4 ms·

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”,

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)
  - rosndo 5y ago
    > I suppose that depends on what you call cheap, and whether you include “guaranteed”/“dedicated” in the definition of reliable for bandwidth. Then there are no cheap options. Even frivolously expensive “cloud” providers don’t give you this. The reality is that there are very few customers that actually have a real need for “guaranteed”/“dedicated” bandwidth.

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)
- rosndo 5y ago
  > I suppose that depends on what you call cheap, and whether you include “guaranteed”/“dedicated” in the definition of reliable for bandwidth. Then there are no cheap options. Even frivolously expensive “cloud” providers don’t give you this. The reality is that there are very few customers that actually have a real need for “guaranteed”/“dedicated” bandwidth.