problem with this mindset (incredibly common in the US; much more so than in the European countries I've lived in, at least) isn't thinking probabilistically, and trying to determine the likelihood of a prospective customer being a fraudster. It's really just that there are only two possible outcomes: Yes and no.
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.
There’s nothing particularly scary about “algorithms” making these choices since it’s just people at these companies choosing and implementing the algorithms. It wouldn’t get better if those humans weren’t allowed to use algorithms to make these choices since decisions.
Well you got a human answering the support hotline.
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.
You're making choices like that every single day. Sometimes with reversed percentages. Even posting this message may be on average a tiny loss for the world. (It's meaningless in the end and burned some energy to give one person a mini dopamine boost)
Arguably, we wave that magic wand every time we decide not to donate to starving children in third-world countries. Which is pretty often!
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
What type of fraud exactly? You mean like stolen CCs? It feels very medieval as a financial trust system if every little vendor can’t trust payments, even when you pay up front? Like this is in some ways worse than cold hard cash. And then we pay VISA premium on top of that, for the convenience of being mistrusted..
If they pay up front then dispute, the company will suffer extra charges. With enough of reports, their payment processor fee% goes up and impacts all their payments.
Paying up front doesn't really mean much, because if the credit card info is stolen, the actual owner will report the transaction and it will be reversed.
I was customer for 10 years, but for business I needed a second account. Banned immediately even after I submitted a passport copy. Worked after contacting their support. Still happy customer (with both accounts). I think they're just very strict and get their (un)fair share of stolen credit card or stolen identity signups.
You also don't know the strain brought by continual streams of fraud that their support has to deal with, all for being a relatively cheap option.
Same with me a few years ago. Their support told me that they didn't want me as a customer. It was my first interaction with them. I swear I'm just a regular nerd with a credit card :D
They are bizarre.
A credit card? That... makes some sense, then. I'd be wary if anyone trying to pay with one of those as well; they're much too rare, and I've heard it's easy to unilaterally reverse charges.
Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in the USA, but they're not anywhere else.
Never had an issue with credit cards on AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr and Scaleway.
I haven't done business in Germany or used German banks -- is it hard to get them to reverse charges?
If they don't want any customers outside of Germany, they should just say so.
Always felt like they were in the business of blaming and hating their customers. Cloud providers that nitpick and judge every aspect of their customers’ business details and technicalities are a huge operational risk. This archaic practice is the reason generic cloud orchestration was a must, and it’s just not needed anymore.
I don’t care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.
There’s nothing about cheap that implies terrible customer service. Or rather, the reverse isn’t necessarily true.
Are Hetzner Europe and US run by different companies or something?
My experience in the EU has been nothing but stellar.
I believe so, so that it does not run foul of the CLOUD Act.
When I ordered a VPS at Netcup (a Hetzner alternative) they called me and asked me for the name of the hotel next to my place to check if I really lived at the address I provided. I guess that if i would have needed to look it up, that is, struggled a bit with the answer, they would have denied me as a customer.
I had the same thing, but this was a business address while I was working remotely and had no idea about the area. Told them as much on the phone while looking the answer up on Google Maps. They just accepted that and opened the account.
If they can look it up then so can you! Maybe it filters out lazy scammers, but it doesn't sound like solid KYC to me.
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.
I thought Netcup either colo'ed at or rented servers at, Hetzner? Maybe this was a ways back or have they always had their own DC?
I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.
> I don't know how they're still in business.
They're growing year after year, so clearly they're doing something right.
Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on the ID.
I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.
OTOH there is Azure where a very sophisticated Twillio phishing service was hosted. When reported to abuse Microsoft replied they were a valid customer. A week later it finally came down.
I'm not sure what was your concern - Hetzner is obliged by law to make sure their signing up a real person or a company and that their servers are not used for malicious intent.
It's pretty obvious what the concern is, no? Hetzner's process seems to be blocking real people with no malicious intent (myself included) from creating accounts, even when we try to provide proof. Obviously this means we end up using a different provider instead. Though in my experience attempting to do business in Germany, this kind of forbidden-by-default perspective is quite common there, so they probably don't see it as a concern, I guess.
Yep. Same thing happened to me. I was not able to get my account working. Ever.
I have all my stuff on vultr now.
They are still in business because 99.99% of customers are not affected by this.
I'm happy customer for years and will be even with these changes.
Because they provide good service to most customers.
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.
I've been reading about how great Hetzner for years but i couldn't get past the sigup page where they require a credit card just to create an account.
Is that a US thing? I'm reasonably sure I did not give them my debit card.
Honestly if you are providing computer resources, that's pretty standard now and one of the only lines of defence against abuse
I mean your transaction probably got flagged as fraudulent (like if your postal code didn't match your card), it's not that mysterious.
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.
It's been ages, but once I got something cancelled due to a site not properly distinguishing between shipping address and card billing address.
Because they're so cheap they have to worry about spammers and other sorts of abuse. It's more cost effective for them to refuse dodgy-looking accounts.
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.
You can actually pre-pay them. Under the transactions section in your account, it says:
“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.”
They must have changed that. I remember reading on their site at some point that they didn't accept that.
That's a particularly, but unfortunately good example of how awful they are as a company. The sooner they get pushed out of business the better.
> I don't know how they're still in business.
They have 400 GBit/s of DTAG transit.
Showing that they are rich as fuck without saying it.
This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US tariffs.
"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 not importing the VMs from Europe. And there are no new tariffs yet, inauguration is in January so there are only various announcements so far.
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.
It's British English. Tariff is used to mean import duties, business prices (e.g. "phone tariff") and also prison sentences (e.g. "whole life tariff").
Though given the political context, it would probably have made sense to use a different word.
It's most likely imprecise wording due to a linguistic false friend from German (Hetzner is a German company); see also my other comment.
"Tarif" indeed roughly translates to "plan" in this context and can be used for all kinds of plans/rates/tariffs, not just the import duty kind.
Sorry, is Hetzner a company from Canada, China, or Mexico? Are digital goods & services indicated to be under tariff as well?
Probably more likely has something to do with increased energy costs.
Because of announcements of tariffs?
I hope this experience teaches you to be more polite and open-minded even when you think you know what you are talking about.
Cool: then maybe they can precisely explain the full breakdown of these changes instead of hiding behind a word that explains nothing.
As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay.
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.
You have a CPU? Or a core, that is 1 of many cores on a system where your VM can be and will be pre-empted by the host node’s scheduler without your VM having any control or insight into the process?
What's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.
Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
Any decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than $5 linode. For example search for optiflex https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to go for i7s
Couldn't you just buy a used decent PC and run this on its CPU + GPU and get faster/better results?
Hetzner, in volume, is about 5x cheaper than limped for my workloads. Limped is 2-3 times cheaper than AWS, but AWS has a few things going for it that make it worth it for some workloads.
It's most likely a vCPU. So even the caches are shared.
I don’t find that to be all that impressive.
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).
Completely unrelated, but I’m surprised how many people actually use the Ryzen 3600, from desktops to servers, it seems to be everywhere.
Don't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel.
Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).
Oracle has people jumping all kinds of hoops to get that service too. Just like Hetzner. Took me a few tries with different credit cards then tried to get one for my friend with their card and nothing would work. Great free service though. That ampere vm with 24 gb ram is quite capable.
My take on this is that there’s a price increase on power consumption and Hetzner decided to bump the prices now; perhaps they are facing a power price increase in January 2025. Do Ashburn or Hillsboro publish their power prices and have they increased in the past year?
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264427
Lots of dupes of this one today
107 points/50 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668
88 points/38 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264789
The bandwidth reductions look like they bring the US in line with Singapore, i.e. typically 20TB of bandwidth in the EU and 1TB in Singapore, US moving from 20 to 1.
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.
It’s kind of not the brightest to both raise prices and reduce services at the same time, who’s in charge over there? Maybe I’m missing something ?
What are some examples of applications people are running that:
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.
I have 2 services that run above those figures:
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
> the demo instance of my OSS software which 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
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.
Not really scared as I take action the second I hear about nasty things. The most recent events were people creating shared links pointing to FTP servers that had revenge porn and sharing those on a whacky telegram account, another annoying one is people who keep trying to brute force other people accounts on cloud providers even though there's a protection in place to throttle to 20 connection attempt per second, effectively degrading the free service for everyone else and getting me kicked off from cloud provider like the most recent one being Hostinger
github's registry (ghcr.io) is the other big free one
Structural monitoring in engineering for example. You need high quality pictures and have lots of drone data and files need to move to hyper scaler or on premise for GPU processing.
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.
BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month to be in good standing within that tracker’s community
I've always wondered how ratios like that are supposed to work. Surely the ratio has to be 1.0, averaged over all users.
Yeah, this is it.
> video streaming?
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.
There are many data streams you may want to process that take lots of network traffic. CT logs, monitoring aggregators, web crawlers, etc. For the traffic you initiate, there's no proxying/caching you can do.
Besides needing it: Not having to fear that an attacker spamming the machine with Mail or web requests or something incurs a bug traffic bill gives better sleep at night.
PeerTube comes to mind.
blockchain nodes
I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know I’m over-provisioned; that’s not the point).
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€.
> > I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know I’m over-provisioned; that’s not the point).
> Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..).
Why would that be a problem? They are paying for their storage, compute and memory. It was mainly the bandwidth that was underpriced and that was what they weren't using.
Those are some steeeep drops. I'm curious how they settled upon such numbers.
Presumably by looking at their competition, and realizing they’re still a better option.
Staying competitive swings both ways.
Hetzner suck. So do Vultr (OVH?). People learn about the bad things cloud providers do but still go crawling back
Used Linode for years. Brilliant service. Not sure how the Akamai takeover will pan out.
Anyone else looking to migrate. https://www.serverhunter.com/
Well the Akamai takeover was 2 years ago, so fairly certain whatever you have now is how it ended up panning out.
I did panic a bit when it happened but my Linode just keeps working so I’m not unhappy.
Was it two years ago?? I could have sworn it was less than a year ago. Anyway yeah I’m happy with Linode
They specifically mention tarifs, maybe its political. Can't expect that kind of thing to get thrown around without international response.
Is anyone old enough to remember 1and1? Similar arc?
Maybe I'm too young to remember the good times, but to me 1and1 were just the European GoDaddy. Mostly targeting small businesses who didn't know any better and ripping them off with bad services at inflated prices, through a lot of well targeted marketing. Selling things like email with a 250MB inbox and 2MB attachment limit far beyond the time when that was a reasonable offering, and at a far higher price than that was worth (being worth roughly zero).
They started with free .com registration.
They grew their business with this offer, and then degenerated into what you described.
They still exist, called ionos now: https://www.ionos.com/
Yes, I should have been more clear. It was another Germany? based provider that gave excellent, even free prices... until they didn't.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264427
To be fair their pre-change allowances were insanely generous.
Yes this hit me. We use a ton of traffic. Any alternatives? Although the pricing isn't too bad even with the increase, nice to have backups.
Checks out
Not sure why this is front page news.