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No, I was referencing my earlier post: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3464059/#Comment_3464059
Surely it's best to cut them off early, rather than establishing the idea (to the customer) that their behaviour is acceptable to the business over a long period?
Not arguing the other points as I can see both sides, but surely this is conjecture at this stage?
For all we know, Hetzner has many customers that are using beyond 250TB/unlimited, but they have decided that they don't want these particular customers for whatever reason.
Ok, so you keep involving 2.6 when they didn't (moving goal posts), ignoring that they didn't say they'd give 30 days notice and will terminate [without refund].
You'd only be right in the case where, without any reason, just provided 30 days notice and no requirement to change usage.
Whatever. I don't care any more. As I said, good luck when you sue them.
I mean instead of 90 minutes, just 60 minutes. In North America, we have a 1 hour lunch (max) and no afternoon siesta so this is reasonable here. Most buffets have 90 minutes limits, IMO.
I generally don't watch what others are eating. If they help get more fresher food, it would actually benefit me. In a stingy buffet, they're competition.
Nope, it's not since the basis of the false advertising claim is their statement:
"We’re writing to you today because of your traffic use, which currently
averages above 250 TB/month on some of your servers."
Followed by:
"Although these servers include unlimited traffic ..."
They're extremely stupid to not just cancel it without explanation, and just call it abuse. This makes it almost too clear what they're up to.
They want to advertise as unlimited, and kick people to override their limits out, but not advertise their limits, because unlimited sells.
It's dirty coming from a company that never struck as a company doing something like this.
yet you're here caring
I agree with this completely at least - they have the right to end the agreement with no reason needed, and instead stated a reason which under the circumstances is stupid. Perhaps it was intended as a courtesy to attempt to keep the customer, but providing a reason had no real upsides for Hetzner.
Probably, yes.
As usual, you skipped over the main point, which was that I have seen the same pattern many times:
Nitpicking over the details in my one poor example does not alter those basic points. The example demonstrates the pattern anyway. I have seen that pattern over and over in hosting, as well as life in general.
Just curious:
How much time do you take to carefully read and consider posts before you reply?
Abuse is never acceptable or allowed. That's not new.
This isn't about network functionality, this is about bandwidth cost and profits.
I'm lost now as to what you're referring to as abusers. I'm of the opinion no abuse occurred. There's zero mention of others being impacted.
I don't know what your point is here. My point was that they're a datacenter with more capabilities than residential shared networks and higher expectations. Do not limit the datacenter to advertise the same as home broadband.
@emg what has been abused in this case?
Using the service as advertised = ABUSING
Hetzner Online GmbH's free LowEndDefenders citing the point number 2.7 for the $7th time:
https://www.tiktok.com/@djskorpios/video/7126326812556217643
The shared common resource. A small number of people are using a disproportionate amount of that resource, affected the majority who are not. @xaoc and @emgh are right - I should have said "maximum use" or "excessive use" (difficult to define), which would have been better terms than "abuse."
I was not referring specifically to Hetzner. I have not commented about whether Hetzner is providing enough common resource to meet their obligations to their customers. I have not commented about the whether peoples' complaints are justified regarding Hetzner's reaction to their heavy use. I have not commented about whether Hetzner's actions are legal and/or justified.
I joined in this thread because I saw two differing views of how an "unlimited" policy may be interpreted or used. Mine is, "Normal use reasonably expected, but unlimited provides insurance against surprise costs due to an unexpected occasional event." (Yes, you must define the terms carefully.)
Others view "unlimited" as "May use the full capacity 24x7 all year long if desired." This is how they want to interpret Hetzner's policy. I have not made a statement about that.
Whatever your stance on the issue, I hope we can all agree that Hetzner should re-write their policy so that the meaning and implementation of "unlimited" are clear and unambiguous to all concerned - Hetzner, its customer base, and the marketing content that Hetzner furnishes to prospective customers.
Just a small point, "as advertised" by how you react to the word unlimited which would appear to be use every last bit of bandwidth available 24x7x365. Please note that this is a valid interpretation of the word 'unlimited' and I'm not saying otherwise. That said, might a different interpretation not be, "As long as I'm vaguely reasonable and don't abuse the living shit out of this $30/mo server by transferring half a petabyte for months on end I should never have to worry about my bandwidth usage."
EDIT: Ah @emg being much more eloquent than I.
@emg and @skorous
Mostly agree, but a whole other route could have been taken, for example, limit the speed after 250 TB, and change the marketing to reflect that the traffic "size" is never limited, so the server will always be available without any surcharges, BUT, after 250 TB, you'll notice it is slower, especially on peak hours were capacity is lower.
If they were quick to make that change, maybe even start a discussion here, explaining that it was naive and unsustainable, and that they now do limit the speed after 250 TB, and that their new marketing reflects that, and that anyone who paid in advance or recently paid a hefty set up fee and feel that this is unacceptable, is eligible for a refund.
What I do not like is how they basically kick the dude out, yet still market their unlimited bandwidth: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/.
blaming the victims is not something new, especially both sides are all victims xD
+1
I currently use around 20TB/mo, but plan to up that usage to well over 100TB and want to avoid this issue. I'm not a network guy, though, so please poke holes in my solution where there are any.
Let's say I proxy all my traffic from my Hetzner server through another server I order at provider B that provides "true" unlimited traffic, but doesn't have as good pricing on hardware as Hetzner.
Provider B has a decent network and is one of network which Hetzner has private peering connectivity with.
This lets me take advantage of Hetzner's amazing price to performance ratio on hardware, while routing all the traffic through server at provider B that has true unlimited bandwidth and that Hetzner shouldn't have a huge paid transit bill.
Or does it? Would appreciate any input here.
So like a reverse proxy?
Traffic from Hetzner to Provider B to the internet is still traffic. And instead of just Hetzner consuming this traffic, it's also being consumed by Provider B (which apparently provided "true" unlimited traffic). Even if you route 100TB of Hetzner traffic through Provider B to the end-user, Hetzner is still using that 100TB.
While it's not a good idea to sneak in a limit, 250TB of traffic per month actually equates to an average usage of about 0.8Gbps:
250TB10248/720Hour/3600Second=0.79Gbps
@dreamofice
and they sell this: https://www.google.com/search?q=1gbit/s+to+tb+per+month
hope they gonna get hella expensive electricity, they deserve ^_^
right, but the connection between Hetzner <-> provider B is private peering, so this should avoid the problem @0xbkt mentioned of high paid transit bills for Hetzner, which he speculates is the reason they give a shit in the first place
In theory this is correct, their transit bills will be very very cheap for this usage.
In reality, I doubt they track it. Each server only has a single bandwidth number that's stored and it doesn't care about who it peers over. I imagine their abuse systems will treat it the same.
But I suppose, if you want to find out, they would give you enough time to migrate away (these bandwidth issues seem to be a contact first kind of deal) - so is it worth the gamble?
Oh btw,
It seems people who already got the traffic notice mail, are already blacklisted and can't order new servers. Orders will get denied without any notice.
It is not an if. It is a "we will"
Hetzner can do anything they want, no complaints about that, terminate, ban, etc Just complaining (again) about @Hetzner_OL being unable to write what they want properly. Just say it clearly if you don't want the person.
A person using unlimited traffic, as advertised are not at the wrong, now you changed your mind, at least give them a friendly warning before the ban -_- but ok. German way of doing things apparently.
No transparency in communication at all
"It seems people who already got the traffic notice mail, are already blacklisted and can't order new servers. Orders will get denied without any notice."
Well i wanna say f*** em, we blacklisted their whole ASN and we ended with hetzliars forever and ever.
Clearly states unlimited (not unmetered) so I feel the OP is justified here. There clearly is a limit.
While I agree that a fair use policy is justified for any resource that does not excuse putting a limit on an advertised as "unlimited" resource. "fair use unmetered" would be a better description IMHO. Or "unlimited" ("after 250TB ...").
Be honest with your customers.
No. This is flat out illegal in the US. The US has very strong consumer protection laws. We are pro business in some ways but very pro consumer in others.
Think about the famous case of the woman who sued McDonald's because her coffee was hot (and won). US laws are not so easily related to European ones. We are pro business in some ways and pro consumer in others.
The contents of the contract have nothing to do with whether it's false advertising.
The wording of the contract, the breed of dog that the business owner has, the number of thanked posts that the corporation has on LET, the price of the services... all of this doesn't really matter.
There was something claimed in the marketing of this company that was untrue. This is false advertising. False advertising hurts both customers and competing firms.