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hey thanks, I didn't notice before... I think I am not even signed up for their newsletter - doh.
also agree on the 'not convincing' part for the billing. from my pov it doesn't even make sense to bind any prepaid amount to a single service. the need to refund will cause much more work and totally counters the intention of hourly billing.
like you said, if you want to be able to spin up and down instances in a glance, there is no sense to have to prepay a 6-month bill everytime.
so. either we got it all wrong (including their phone support) or they just jumped for the marketing term 'hourly' to react on the hetzner relase. maybe they change their billing policies after they notice the mess that will cause with billing.
Felix usually sounds reasonable in their forums and listens to whatever people point out.
we'll see about that.
their prices also changes a lot by that. the VPS 1000 f.i. has been 4.99€ per month on a six-month term before (while on sale) it came with 4core, 4GB, 80GBSAS.
now it comes with 4core, 8GB, 80GBSSD but is a whopping 9.49€ on a six month term.
or you need to pick the new VPS 500 instead which halves the cores and disk and still is 5.29€ ...
so while one of course can get rid of the boxes more easily, even after hours or days and only pay for that, it will increase prices for normal customers that don't even bother about that hourly stuff.
I understand they did that to match the prices of hetzner and other better, and be also more comparable for the price guarantue marketing stuff. but it won't help the case for real users I guess ;-)
TL;DR; agreed, not my cup of tea so far either.
forgot to say: if ordering a new product now, you will have to agree to their latest AGB/TOS which now state that mining is forbidden.
and they will then apply that to older services one may have in account too, once you agreed ;-)
maybe a way to get rid of all those people that bought to mine on BlackFriday, even if they just go and try out on the new lineup for a few hours, LOL
Nice summary. Spoken to their phone Support and also commented on their FB page where they posted the deal. You may be able to find my little conversation with them :-)
tagging @Neoon for appropriate rage-gifs to commiserate the prepay requirement. Perhaps an aloof alpaca or facepalm montage? Thanks!
I've now read your FB conversation. :-)
Although I find netcup's conception of hourly billing coherent, it's not the usual conception (as a number of you have pointed out), and people will tend to misunderstand it. In general, their conception will probably work okay for German customers, but once international customers come into the picture, there will be a lot of misunderstandings and frustration. In this connection, I wonder how soon they will update netcup.eu -- it may take a while.
Personally, I think that they should have kept their old system and not introduced hourly billing (if this is their conception of hourly billing) and simply tried to beat Hetzner a bit more on the monthly pricing.
Ah you have? Hehe :- )
100% agree though. If I have to prepay anyway well then fuck that "hourly" billing and give me the usual stuff.
Nope my little friend
Yeah, no - their T&Cs are an absolute shitshow.
Prepay, onerous terms and lack of NVME, nothing for me to see here.
Meanwhile in Latin America...
Maybe a sassy llama is fine too?
I only see a Abrechnungsperiode: 3 Monate, and in the order page I only see Abrechnungszeitraum: alle 3 Monate ... maybe I'm missing something
The price for the small VPS was 1,99 Euro incl. VAT (19 %) the last months.
In their forum I read there were several hours downtime for Meldown and Spectre updates - no Live Migitation.
OVH with half-day downtime because of power supply and Netcup with hours of downtime because of normal updates, only if I would have a hobby website.
for root server it was 30 minutes downtime
My storage server and VPS both went down for about 30min. I received an email from netcup a few hours before downtime.
ok, let's do this ...
The thing is, that is nothing special.
You need to prepay 6 months, its even no NVMe, just SSD.
Yes its cheaper with VAT compared to Hetzner and has 20TB more Traffic, but if you gonna use 40TB I am sure you need to get a dedi, since it will also use some decent ammount of CPU and I/O.
Also about AntiDDOS, Netcup does include 5Gbit, which is a joke these days, Hetzner did not mentioned how much, but they got over 2Tbit network capacity, so I would guess something with at least 100Gbit.
So still, Hetzner is the better option.
And here we thought @jarland DO 1 month prepaid hourly billing is bad enough.
agreed, still it is nice to see options and competitive developments. The six-month pre-pay (if that is really the case) is the major "nope" for an hourly offering as far as I am concerned. Hopefully netcup may see fit to re-evaluate that detail (or not, what do I know....)
I think this is the first time I've seen @Falzo do anything but fellate NetCup. NC's "hourly" billing is complete horseshit, and their billing overall is awful.
I've got a #3 credit with them because they never seem to apply it when bills come due.
I think 30 minutes downtime is to much. Perhaps you are happy with this, I´m not. Some users report downtimes around 3 hours ...
Normally it should be done this way: Live Migration for maintenance.
My cloud servers are for instance at 1and1 - no downtime for maintenance. It´s more expensive: 1 vCore, 512 mb ram for 5,- Euro incl. VAT (incl. VMWare, Load-Balancer and if you prefer Plesk).
they go by a 99,6% per year SLA which easily covers those three hours. but updates to patch against exploits and security risk won't even be counted towards the SLA...
VAT, VAT
The hetzner thread is drowning in a post bombardment and this one here is way down in the list and largely ignored?
Let's be fair. Being at that: NO, I do not think that @netcup is but a me-too, a second place follower. For a start, nobody creates that kind of product in a week, let alone in a day. Both companies worked for weeks, probably even for months. Both companies sank 6 digits money into it. In fact, it's perfectly possible that netcup was the real first ... but hetzner got wind of it and pushed theirs out early to be the official first.
Second import point (well, in my minds eye anyway): There are (at least) two worlds in hosting, namely the cloud one and the host-centric one.
The former means a lot of things to different people but one might say that cloud is about floating (like clouds) entities that (just like clouds) can frequently change their gestalt considerably, from basically hibernation up to ultra-active needing mountains of resources all over the globe.
The latter being and staying centered about a "machine", which might be physical (dedi), pseudo-physical (dedi slices), or virtual (all the diverse vpss and containers) - but the mental model (and usually the implementation) is a machine of some kind with largely fixed parameters.
netcups offer seems to target mainly the "machine" mindset but bringing in some cloud elements; the "machine" is less rigidly defined and more dynamic - which is a great thing for the machine minded of us (like me). Our problems and scenarios and uses cases simply are not "no you see it, now you don't", "now it's a globally present cluster, now it's basically in hibernation". What we do need, however is to cope better with quite different loads at different times, to name an example.
The third thing is payment. The cloud mindset is like "pay pretty much nothing for 5.5 months but then have a global cluster at your fingertips for two weeks" - which is something only a) globally present, and b) very money-loaded corporations can do. Frankly, I think even for Hetzner (who is quite large) the cloud road carries high risk with it.
netcup not going that road (at least not yet) but taking more of a "machine with some cloud elements" route is perfectly prudent and realistic and attractive for many customers. As for asking 6 months payment I see no problem. While I understand that that puts off the cloud people, we machine mindset people have not problem at all with that as long as we can get pro-rate refunds in case we have to shut down a box.
Side note: one element that drives me away from @Hetzner_OL is Kathy, or more precisely, their fucking obvious and kind of brutally implemented "let's bring in the fish" attitude. Unless you have bought right now and have a clearly defined, small, and short question, she just completely ignores you. Plus, frankly, she seems to have to hand over to colleagues a lot. Plus, there seems to be a lot of problems in handling the
fishcustomer load. Thanks no. Maybe later once everything is working properly and Hetzner has actual support and not just Kathy, the harvest handler.I'll follow the netcup story attentatively and with interest. Chances are that I'll bring my 2 or 3 $/€ per month to netcup. No matter with whom I'll go, I'll write a review after some time.
I heard that the authentication of Netcup is very troublesome
Oh, come on... Having a marketing member answer basic questions is better than having NO representative at all.
It's far better to have someone tell me "Please create a ticket with XYZ" regarding a complicated matter rather than getting wrong/misleading information.
The latest offer by Netcup is decent, though they should just drop the "hourly billing" part for now as it's misleading at best.
@Aidan
My point was not "Kathy is the pure evil!", nor was it "netcup is the paradise".
Yes, netcup is not (or hardly) present here. That may mean something or not. I didn't bring it up because I'm not (yet) a netcup customer and hence simply do not know how good or bad their order processing is.
As for Kathy, pardon me but I remember that cociu got slapped for abusing LET as his support desk. Moreover I see a lot of small problems in that area at hetzner and while it's convenient for some, of course, I'm not sure that LET should serve as the order desk support for any provider.
Finally, for the sake of fairness: I'm under the impression that the products of both companies were born a little early in what seems to be some kind of "who's first" market race. I guess that also both companies will iron out those problems quite soon.
And again: Yes I also don't like that netcup seems to be quite absent here. But then, maybe LET simply isn't considered to be a major revenue source. Me not know. Maybe someone with good contacts ( @Falzo ?) could/should give a hint to netcup.
First of all on one hand I am suprised that you of all people are not outraged by the marketing bullshit Netcup pulled again like you are with Hetzner but then again as long as you are against popular opinion I guess it serves you fine.
The problem isn't the product. The problem is Netcup pulling every trick in the book to bend terms to fit their needs. It all started with their Root Servers, a synonym for dedicated servers for the longest time even in Germany, being a marketing label for their KVM line. Now they talk about hourly pricing, implying that they bill you hourly when it's everything but that. Nobody complains about it not being postpaid but prepaid, which is fine, but they take the entire amount not even for a month but for six. They ride the cloud marketing when their product couldn't be any further away which leaves costumers (us) disappointed.
"Root server" seems to just be a standard term in Germany (which I also found bewildering).
As for the rest: Well that's what I meant, that's why I said there are basically 2 worlds. You seem to belong to the "cloud" world and I can perfectly well understand that the @netcup way of doing things pisses you off. Probably it is indeed strange from the cloud pov.
My personal take isn't that netcup is somehow evil but rather that their marketing people are aggressive and that they use terms rather loosely. Which, yes, is incorrect and understandably pisses off cloud people.
So, you see, I'm actually neither against Hetzner nor blindly pro netcup (I'm a customer of neither yet). Similarly I'm not somehow against the cloud people; I just happen to be one of the machine mindset people.
As for me not being outraged about marketing tricks: I HATE marketing of any kind and generally. And I do not believe a single word of it nor do I care about the marketing bla bla at all, and, frankly, I consider people falling for marketing simply idiots. I'm looking at specs and parameters and conditions, tangible and preferably quantifiable stuff. If I judge then I judge whether that (real info) is well reachable and visible behind the marketing bla bla or whether it's basically absent. Here it seems to me that both companies have the real info available albeit hidden behind more or less marketing bullshit.
What I meant wrt Kathy/Hetzner was that I strongly differentiate between a provider being here and being more or less present - or - just dumping his offers; Kathy IMO is not positive; she is not here for us but rather as a harvesting support entity. I dislike that. That said, I also dislike that netcup is all but absent here and I said that and hoped for someone giving them a signal.
@bsdguy: Her name is Katie, not Kathy.
Anyway, she's in marketing for Hetzner, Hetzner would very probably approve of what she's doing. Again, she's a marketing person for Hetzner. Despite what how a number of people in that thread appear to react, there's no special love that she or Hetzner have for LET. For them, LET is a pond full of fish eager to be caught.
Early in that thread, I questioned why that thread was allowed not to sink, but a number of people (including you -- correct me if I'm wrong) assured me that it was all good because Hetzner was so exceptional, blah-blah.
Sorry. No bad will from my side.
I did not say anything different.
You are mixing up things there.
I thought - and still think - that Hetzners new offer is significant and should not sink. I'm talking about the product and its pricing.
A completely different and not necessarily causally related matter is the question how those products are sold. There I see not at all small or minor things to criticize. And I see that we should ask the question why Hetzner is allowed to (ab)use LET as a harvesting support desk.
Yet another matter is what I addressed here, namely why @netcup and their quite similar product and offer which is no less strategically remarkable than Hetzners is largely ignored. One reason, which I also talked about here, is that there seems to be a cloud fever going around (which again was also noted by netcups marketing which lead to them making questionable statements trying to paint their offer as "cloud").
I personally, however, see the netcup products as what they are, as machine mindset product with some quite attractive extensions from the cloud world. As such I like them but I understand that some (many?) cloud centric people dislike them.