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Free unmetered bandwidth is pretty much the norm unless you have fallen for some “cloud” scam. edit: s/unlimited/unmetered/

by rosndo 5y ago

franga2000 5y ago
Both old-school webhosting and modern cloud hosting commonly have data caps. Unlimited data is common only on mid-to-high-end VPS or dedicated servers and unlimited bandwidth doesn't really exist.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  >unlimited bandwidth doesn't really exist. True, when there is no deliberate cap stated, it's unmetered, not unlimited, meaning you can use what however much fits through the pipes (usually best effort instead of guaranteed bandwidth), and that's the natural limit. A 1 Gbit/s link for example will get you close to 300 TiB in each direction in a 30 day month if you are able to saturate that link 24/7, while a 100MBit/s link will get you a tenth so "only" close to 30TiB.
dspillett 5y ago
Free unlimited bandwidth always has a catch somewhere, that this use could trip on, unless the service is fairly expensive. There is often a “fair use policy”, and even without anything like that you need to consider the potential effect on the stuff you are actually running the service for (while a search engine is pulling random data as fast as they can, that transfer is competing against other network load). I have a couple of inexpensive hosted servers with genuinely unlimited bandwidth, but only at 100 and 250mbps respectively, better rates cost a fair chunk more without some sort of cap (usually of the form “after some-TB-or-some-tens-of-TB we'll throttle you to 100mpbs until your next billing month”. Unlimited throughput on gbit/more lines is commonly available, but never both cheap and reliable.
- rosndo 5y ago
  > Unlimited throughput on gbit/more lines is commonly available, but never both cheap and reliable It’s been a long time since you could call OVH “unreliable”, Hetzner chugs along just fine too. I think you might just be stuck in 2004, reliable unmetered gbit+ has been cheap for years.
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    I think the concern here is about congested peerings to certain providers, not uptime. For example Deutsche Telekom: They don't accept free direct peerings. Sending data to them indirectly frequently runs into congestion issues. For a while Hetzner offered a paid option for better connectivity to DTAG. It looks like Hetzner added a direct peering in 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200205014018/https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en https://web.archive.org/web/20200205014018/https://wiki.hetz... https://www.hetzner.com/news/03-20-dtag/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/03-20-dtag/
  - dspillett 5y ago
    > reliable unmetered gbit+ has been cheap for years I suppose that depends on what you call cheap, and whether you include “guaranteed”/“dedicated” in the definition of reliable for bandwidth. I'm looking at things mainly from a personal projects & packups PoV, but demanding at least two drives for RAID1+ rather than the cheapest units. If you have money-making projects then the lines between cheap/inexpensive/reasonable might move. > OVH / Hetzner I have Hetzner down as “inexpensive” rather than cheap, assuming you count the older hardware in their auction lines (with their new-kit offerings being “reasonable”). OHV is cheap if you are considering their lower-spec offerings, but those are at limited rates (100mbit usually in the case of Kimsufi branded services, 250mbit for SYS) and IIRC that rate is not guaranteed (while not a massively oversold resource like you'll see in many VPS/shared/similar hosting arrangements, there are enough machines sharing a larger resource that if many try saturate their allocation at the same time they'll hit congestion even within the DC rather than just when your traffic touches external peering). (Don't take the above as a criticism of Kimsufi/SYS - they are honest & open about the limits of the services they sell (older hardware, limited max network throughput) - I get what I pay for, which is no less than promised, and I've found them to be reliable over the years I've had services with them)
samhw 5y ago
This isn't physically possible. I think you're confusing (a) an ISP saying "we'll give you all the bandwidth we get (from our tier 1 networks / backbone links)" with (b) genuinely unlimited bandwidth, which would suppose a infinitely large carbon fibre cable subsuming the universe, or something along those lines. (a) may not be that much, in reality, depending on how their network is set up, and how much other traffic there is at any given moment. It also depends where you're routing to, whether e.g. (i) your neighbour or (ii) a DC across the world (neither is clearly better, it all depends). You have to think of it through the lens of physics and information theory, rather than law and business models.
- vidarh 5y ago
  This is pointlessly pedantic. In this context the term is being used to refer to unmetered and uncapped bandwidth and that usage is well understood.
  - samhw 5y ago
    I'd agree if the upper bound of unmetered and uncapped bandwidth were so far in excess of the possible upper bound for this application that it were silly to consider - but, like I addressed in my comment, it's very much not. If he were only talking about meters or caps, then that would therefore make his point a bit of a non sequitur in the context of an argument about whether tarpitting/blackholing a connection is risky for the serving party. (FWIW, at past companies I've not-infrequently encountered network saturation even without an artificial cap from whomever we were peering with.)
- toast0 5y ago
  Genuine unmetered/unlimited bandwidth claims also include a port speed. And the really good claims will include a 'minimum sustained' rate (with well connected peers), which lets you complain when you can't get decent throughput because all the servers on the 10G switch share a t1 out to the local internet exchange.
300bps 5y ago
Please tell me what provider has free unlimited bandwidth. I’ve heard this false notion so many times on HN and every time I check it out, the provider says clearly that they don’t allow for unlimited bandwidth. So please tell me the provider. I’ll pay for a month of service for 10 Gbps unlimited service and then I’ll saturate that line up and down stream for an entire month. And we’ll just see what happens, ok?
- seszett 5y ago
  > Please tell me what provider has free unlimited bandwidth. Unmetered rather than unlimited of course, but OVH, Online.net, Hetzner. These are rather well-known providers. I haven't checked all of them for the exact language but Hetzner explicitly says "All dedicated root servers have unlimited traffic" for example. Of course, they do have a limit for servers with 10 Gbps connections probably because of people like you who like to push the limits beyond what is reasonable.
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Yep, those. Also FDCservers, Nforce, psychz, worldstream and countless of others. I have extensive experience maxing out unmetered 10gbit lines with these providers 24/7. It’s been years and years since a host last tried to FUP me, bandwidth is just really cheap now.
hughrr 5y ago
Someone will always pull the plug when you hit the undocumented limit.
- rosndo 5y ago
  Big providers like OVH and Hetzner (and many others) offer truly unmetered bandwidth. You can max out your line nonstop for as long as you’d like.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Yep, the cheap dedicated servers I have are with Kimsufi and SoYouStart (both OVH brands), though the lines are limited to 100mbit and 250mbit respectively and IIRC neither is guaranteed (something like X servers sharing a gbit+ connection, where Xrate > TotalLineRate) so I can usually* but not always get 100mbit out of kimsufi. I've not really pushed the SYS machine's resources yet, it is a recent addition to my dominion. A search engine pulling data from /dev/urandom as in the post that started this discussion is likely to impact other uses of the 100mbit link from Kimsufi. Worse if bad luck means multiple hits of that sort at the same time.
    - rosndo 5y ago
      If you’re too small to get negotiated rates, you can still get kimsufi and SYS kit with guaranteed gbit from resellers. Check out https://discord.com/invite/7Gv8tdM https://discord.com/invite/7Gv8tdM There are really good deals available, all of these still come with a decent margin for the reseller. Core i3-2310 8GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €16 Core i5-2300 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €24 E3-1225 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €35 (iGPU enabled) W3520 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €40

Free unmetered bandwidth is pretty much the norm unless you have fallen for some “cloud” scam. edit: s/unlimited/unmetered/

by rosndo 5y ago

Free unmetered bandwidth is pretty much the norm unless you have fallen for some “cloud” scam. edit: s/unlimited/unmetered/

franga2000 5y ago

Both old-school webhosting and modern cloud hosting commonly have data caps. Unlimited data is common only on mid-to-high-end VPS or dedicated servers and unlimited bandwidth doesn't really exist.

rndgermandude 5y ago
>unlimited bandwidth doesn't really exist. True, when there is no deliberate cap stated, it's unmetered, not unlimited, meaning you can use what however much fits through the pipes (usually best effort instead of guaranteed bandwidth), and that's the natural limit. A 1 Gbit/s link for example will get you close to 300 TiB in each direction in a 30 day month if you are able to saturate that link 24/7, while a 100MBit/s link will get you a tenth so "only" close to 30TiB.

dspillett 5y ago

Free unlimited bandwidth always has a catch somewhere, that this use could trip on, unless the service is fairly expensive. There is often a “fair use policy”, and even without anything like that you need to consider the potential effect on the stuff you are actually running the service for (while a search engine is pulling random data as fast as they can, that transfer is competing against other network load). I have a couple of inexpensive hosted servers with genuinely unlimited bandwidth, but only at 100 and 250mbps respectively, better rates cost a fair chunk more without some sort of cap (usually of the form “after some-TB-or-some-tens-of-TB we'll throttle you to 100mpbs until your next billing month”. Unlimited throughput on gbit/more lines is commonly available, but never both cheap and reliable.

rosndo 5y ago
> Unlimited throughput on gbit/more lines is commonly available, but never both cheap and reliable It’s been a long time since you could call OVH “unreliable”, Hetzner chugs along just fine too. I think you might just be stuck in 2004, reliable unmetered gbit+ has been cheap for years.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  I think the concern here is about congested peerings to certain providers, not uptime. For example Deutsche Telekom: They don't accept free direct peerings. Sending data to them indirectly frequently runs into congestion issues. For a while Hetzner offered a paid option for better connectivity to DTAG. It looks like Hetzner added a direct peering in 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200205014018/https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en https://web.archive.org/web/20200205014018/https://wiki.hetz... https://www.hetzner.com/news/03-20-dtag/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/03-20-dtag/
- dspillett 5y ago
  > reliable unmetered gbit+ has been cheap for years I suppose that depends on what you call cheap, and whether you include “guaranteed”/“dedicated” in the definition of reliable for bandwidth. I'm looking at things mainly from a personal projects & packups PoV, but demanding at least two drives for RAID1+ rather than the cheapest units. If you have money-making projects then the lines between cheap/inexpensive/reasonable might move. > OVH / Hetzner I have Hetzner down as “inexpensive” rather than cheap, assuming you count the older hardware in their auction lines (with their new-kit offerings being “reasonable”). OHV is cheap if you are considering their lower-spec offerings, but those are at limited rates (100mbit usually in the case of Kimsufi branded services, 250mbit for SYS) and IIRC that rate is not guaranteed (while not a massively oversold resource like you'll see in many VPS/shared/similar hosting arrangements, there are enough machines sharing a larger resource that if many try saturate their allocation at the same time they'll hit congestion even within the DC rather than just when your traffic touches external peering). (Don't take the above as a criticism of Kimsufi/SYS - they are honest & open about the limits of the services they sell (older hardware, limited max network throughput) - I get what I pay for, which is no less than promised, and I've found them to be reliable over the years I've had services with them)

samhw 5y ago

This isn't physically possible. I think you're confusing (a) an ISP saying "we'll give you all the bandwidth we get (from our tier 1 networks / backbone links)" with (b) genuinely unlimited bandwidth, which would suppose a infinitely large carbon fibre cable subsuming the universe, or something along those lines. (a) may not be that much, in reality, depending on how their network is set up, and how much other traffic there is at any given moment. It also depends where you're routing to, whether e.g. (i) your neighbour or (ii) a DC across the world (neither is clearly better, it all depends). You have to think of it through the lens of physics and information theory, rather than law and business models.

vidarh 5y ago
This is pointlessly pedantic. In this context the term is being used to refer to unmetered and uncapped bandwidth and that usage is well understood.
- samhw 5y ago
  I'd agree if the upper bound of unmetered and uncapped bandwidth were so far in excess of the possible upper bound for this application that it were silly to consider - but, like I addressed in my comment, it's very much not. If he were only talking about meters or caps, then that would therefore make his point a bit of a non sequitur in the context of an argument about whether tarpitting/blackholing a connection is risky for the serving party. (FWIW, at past companies I've not-infrequently encountered network saturation even without an artificial cap from whomever we were peering with.)
toast0 5y ago
Genuine unmetered/unlimited bandwidth claims also include a port speed. And the really good claims will include a 'minimum sustained' rate (with well connected peers), which lets you complain when you can't get decent throughput because all the servers on the 10G switch share a t1 out to the local internet exchange.

300bps 5y ago

Please tell me what provider has free unlimited bandwidth. I’ve heard this false notion so many times on HN and every time I check it out, the provider says clearly that they don’t allow for unlimited bandwidth. So please tell me the provider. I’ll pay for a month of service for 10 Gbps unlimited service and then I’ll saturate that line up and down stream for an entire month. And we’ll just see what happens, ok?

seszett 5y ago
> Please tell me what provider has free unlimited bandwidth. Unmetered rather than unlimited of course, but OVH, Online.net, Hetzner. These are rather well-known providers. I haven't checked all of them for the exact language but Hetzner explicitly says "All dedicated root servers have unlimited traffic" for example. Of course, they do have a limit for servers with 10 Gbps connections probably because of people like you who like to push the limits beyond what is reasonable.
- rosndo 5y ago
  Yep, those. Also FDCservers, Nforce, psychz, worldstream and countless of others. I have extensive experience maxing out unmetered 10gbit lines with these providers 24/7. It’s been years and years since a host last tried to FUP me, bandwidth is just really cheap now.

hughrr 5y ago

Someone will always pull the plug when you hit the undocumented limit.

rosndo 5y ago
Big providers like OVH and Hetzner (and many others) offer truly unmetered bandwidth. You can max out your line nonstop for as long as you’d like.
- dspillett 5y ago
  Yep, the cheap dedicated servers I have are with Kimsufi and SoYouStart (both OVH brands), though the lines are limited to 100mbit and 250mbit respectively and IIRC neither is guaranteed (something like X servers sharing a gbit+ connection, where Xrate > TotalLineRate) so I can usually* but not always get 100mbit out of kimsufi. I've not really pushed the SYS machine's resources yet, it is a recent addition to my dominion. A search engine pulling data from /dev/urandom as in the post that started this discussion is likely to impact other uses of the 100mbit link from Kimsufi. Worse if bad luck means multiple hits of that sort at the same time.
  - rosndo 5y ago
    If you’re too small to get negotiated rates, you can still get kimsufi and SYS kit with guaranteed gbit from resellers. Check out https://discord.com/invite/7Gv8tdM https://discord.com/invite/7Gv8tdM There are really good deals available, all of these still come with a decent margin for the reseller. Core i3-2310 8GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €16 Core i5-2300 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €24 E3-1225 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €35 (iGPU enabled) W3520 16GB RAM 2x2TB HDD 1Gbps Unmetered €40