Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

As a Hetzner bandwidth enjoyer affected by this, this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great, because if you get rug pulled you just migrate to another provider with better prices.

That said, $1/TB for bandwidth overage seems pretty fair. I empathize with the complaining but if the new price is such a ripoff everyone should be recommending what cloud VM provider they're migrating to for a better deal.

fastily · a year ago

I use OVH (VPS’s specifically), which offers unlimited bandwidth. In my experience they’ve been both reliable and affordable which is a rarity. I run a few applications that require high amounts of bandwidth, so silly caps like the ones that Hetzner are imposing are a non-starter for me

Aachen · a year ago

That's what a friend said also. If you look beyond the marketing material, hoever, the ToS says:

> OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client

but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would they eat those costs for you?

I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history:

> it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then

> I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection advertised to be capable of 500mbps×24h = 5.4TB/day... that's reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a 5$/month VPS

silisili · a year ago

OVH is the most set and forget experience I've ever had. They email me maintenance notices 3 or 4x a year, but I don't think I've ever had any downtime. It just stays happily humming along for years. I think I pay something like 60 a year for it.

markvdb · a year ago

OVH and reliable, in the same sentence? They're cheap, so suitable for projects you don't mind going poof.

Personal anecdote. A few years ago, I lost a lot of sleep on a domain renewal at OVH. Their incompetence was mind-boggling. A less common tld was the only slightly challenging bit. After a week of calling and emailing, and on the verge of the domain lapsing, I gave up and sent someone to the tld registry with cash.

Also, do search for OVH SBG2 should you have missed that.

BonoboIO · a year ago

As long as their their wood floor datacenter and your backup in the same location does not burn down

„… data center had wooden ceilings, no extinguisher, and no power cut-out“

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...

mst · a year ago

The systems *I* currently have at hetzner are, so far as I'm aware, on a "we don't charge for bandwidth but if you use a shitload you'll get throttled for the rest of the month" plan just like my ovh boxen.

But I only pull dedis from hetzner; my VPSen are all ovh based. So please nobody expect my experience to generalise without triple checking the terms just like I did in the process of signing up for those systems.

jitbit · a year ago

I wouldn't say "affordable". Looking at their pricing page right now. A US-based 64GB RAM cloud server in OVH - $539

AWS is $220 (us-east, r6a.2xlarge instance, 1yr reserved)

tokinonagare · a year ago

I've only ever been on OVH and was surprised to discover a few years ago that bandwidth is not only unlimited but also costly at most other hosting companies (including cloud ones).

9cb14c1ec0 · a year ago

Shout-out to Microtronixdc, my colocation provider. For their $55/month/U colocation package, they provide unmetered gigabit for no additional cost.

https://microtronixdc.com/

mrbluecoat · a year ago

Their option to colocate a Raspberry Pi (or similar form factor) for $5/month is also interesting as a VPN exit node.

Aachen · a year ago

I see terms for hosting and domain registration and managed databases, but not colocation. Do you know if they really not care if you actually use that connection to the stated allowance?

jfreak53 · a year ago

Thanks for the shoutout!! :)

arcastroe · a year ago

Exactly! I had a three node k3s cluster hosted on OVH. When I decided to switch to Contabo, it was as easy as adding the three Contabo nodes to the cluster, and then removing the three OVH nodes (plus updating some DNS rules). It was the easiest and simplest migration I'd ever done. All my services and data just moved automatically and mostly with zero downtime. The only service that experienced a little downtime was Plex, which as I understand does not support high availability. If I ever find a cheaper host, I'll simply switch over. No hassle and no vendor lock in.

lysp · a year ago

This is what I also want to do.

How are you handling storage? That is the only issue I'm struggling with for a small 3-node deployment.

rmbyrro · a year ago

The OVH Eco-line (Kimsufi, So You Start..) are incredibly good and affordable. I have a few beefy servers, which I use to create my own VPS service on top of Proxmox. I'm not a sysadm and it's still simple to setup and maintain.

Eco is clever, because they reuse good hardware pieces to assemble new servers, instead of throwing out as garbage...

Have been a very happy user with several servers for quite some time.

princevegeta89 · a year ago

As someone who's already using the dedicated server for a ton of things, I have been really grateful. But now, I have a new question, are they going to do this to their dedicated servers as well?

dantillberg · a year ago

This change only affects VPS services in the US, and for what it's worth, Hetzner does not offer dedicated servers in the US.

consumer451 · a year ago

I am very ignorant here, so my apologies, but...

When someone runs a dedicated server these days, does this mean a one-off linux install? Or is this more likely to be a docker install so that it's portable?

srockets · a year ago

CSPs aren't your cellular provider. You don't get better pricing by telling them you'd switch, because both the AE and yourself (assuming you ever did the math), know it's not a viable option.

Trying to be multicloud by choice, unless you have a very unique use case, which you probably don't, is simply admitting you are incapable of calculating the cost of being multicloud. This would get you horrible pricing, as you just showed your hand.

ndjdjddjsjj · a year ago

It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"

BrutalCoding · a year ago

I remember reading something about the Costco hot dog story, quite funny IMO, here's what I just found from 2018: "I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed. By the way, if you raised (the price) to $1.75, it would not be that big of a deal. People would still buy (it). But it’s the mindset that when you think of Costco, you think of the $1.50 hot dog (and soda)." [1].

Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from 2024: "'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip said." [2].

Sources:

[1] https://www.425business.com/news/costco-ceo-craig-jelinek-on...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/05/31/cos...

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8n4vidtmkvmk · a year ago

Wait what? Did they actually raise the hotdog price?

I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad times to come.

andix · a year ago

Is it an option for you to just move the servers to one of Hetzner's Europe location? I guess a lot of high bandwidth applications don't require low latency.

0xblinq · a year ago

> this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s

As long as you don't factor in the cost of the effort to make that work as seamless as it sounds.

api · a year ago

DataPacket, ReliableSite, HiVelocity, and FDCServers among others have great bandwidth prices.

jdhendrickson · a year ago

Can vouch for HiVelocity under the previous owners anyway, not sure what's going on over there now. My companies launch was bandwidth and compute intensive and they handled it well.

j45 · a year ago

Being cloud-agnostic is highly valuable. It's also possible to make determinations on where your needs are served best pro-actively, independent of service plan like this.

cchance · a year ago

Thats not a bad overage price, but then again cutting from 20 to 1 while raising prices seems fucking insane

S0y · a year ago

>multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great

As someone with the exact same setup, thank you for strengthening my confirmation bias.

As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay.

For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets.

This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable.

I expect Linode to change the price on me, eventually.

dangus · a year ago

I don’t find that to be all that impressive.

I’m immediately saving money with the server I built out of mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS solutions.

The only reason it’s near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS instances have barely any computing power assigned to them.

For the same price as one game server I’m running something like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real CPU cores (Ryzen 3600).

throwaway2037 · a year ago

What is your annual electricity cost for that server in your closet?

Aeolun · a year ago

Completely unrelated, but I’m surprised how many people actually use the Ryzen 3600, from desktops to servers, it seems to be everywhere.

ryukoposting · a year ago

What's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.

Firerouge · a year ago

Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?

immibis · a year ago

I understand Tailscale is the new Hamachi.

shrubble · a year ago

You have a CPU? Or a core, that is 1 of many cores on a system where your VM can be and will be pre-empted by the host node’s scheduler without your VM having any control or insight into the process?

prmoustache · a year ago

> This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable.

The fact a usage is common doesn't mean it is profitable or that it needs to be supported for a hosting service to be profitable.

Mining crypto used to become quite common as well a decade ago and tall hosting services banned this exactly for because there was no way they could be profitable and offer decent QoS.

qwertox · a year ago

It's most likely a vCPU. So even the caches are shared.

renewiltord · a year ago

If I recall Linode has a "dedicated core" feature which reserves a CPU core for you, but I doubt that is $5/month so you're likely right. User must be quite lucky to have no utilization on host for process to not get cache-evicted.

whalesalad · a year ago

Why is this attitude so commonplace?

Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty.

Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of that service for that fee.

fastball · a year ago

Completely backwards. A server that is being paid for but not utilized is the best-case scenario for a hosting provider – revenue the same, lower costs (electrical/cooling/etc).

IAmGraydon · a year ago

You seem oddly emotional about this. Also, you're wrong.

Hosting companies count on a certain <100% average CPU usage, and this factors in to their business model in the shared CPU plans. That's literally why those plans exist, because they are getting more users on a machine by counting on less than 100% usage. The users get a lower price and the risk of getting throttled in certain situations. Nowhere in their product description do they promise you can use 100% all the time. If you want that, you go to their dedicated plans.

Don't get so emotional, but if you do, at least make sure you aren't wrong first.

Chaosvex · a year ago

I think others have said it well enough, but you're mixing the VPS business model up with cloud. It's in the interests of cloud providers to have you utilising resources because that's how you're billed. VPS and dedicated servers just give you a bill for potential utilisation, regardless of how much or little you choose to actually use (excluding bandwidth overages).

BoorishBears · a year ago

No competitively priced VPS* is charging a price that works when everyone is fully utilizing their entire quota at 100%...

It's not nefarious: you pay a bit more than the compute you use would cost on a fractional basis, and in exchange the cost of entry is dramatically reduced, spikes in usage get absorbed, etc.

It's a win for everyone involved unless usage patterns shift and suddenly there's never a surplus to go around. At that point prices will quickly climb to roughly what dedicated resources cost.

(*and frankly it's not just VPS, a lot of cloud services rely on everyone not trying to max out their quota at the same time to even function, let alone profit.)

sureIy · a year ago

Maximized by flat rate payer, minimized by pay-per-use.

You want to maximize it, the hosting definitely prefers someone who pays and doesn't use, so they can double-book that server.

CGamesPlay · a year ago

This is absolutely untrue in both a naive and more nuanced sense. Naively, it's not like an airplane, it's like an airplane rented by the month: the owner of the airplane collects rent whether or not the airplane is flying. More nuanced, many VPS providers don't sell you 100% CPU utilization; they sell you a compute budget. AWS actually enforces this; I don't know about other providers. But if you're exceeding your compute budget and the provider doesn't enforce the budget limit, you can expect the system to break at some point.

mr_toad · a year ago

On the other hand airlines regularly overbook flights, and residential ISPs don’t have nearly enough bandwidth for every customer to max it out.

keyle · a year ago

I'm not sure why you compare this to airplanes. Airplanes fuel consumption is very expensive if the plane is empty relative to profit. They need to put bums in seats for the flight to be viable commercially.

On the other hand, a flat out rack takes more power than an idle one. So this isn't the same thing at all.

wiredfool · a year ago

Hetzner, in volume, is about 5x cheaper than limped for my workloads. Limped is 2-3 times cheaper than AWS, but AWS has a few things going for it that make it worth it for some workloads.

wiredfool · a year ago

Linode. Decking autocarrot.

gear54rus · a year ago

Don't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel.

Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).

dizhn · a year ago

Oracle has people jumping all kinds of hoops to get that service too. Just like Hetzner. Took me a few tries with different credit cards then tried to get one for my friend with their card and nothing would work. Great free service though. That ampere vm with 24 gb ram is quite capable.

keyle · a year ago

Off topic, your website is interesting, I wish I knew how to interpret it "commitment of traders". Maybe there is a blog post somewhere?

Dylan16807 · a year ago

One core isn't very expensive, and when we look at modern super dense CPUs full load is less than 5 watts per core.

edm0nd · a year ago

Couldn't you just buy a used decent PC and run this on its CPU + GPU and get faster/better results?

themgt · a year ago

bhouston · a year ago

> Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources. We want to make things more balanced.

I may know one of the culprits -- whom I will leave unnamed here. But the company, who is fairly popular, built out their own CDN via putting a bunch of nginx caching proxies on various Hetzner servers around the world. It apparently was really cheap and very effective. Given that they were bootstrapped and this was prior to Cloudflare really being that popular, it was a great strategy. This was true like 8 years ago, so maybe it has changed in the meantime.

justinclift · a year ago

Sounds like a completely legitimate use though. Hetzner were widely telling people about that 20TB limit, so why would they be surprised when people use them as CDN boxes?

sdwr · a year ago

Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut them back. The marginal customers who need those features leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used to your product and stays.

yurishimo · a year ago

Until you remember that marketing is a separate department from finance which is a separate department from ops/engineering.

The engineers said 20TB in aggregate was fine but likely didn’t consider the “bad apples”. Marketing obviously wants to use the biggest numbers and then finance comes in with the hammer and dev points to egress as an simple way to upset rhe fewest number of real customers.

tssva · a year ago

I think culprits is a poor choice of words since it means someone suspected of a misdeed. I could perhaps understand using it for example for someone that tried to store a petrabyte of storage on a consumer unlimited storage plan. But in this case Hetzner set a specific data usage amount you are paying for so using that amount is not a misdeed.

KomoD · a year ago

> I could perhaps understand using it for example for someone that tried to store a petrabyte of storage on a consumer unlimited storage plan.

I couldn't, don't call it unlimited if it's not unlimited, using what you paid for is not a "misdeed".

Well, I doubt an extra $1/TB is going to stop Hetzner from being very price effective.

Then why does this only apply in the US? Are they saying EU customers are well behaved?

citrin_ru · a year ago

It also may depend on peering arrangements Hetzner has. If EU ISP more inclined to peer with Hetzner than US one bandwidth in EU will be cheaper for them.

eatery1234 · a year ago

Hetzner colo's for their US servers/locations. Perhaps their US bandwidth rates are much higher than their own DCs?

1oooqooq · a year ago

probably streaming platforms have better content on the US and everyone wants to exit there? so they are mostly serving US traffic for several vpns all over the world connecting to CDNs in the US.

Hilift · a year ago

Isn't Hetzner impacted in Europe at the moment from a cable cut? Wouldn't surprise me if there is a wave of people moving stuff over to the US because of that. I don't know much about cloud though. I believe "The Ship has arrived and repairs are underway, which will still take some time." and "the repair may take up to two weeks.".

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings

The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

lostmsu · a year ago

Do they have dedicated servers in US?

dumbledoren · a year ago

What? Afaik they are unmetered. And real unmetered - there are people who are saturating their connections 24/7 while using them.

paxys · a year ago

“Culprits” because they used the service they paid for within its advertised limits?

It’s the same with cloud storage providers. First give out a massive amount of storage and rapidly gain users, then cut it down after blaming people for “abusing” it. How about you advertise your correct capacity to begin with?

They are simply deflecting blame for their own enshittification.

macspoofing · a year ago

>“Culprits” because they used the service they paid for within its advertised limits?

"Culprits" because it was their (legal) use of the service that made Hetzner rethink and change their service plan.

learnedbytes · a year ago

Want to give a clue on who the culprit is?

I was curious and checked if they are still using Hetzner. It appears not, so I can share who it was. It was https://artstation.com. Basically heavily oriented towards serving static images, so the CDN could have been really expensive. Doing a reverse IP lookup on cdn.artstation.com servers now resolves to Cloudflare and it has cloudflare headers on the response.

dpeckett · a year ago

This is typical of Hetzner, if a product SKU is losing money they very quickly make changes, even going as far as to discontinue the product entirely (eg. GPU servers). They definitely don't seem to be a fan of loss leaders.

I'm guessing somehow the traffic usage patterns of their USA customers was very different to their EU counterparts, or the cost of expanding network capacity was a lot higher than anticipated.

It's a bit of a shock for sure but it seems this model is a big part of how they can maintain their slim margins.

gnfargbl · a year ago

I have no complaints at all about this model. They work out the cost of providing a service, then they charge that cost plus a markup. They keep doing things that make them money. They stop doing things that don't make them money.

It seems like a straightforward way to run a business.

Yep they're the technology equivalent of a discount supermarket. Everything is commoditized to the extreme.

Breath of fresh air in the modern cloud era tbh.

josephcsible · a year ago

I have one big complaint and one little one. The big complaint is that they didn't even give one business day's notice, and the little complaint is that they raised prices at the same time they cut what they were offering by 20x, instead of doing one at a time.

Moru · a year ago

The bandwidth market is very different between EU and USA, maybe they weren't prepared for the much higher prices in USA? I'm pretty used to having a 100 Mbps connection to our servers that we can use without any strings attached. Even on the lowest tier. (Not Hetzner customer but been thinking about it)

tayiorrobinson · a year ago

To be fair, given how cheap a lot of Hetzners products (especially Server Auction, my beloved) are compared to the competition, not wanting to have loss leaders seems reasonable to me

Rather, the backbone providers dont do peering agreements and the traffic is very expensive, especially in the post-zirp inflation period. Europe is different - everybody peers with everybody so traffic is dirt cheap.

sigio · a year ago

Traffic over-usage is $1 per TB, so this is still quite fair, only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.

jsheard · a year ago

> only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.

Expensive by Hetzner standards but still cheap by cloud standards, egress from Singapore EC2 instances is between $80 and $120 per TB for example.

tr33house · a year ago

$80!! EC2 is a scam

binarymax · a year ago

That’s very fair. I wish they had put that in the email!

geek_at · a year ago

That is right, it would have maybe reduced the public outcry. It just makes it 10$ more expensive per month which is totally OK in my book

jgalt212 · a year ago

so still order or orders of magnitude cheaper than the the big 3 hyperscalers.

tecleandor · a year ago

  AWS EC2: 100GB included and then $90 per TB.
  GCP Premium Tier: $120 per TB
  GCP Standard Tier: $85 per TB

That's a bunch of money...

freefaler · a year ago

In Singapore and Asia in general traffic is very expensive, because there are no peering exchanges. So you need to pay for each Mbps you use. Big ISPs there are oligopolies and aren't too fast or keen to work with you.

jpalomaki · a year ago

Am I calculating right that 20TB per month means around ~60Mbits per second for 24/7? Not a network expert, but it is hard to see how this could be sustainable for less than €5/month.

Sounds a bit like the usual case where company is able to give a generous offering because most customers utilize just a small portion of it. Maybe with the attention they have been getting, they have attracted more bandwidth hungry customers.

summarity · a year ago

That is what they (explicitly) said in the email: users using next to no bandwidth were offsetting the costs for the heaviest users. That was no longer sustainable.

drpossum · a year ago

I think I'm missing something then. If that were true, wouldn't you lower the network allowance and then make the product cheaper or at least priced the same? This would have the no-traffic users paying "their fair share" and the overage costs (or higher traffic addon) would make up for the heavy users.

The current plan makes everything more expensive for everyone. They would do this if a) they never had a sustainable model in the first place or b) they were just being greedy

shubhamjain · a year ago

They already offer it on their European servers and it's still unchanged. Also, just because it's included doesn't mean everyone is using it to their full capacity.

Internet is much cheaper in Europe than in most other regions and there's more of it. Europe is effectively the center of the Internet. Most of the time (in regions like Asia-Pacific and Africa) this is simply due to having more time and money to build it, but when comparing Europe to the USA, it's probably because of regulatory structure - more competition, less monopolization.

atwrk · a year ago

Is that much? I use a German competitor, Contabo, and they offer 32TB even with their entry-level VPS for 4.5€ plus taxes.

rsynnott · a year ago

IIRC a while back one of the CDNs had a post about their transit costs; they worked out _way_ lower in Europe than in the US. I don’t think Hetzner Germany is increasing prices here, just the US one?

Possible theory why they did it: To my understanding, you don't pay for traffic, you pay for network capacity. Maybe US instances aren't getting the uptake they had hoped for, and they are looking lower some costs by reducing their network capacity (they are a very German company and care a lot about efficiency).

Hetzner is very cheap and still profitable because classic "economy of scale" and vertical integration. They own, build, and operate all their data centers. This comment goes into more details[1], but it's possible this doesn't really work out in a foreign location like US.

[1]: https://forumweb.hosting/13663-why-are-hetzners-dedicated-ho...

esskay · a year ago

Counterpoint: They could've lowered their capacity without changing plans if they were indeed seeing lower uptake, and increase capacity as/when it's needed if it did indeed ever pick up. They wouldn't be the first provider to put products out of stock whilst they scale back up.

crest · a year ago

That doesn't explain a 20x regional pricing difference for the same service (outgoing bandwidth). It's either a malicious change to extract exorbitant rent from customers (hostages at that point) or buying enough bandwidth is whole lot more expensive than they calculated and it reflects costs to provide the product (a virtual machine a specific traffic cap).

If its mostly the later case they really fucked up their customer communication. They should care enough to provide their customers with time to respond and transparency to (re-)earn the trust a hosting provider requires.

mdasen · a year ago

If it were malicious, they would have increased prices in Europe as well. They could try and extract money from European customers just as much as American ones.

And the bandwidth pricing is still quite cheap, $0.001/GB. Major cloud providers usually charge nearly 100x that (AWS 90x, GCP at 85x or 120x depending on whether you want standard or premium, Azure at 80x or 87x depending on standard or premium).

You used to get 20TB for free and now you get 1-8TB free. If you had to pay for 19TB, that's another $19. If you had to pay for 19TB from a major cloud provider, that'd be $1,556-2,335. Even if you had DigitalOcean, they'd be charging you $0.01/GB (10x) and you'd be hit with a $190 bill.

I think the issue is that in the US, they don't have their own network. They peer with a single company in Virginia for 200Gbps and then pay for transit on 1Tbps. That's a lot of transit to be paying for - and 5x more transit than peering. In Europe, it looks like they have their own network between Finland, Germany, France, Amsterdam, UK, Austria, and Czech Republic. They also have a much better ratio of peering to transit. So they can use their network to carry the traffic to a lot of Europe and then maybe they have peering arrangements to handle most of their traffic when they need to hand it off.

In Europe, they're more likely to face owner economics while in the US, they're effectively renters - and the more their customers use, the more it's going to cost them.

If this were really a cash grab, it's a pretty terrible cash grab. It will certainly impact some users, but the maximum it will impact any user is $19/mo (if they're on a server with only 1TB of included traffic). But most people don't use many TB of traffic. Consuming all Bluesky posts in zstd compressed JSON is 30GB/mo. These weren't servers that had unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps port. They had a 20TB limit. If you were hitting that and intend to continue hitting that, it's another $12-19/mo.

If I had to guess, I'd say that they probably thought they'd expand more in the US and build out a fiber network here (as OVH has done), but that didn't happen and now they're looking at continuing to pay transit for the foreseeable future. Though I feel like the optics of this are pretty bad given that most people probably use less than 1TB and those users will still feel like something is being taken from them (even if they were never using that much anyway).

American traffic is expensive and they scarcely do peering agreements. And the backbone providers are probably jacking up the prices to boost revenue in these inflationary times. Eu users are not affected because the Eu invested heavily in the internet backbone and everybody peers with everybody there. In the US the isps cripple any effort to improve the internet infrastructure for profit.

ptero · a year ago

This seems to be a huge PR blunder. As a single data point, I have to say that my first reaction is illogical.

I have two hetzner shared instances and I am royally pissed by the 20x reduction in traffic allowance. It is also irrelevant to me: over the last 12 months I never exceeded 1TB. My unhappiness on the traffic reduction is purely of a "what if I start using more" type. For which two rational answers is "well you can explore alternatives then" and "d'oh, your average is way under 100GB, it's not going over 1TB". But I still started looking at alternatives.

My feeling is that the reduction is aimed at a small group, but upsets a much larger set of customers who now will start looking for alternatives. Which indicates a typical marketing screwup. My 2c.

axelthegerman · a year ago

Fair I felt similar about it.

But then, I have looked at alternatives before they even offered their US locations (and also for a CA one) and couldn't find anything decent for even nearly the price.

So we can pay a little more and get a little less, or move somewhere else and either pay a lot more or get a lot less

christophilus · a year ago

OVH is comparable and has locations in North America.

SixThreeOne · a year ago

Very well put! I had the exact same reaction as you: even though I don't even use 1TB/month, I found myself looking at alternatives simply b/c of the cognitive jolt of seeing the 20x reduction. Sometimes I wonder if companies don't consider the psychological impact of changes enough. No, logically, this change means a meager price increase for me, but if it caused me (and at least one other) to think about competing offerings, then like you said, indicates a marketing screwup.

That's not to say they have to keep offering that much traffic if they're losing money (of course they don't), but the way you make changes matters.

atomic128 · a year ago