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Hm, yeah, i've seen that a few times, but then we're doing a whole lot more capping than we do now. Again, we cap maybe a half dozen users in a given month, some months none at all. There's plenty of people that use more than the guidelines, and that's fine assuming it isn't egregious.
The issue is when it starts to affect nearby users (either on the switch uplink, or the metal itself). Some of our heavier users end up spread out pretty good so they don't hammer any one side. Other users have a bunch of VM's land on the same switch/node and their user causes issues for others.
We usually push around 10 - 15Gbit per rack, but the latest LUX rack is 35Gbit or so, which isn't great when it's a 40Gbit link. We've had to cap some users, or ask them to allow us to pull them to a different node, albeit on a 3900x instead. Most are just fine with that and adjust as needed. A few go kicking and screaming into the night. We have an open ticket with a user that's rimming not only his BW but also maxing his shared cores, and feels we're being assholes for enforcing the CPU cap we list on the site.
We sent a 100G switch in the October shipment to allow us to do some LAG's, but it isn't playing nice enough yet for me to put it into production. That'll at least let us get 80Gbit to each rack (or whatever if we somehow need more).
Francisco
Our users ask for numbers in both, so I guess we need a table of sorts to cover both.
Some users want to know how many TB they can run since their usage is more bursty (backups, big releases once a week, etc).
Other users are sustained/constant usage because they're streaming, massive gameservers, CDN's, VPN's, etc. Those users will always ask us for an Mbit/sec range so they can balance on their end (tune bitrates/ratelimits, things like that).
Francisco
After reading through two pages, all I can say is there needs to be clear terms laid out in F.U.P. explaining what unmetered means.
Because as it happens, it's a marketing term being used to pitch, that can lead to clear mis understanding.
You enforce it or not, is up to you, but terms needs to be clearly laid out.
I'm still confused. If I sign up for a 4GB VPS, on day 1 do I get a gigabit port with gigabit speeds UNTIL I get "capped" to a fixed 200Mbps or would the VPS be limited to 200Mbps from the start and always?
Because anyone limited to less than gigabit speed on gigabit port is by definition capped.
Limiting peak speeds is definitely a sign of insufficient upstream capacity.
Why do they need to ask you for limits on an unmetered service? They don't jive...
The package sold should state this clearly, no searching or asking required.
Every service comes at 1Gbit if you're a normal user. Premier users are 10Gig from the get go. We've had no problem bumping people to 10Gig burst if they prepay 3 months, but this is a manual thing for now.
Normal users automatically bump up to 10Gig burst if a service has been active for 90 days, and there's no cap in place.
They just do? I don't know what to tell you, I try to not dig into the brain of most of our users, or I'm sure it'd give most of my staff war time like flashbacks.
That's more reasonable, but unfortunately means Mr $30/mo guy at 200Mbps is subsidizing the people paying less and still getting gigabit or 10Gbit speeds. That wouldn't sit well with me.
What would it take for this guy to be uncapped again seeing how you only cap like half a dozen times a month, if at all?
I wish the "limited" unmetered meme would go away forever. Just tell me how much I can use in clear terms(30TB/m or 100mbps 24/7 whatever) and be done with it. I don't expect really unmetered in a 7 dollar VPS, but if you advertise it as such without clear information people will make less smart assumptions than I might as a """pro""" user.
But Mr £30/m may still move more data than the guys sitting on the 10Gbit. It all comes down to usage. If you use 100% of what I give you, I am not going to give you all I have. If you use 1% of what I give you, go ahead and take whatever you need.
Probably a fair usage behavior. If you constantly hit the cap, it's clearly needed. If you never hit the cap, it might as well be removed.
I'm trying to not pick sides, but seriously, running a seedbox on a $3.5/m vps?
I would like a brand new ferrari for the price of a sandwich please.
What really makes me angry is that I feel like I'm being treated unfairly.
It wouldn't be a problem if all the rules were applied equally. But in some Telegram groups, I see many people using the $3.5/month plan and uploading around 4TB per day, for a total of 110-120TB of upload traffic per month, and they have no problems for several months. Meanwhile, my account has been restricted, not just a single machine, and even the new silent I created, is still limited to 100Mbps. But many, many people using the $3.5/month plan and uploading 110T per month have been using it just fine.
Anyway, I just want to use up the balance on my account now, so that's why I said in the ticket yesterday: if the $30/month plan doesn't meet my current traffic needs, you can deduct an appropriate amount from my account balance instead of limiting my bandwidth in the backend.
He already used barely 10Mbps for the last 6 weeks and still capped. That's the whole reason for this thread. With better communication, the user can limit upload speed in the torrent client and still enjoy downloading at full speed. I want my show downloaded in under 10 minutes, not 90 minutes.
He can ping his ticket again and we can adjust his limits. I looked through all tickets in all queues and I swear I can't find him. Maybe he closed the ticket.
I'd have to look at his previous usage before the 8G upgrade he did, but he'd likely be just fine pushing 100T a month in each direction.
We'd have to take his word for it if the caps been active for that long. Our graphs only go back 30 days, so maybe it happened months ago. VM's that are network capped don't 'reset' to 1Gig, or upgrade to 10Gig. The cap is enforced.
Francisco
@rayhope please post ticket number. Sounds like you'll get your cap removed. We'll see if the support agent errored or if policy change occurred as a result.
Found his ticket.
The users cap was raised yesterday morning back to 1Gbit.
He had an account wide cap, I think that was a misclick on my side when it should've only been a single service. Maybe he had a slew of services in the past and that's when it was account wide.
I lifted the account wide and restored 1Gbit bursting to his latest service he mentioned.
They pick quieter locations I guess? New York's got the most spare bandwidth of all locations by a mile. We're using 32Gbit peak of our 100G to HE, and probably half that on the Cogent side.
Francisco
Ticket number #410973
Thank you for your response. I upgraded to a $30-per-month machine yesterday and the restriction has been lifted. However, other newly created virtual machines are still limited to 100Mbps. It doesn't matter to me anymore, as I just want to use up the balance and then stop using it.
Check again. He's saying the single service was uncapped yesterday but the rest were only uncapped minutes ago.
You should have replied to the ticket about the rest being capped instead of closing the ticket.
Also, your op made it sound like you went from 100Mbps to 200-300Mbps, not gigabit after upgrading to $30 package. Please try to keep us in the loop so we have the right info.
I just confirmed that the account's restrictions have been lifted. Thank you, everyone.
In fact, last night after I upgraded to the $30 package, I did only have 100Mbps, and after I submitted the ticket, they replied that they were only willing to increase it to 200-300Mbps. Later, they helped me restore the gigabit speed after I posted on LET. I apologize for any misunderstandings caused by the translation, as I used chatgpt to translate the text and my English is not very good.
To be honest. I feel you should take a page from Servarica's terms on this one.
This whole upgrade, downgrade, ticket, reset is already making my head spin.
They clearly state and give users a choice, 100mbps forever or fixed TB @ 1Gbps or so.
Makes it fair for everyone, and saves everyone the headache.
As a bonus you can keep your "unmetered" sales word on the plans page.
Sounds like it was just a misunderstanding then. Sorry about that.
Upgrading doesn't reset the cap status on a VPS, so that'd be why the 100Mbit was still there. There was a restriction on the whole account which I removed once I found your ticket.
I'm sure we could use some refining on how things work. I'll keep it in mind when we try to update the site and things like that this year.
Francisco
I'll second that, I really like the Servarica way.
The best thing is that you can switch yourself from their controlpanel. I have a few servers with them running at 100mbps as I rarely use even that, but once I needed to move a shitload of data so I simply switched one to 1Gbps while moving and then switched back to 100mbps when I was done.
I'm not reading all this, but I've skimmed through it.
Why not simply have a bandwidth limit that's exactly what you allow, and, once it's reached, limit to a certain speed that you're okay with the user maxing for the rest of the month (based on the plan, so a certain xyz Mbps per GB RAM, and make it resonable, not like 5 Mbps), and have it always reset monthly?
5-20 TB / GB RAM / month, not capped
(5 is resonable ish, Hetzner does 20 but they don't increase with plan - makes no sense)
10-50 Mbps / GB RAM, fully unlimited until the monthly reset
I used quite big spans because you know a lot better than anyone here what's profitable
But that's the best system, no risks of overages, no risks of unexpected slowdown, no forever slowdown, and no negative feedback from unknowing users
While I believe the amount of bandwidth provided is quite generous given the pricing, I do have to say I believe that advertising it as unmetered is quite disingenuous and misleading. As a consumer, seeing unmetered on all plans I'd assume I would be able to use the same amount whether I bought the cheapest or most expensive option. I would assume that somewhere in the TOS the specifics are described, but let's be real, most do not read that.
If I just needed a server for the purpose of some bandwidth, maybe a personal VPN or somthing, and saw unmetered, and then I would get limited because I used 10 TB per month I would be quite upset. Simply because, it is no longer uncommon to see cheap offerings with 5-10TB bandwidth. I'd expect unmetered to go way beyond that.
It is food for thought.
I know right. I needed a quick windows VPS to try out few things. And was so surprised with the bandwidth option.
It's fantastic idea. Get's them to keep the sales label as "unmetered", because well that sells. And at the same time, gives use the choice, what they wana do.
It goes back to where some users need to burst more and we'd be OK with them going over those hard limits. Plenty of users that use very little for months and then they have a heavy month where they blow a 100T because of whatever event/project they're doing. Then the following month back to a handful of GB/TB a month.
Your idea would be that we now change 10's of thousands of users are using because a handful of users/VM's feel we're unfair in asking them to not burn 3Gbit/sec w/ peaks of 10Gbit, while paying $25/month (not the OP, but someone from the same circle).
Easiest is just some guidelines and not 'definite hard caps'. They're basically there to point out to someone if we feel someones being unreasonable. We do our best to find a middle ground, but some people can't be appeased.
Francisco
So stack until a certain number
Basically all phone carriers do this with data
It's obvious that a lot of people (judging by the comments here) feel that they'd prefer knowing what they can and can't do
And there's ways to have flexibility while also providing predictable terms (such as a fairly high speed even when limitng, auto-remove limits, clearly see your limits, stack unused from previous months until x TB / GB RAM etc
I'm sure you can do something along those lines (maybe not exactly the above) without it making it harder for bursts, if anything, bursting should become more predictable and less subjective
I got a headache reading through all this, and I still don't understand the policy.
There are rules but we often don't follow them but also sometimes we do and also the limit is 20 % higher than stated but also not in this case
A bit off topic but I feel like that represents a lot of "limits" in the hosting industry. A very vocal minority prefer to know exactly where the fence is, but then if you erect a very easily seen fence customers skip over you to find someone who appears to have no fence (even if they do).
Sort of like how unlimited shared hosting is considered a scam by hosting forum users, but Dreamhost customers love that they don't have to think about limits and almost none of them ever does. But if Dreamhost had clear limits, they would skip over them and go to another "unlimited" host because they just don't know what they need and they like the idea of not having to think about it. Even if they should have to think about it.
In that I feel like it's an endless struggle, because unspoken limits often only impact a tiny minority while clearly spoken limits alienate a larger minority. Even though most outspoken users would agree that it shouldn't alienate them, and that they should consider it a positive thing.