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Comments
@ReadingIsFundamental
what you say is okay.
what is not okay is that all we wanted to simply state the traffic limits and not cheat with unlimited before purchase, thats all.
They can elect to not renew a contract... because reasons. A 30 day contract isn't a lifetime contract, it can end when the 30 day period ends. Nothing illegal, just a provider terminating a customer that doesn't fit with their objectives AFTER providing service for the agreed term
@ReadingIsFundamental
again all okay what you say.
but does 250TB = unlimited ?
all their pages states unlimited.
Would hetzner kindly update all their pages and state that traffic limit is 250 tb on dedicated servers
Thats all i ask
They didnt cheat- your service hasnt been cancelled. If they cancel it, I am sure it will be after they fulfilled the contract (which as you say includes unlimited).
While I do think hetzner is quite misleading and they should put in proper limits and state such on their website or ToS, Pushing more than a PB every month on your bottom of the barrel server without a “proper” dedicated port is a but much.
Either way, For the last few years I haven’t felt safe having my data on herzner, I always make sure I have latest backups ready to go off site whenever I do have to go with hetzner (which is almost never these days).
If I were OP rn, I’d first take backups and look for providers who can provide a proper dedicated port given what I’m running is really that important and doesn’t have any alternatives.
@typicalGtaTG
last "cheap" is OVH, but dunno is unlimited, like real unlimited?
I suppose the secret limit totally depends on how much you are costing them on paid transit. They would not probably give a shit if your usage was mostly over direct peering or IXs. My two cents.
Scummy marketing but sadly they can get away with it. Aparently clearly advertising limits is to difficult for them.
Because it seems sufficiently many (prob. most) customers swallow "unlimited" as true. Another considerable part of customers somehow vaguely feel that "unlimited" isn't really true but hesitate to ask the provider because their response with very high likelihood would feel like "getting less" ...
or in other words: providers do it because more often than not it works, plus because it's easier to convince existing customers to pay extra for traffic beyond the real limit than it is to convince not-yet-customers (who also haven't invested work yet into setting up, configuring, updating DNS, etc, etc their box).
TL;DR because it works
Side note: It's I guess only a very small part of customers who need more than say 200 TB traffic/mo and those usually know that traffic isn't free and hence that "unlimited" doesn't really mean unlimited - but it does mean unlimited for 95% (probably more like 99%) of all customers.
@jsg
well i take what you say, but hetzner itself was limited before and then stated that removing traffic limit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500
"Hetzner removes traffic limitation for dedicated servers"
so removed != removed, too now?
Misleading advertising is illegal in Germany and other EU countries. And the fines are normally high.
It can be reported to https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/beschwerde
@kasodk
well as other stated its not misleading.
we exceed fair-use of unlimited
@xrz and @kasodk it has been unlimited for the contracted term - where is the violation? Hetzner, potentially, at their discretion, is deciding to not allow a new contracted term with a customer that no longer meshes with their company objectives. They offered unlimited, client got unlimited - where exactly is the legal violation?
Unlimited means more, to more people, than a defined limit does. I've come to accept and embrace this fact. Unlimited will gain me 10,000 customers who have no issue with it and 1 who does. Therefore, the 1 is the outlier and not the one to base all decision making on.
I'll tell you how this correlates to my experience if interested:
I sell email hosting for unlimited domains. There is no unlimited domains. A server cannot hold an infinite number, it will fall for one reason or another at some number.
Now my customers they don't want limits on that feature. They don't know how many they might add over time, they don't want to think about how many they need. They like not having to think about it, and almost every single one of them will never have to.
Then, one customer added 12,000 domains and the Apache includes took too long to reload, causing systemd to time out trying to reload the service, causing webmail to fall over every time someone added a domain on a server. I refunded the user and gave them as much time as I could to move out. Now, do I punish every user moving forward by forcing them to consider a number that they don't want to think about? Or do I simply and kindly refund the extremely rare outlier?
You might just say "just say the limit is 11,999" but what if that isn't always the limit? Today, I'm already ready for that 12k domain customer again, that's a solved problem. New processes, upgraded hardware, things are always improving. So no, I think I'll not state the limit as that. I think I'll try to accommodate anyone and when I have to give up on being able to accommodate someone, I'll apologize for failing them and refund them.
There are many considerations around this topic, but the provider should be making policy that satisfies the majority of their customers.
hetzner does
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500
https://web.archive.org/web/20181002114731/https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php?title=Traffic/en&curid=2842&diff=30324&oldid=29871
There is a big difference between contract laws and advertising laws.
Unlimited traffic is misleading advertising when they, as in this case, clearly terminate a contract because of traffic use.
Hetzner will most likely not get in trouble because they terminated the contract.
But they risk getting a relatively big fine for their adverting which is strictly regulated in the EU.
Get outta here with your logical response. We don't do that here. PITCHFORKS!
Read carefully they did not terminate the contract. The contract was for a one month term. They may, at their sole discretion, decide to not engage in an additional 30 contract with the customer. Hence, they did not TERMINATE the contract and did provide unlimited as advertised for the contractual term
it's just like marriage... till death do us part, unless I change my mind then we get a divorce. Nothing means anything to anyone.
@mosquitoguy
yup, we are already searching new hosting, this time hope real unlimited, and not this limited "unlimited"
Most people don't define in advance everything that will cause them to divorce their partner. Most follow a "I'll know too much abuse when it see it" policy.
It simply doesn't matter if they terminate a contract or deny renewing a monthly subscription. They have given the reason in the support ticket. (unlimited != unlimited = illegal advertising)
Your way of putting things won't hold in a court in Germany or any other western EU country.
Well, in that case you might want to consider @kasodk 's hint. Just be sure that there is no more current statement from Hetzner saying that they re-instated limiting.
"Unlimited" is generally not proper word at all, mostly we use it for things that are beyond our comprehension, including big numbers.
Whether to use such terms in marketing is at providers discretion, but when looking for a service, it saves time: you may expect, that one additional gigabyte or domain won't limit you in the future. Yet, caution should be exercised in case with serious projects, while attempting to save a lot in hosting market. Phrase "unlimited space" already serves as good stop words.
That's how democracy works and it's still far worse than Hetzner, IMO.
In practice, I think that it's best to think of unlimited as a many-place function whose value depends on a number of not-so-easy-to-specify-exhaustively-in-advance variables, including time (month/year), price of BW (for company at time), average BW use across servers (at company at time), customer's pattern of BW use (at time), potential impact of customer's pattern of BW use on other customers (at time), and the like
In short, unlimited is best viewed as a (complex many-place) function, and not as either some fixed-in-advance high value or some arbitrarily high value imaginable by a customer (of the kind "unlimited is the highest value that you can think of + 1")
Let's not reinvent the meaning of words.
Did Hetzner hire someone from OVH? Typical "Bait and Switch" scheme. Bait the market in with "unlimited" and weed out the customers who actually use said "unlimited" bandwidth. The right thing to do is to mention "Fair-use" on the server details page somewhere here https://i.imgur.com/SEt2T0g.png
They obviously have reached the point where abusive servers are actually causing network congestion. I noticed a lot of my servers now struggle to max out 1Gbit link speeds in both Germany and Finland.
@Smith42
great so no ovh
also enjoy maybe the unlimited network became unlimited again
, we gonna delete hella sh*t of servers and move away from hetzner
@jar stop making so much sense, you're making us all look bad.
I appreciate how, even when someone stretched the limits of your server to the point of breaking it by adding 12k domains, you still saw it as your own failing and gave them refund and a timescale to move on. I know some people have their beef with you and I once felt the same although I never expressed it, I want to say that this sort of thing is why I respect you and how you operate your business.
That Logic does not work at all in my opionion, the Server does have only a 1 gig interface so you know exactly the maximum a customer can transmit over a month in hetzners case.