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Traffic story in the Cloud Providers
doomsdayplane
Member
in Help
Hi,
I would like to understand the reason why some providers, such as Hetzner, can offer unlimited or free inbound traffic. As far as I know, Hetzner only counts outgoing traffic and includes it in the billing.
Is there a specific reason why some providers are able to offer this, while others include both inbound and outbound traffic in their billing?
Comments
Probably because they have more outbound traffic than the inbound so because they get billed for peak usage they charge only the outbound.
free ingress, paid egress Is the industry standard. Azure, GCP, AWS for example
Besides what others have already said you shouldn't confuse being able to do something with wanting to do something and as soon as there's a point in the chain where someone decides that it's more profitable for them to just bill everything without turning away too many clients it will spread on downwards.
They have enough customers that use far below the average they don't need to spend money on overhead to monitor bandwidth usage for the heavy users.
Bandwidth socialism.
It's more like they have enough scale that statistical multiplexing works. Hetzner is also big enough that ISPs want to peer with them which further brings costs down. Also with high asymmetry and hundreds of gigs of idle capacity they don't really care.