23 ms·

Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

• elpocko 2y ago
  In the second example charging 28% more for 90% less traffic, starting in 3 days. That's straight up illegal in some parts of the world, but apparently not in the US?
  • shubhamjain 2y ago
    The pricing applies immediately only for new customers. For existing ones, it applies from Feb 2025.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      That ain't exactly a very long timeline either.
      • switch007 2y ago
        Nope, but they must have covered their ass in the legal T&Cs with something along the lines of them being able to vary the prices at their discretion etc
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tchbnl 2y 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. So... raising the prices for everybody instead?
  • bakugo 2y ago
    Yeah, the justification given makes absolutely no sense - you are paying more than before even if you stay under the new limit (which is 1/20th of the original!) They also use the word "tariff" several times without elaborating, as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word. Seems like intentional deception to hide a standard "we just want more money" price raise.
    • stevesimmons 2y ago
      What's wrong with their use of "tariff"? Looks fine to me!
    • dagw 2y ago
      as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word. The word "tariff" has a few different meanings. I'd say they're using it correctly, just not with the same meaning that the word is commonly being used in the news right now.
    • michaelt 2y ago
      > as if the person who wrote the email doesn't know the actual meaning of the word. In my country, "tariff" is seen in several contexts: * A tax on imports, much in the news since the recent US election. * A pub or bar's price list is known as the "bar tariff" * Energy companies offer a selection of "tariffs" i.e. agreed contract rates for usage-based pricing. e.g. a 3-year-fixed-price tariff, a 100%-green-energy tariff, and so on. * The portion of a 'life' jail sentence which must be served, before a prisoner can be considered for parole. So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a "tariff", merely unusual.
      • crazygringo 2y ago
• andrewcamel 2y ago
  Are tariffs already in place or is this just a thinly-veiled scapegoat for haircutting traffic allocation by 95%? To a customer, it certainly feels like a bait and switch to sell a subscription product and once customers are embedded materially change the economic trade.
  • sva_ 2y ago
    By tariff they just mean contract pricing, not the tax kind.
  • jsnell 2y ago
    It's the language barrier. The German word Tarif doesn't mean the same as the English word tariff.
    • rob74 2y ago
      Well actually one meaning of the English word tariff is the same as the German meaning, although it's not as widely used. To quote Wiktionary: > tariff (plural tariffs) 1. A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties themselves. 2. A schedule of rates, fees or prices. 3. (British) A sentence determined according to a scale of standard penalties for certain categories of crime. ...so Hetzner's usage of the word is technically correct™, even though native speakers might not use it in this context.
      • tyrfing 2y ago
        It's closer to industry jargon at this point in American English. Search for LTL tariffs, for example, and you'll find a very long list of trucking companies publishing their fees and terms as tariffs.
        • Symbiote 2y ago
          It's completely normal usage in Britain. "I changed electricity provider to one with an EV tariff."
• not_your_vase 2y ago
  This is pretty steep... their website still seems to list the old included traffic and price (though okay, I guess they still have 3 days to update). Is there a more official link, or was it distributed through email?
  • GavCo 2y ago
    Haven't been able to find a link. Seems like it was only distributed by email — which isn't great communication IMO
• not_your_vase 2y ago
  Ahh, yes, the good old "here, you purchased X amount of things for $Z. But don't dare to use everything you paid for, or we double the price"
  • adventured 2y ago
    Hetzner have definitely always been scumbags about the bait & switch on aspects of their service like that. Granted it's pretty typical of the too good to be true rule of life.
    • socksy 2y ago
      Do you have any details? I was about to move all my services off from vultr to hetzner due to the much better pricing
      • FredPret 2y ago
        I’ve had several servers with them for years now - private and VPS, and they do what it says on the tin.
      • amluto 2y ago
        Vultr still seems to charge several times as much for bandwidth as Herzner.
    • StrauXX 2y ago
      I have only had and have heard of great experiences with Hetzner. For both their offerings snd their support. I am based in Europe though.
    • christophilus 2y ago
      Been using them happily for a few years. They’ve been rock solid and cheap. Can’t complain, even about this hike.
    • qeternity 2y ago
      I can't think of a single other instance of bait and switch with Hetzner and we run a fair bit of infra with them.
• Slartie 2y ago
  Did they finally realize how AWS/Azure/Gcloud actually generate their exorbitant profit margins?
  • stavros 2y ago
    No, they realized that nobody switches away from AWS because of their expensive bandwidth.
    • acdha 2y ago
      AWS negotiates on bandwidth, too, so I imagine the actual savings would be a lot smaller for most customers unless you have some business which is heavily dominated by egress pricing.
    • cuuupid 2y ago
      Bingo, lots of people are loud about this online and many influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it’s easy to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up less than 1% of a serious company’s revenue for AWS. I’ve liked using Hetzner before and I’m curious how they’ll go after the market now. This is probably the wrong move though; Cloudflare realized this same fact some time ago but they kept their prices low to avoid cultivating ill will.
      • high_na_euv 2y ago
        What do you mean? News Hacker isnt representative sample that also understands the insustry and the business?
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > lots of people are loud about this online and many influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it’s easy to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up less than 1% of a serious company’s revenue for AWS. So basically, by getting worked up publicly about this, those people provide free marketing for Hetzner?
• hipadev23 2y ago
  Good. Maybe they can stop null routing traffic to paid customer accounts because their abuse detection false-positives constantly.
• pixard 2y ago
  Just got this via email. Well that's great, just as I moved a high bandwidth client to them a couple months ago. I love the "if you don't like it feel free to cancel" in the email also. SMH.
• musha68k 2y ago
  Unity moment.
• CalRobert 2y ago
  Bit annoying that the word tariff differs between the continents. Was thinking it related to possible trade tariffs
  • devjab 2y ago
    I wonder why English decided to narrow its meaning. Well I guess a language doesn’t decide anything, but I think you know what I mean. In many EU countries it simply means “cost list” or “price list” which can be for import duties but also for a range of other things. It’s very nice to have it called tariff in basically every EU country though. We get green energy tariffs and if it was called something different in each country they wouldn’t be fun.
• rmbyrro 2y ago
  Oh shit, did some VC or PrivEquity buy Hetzner? Will we have HWS soon?...
• jpalomaki 2y 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.
  • shubhamjain 2y 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.
    • immibis 2y ago
      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.
      • mardifoufs 2y ago
        What do you mean? Is peering/transit actually more expensive in the US? Residential internet isn't really relevant here, and if it was, it would still not really make sense considering that Germany (where they have their main datacenter) has much worse internet than the US according to most speed/bandwidth averages. Because if you are not referring to residential ISP, I don't think there's any peering/transit provider monopoly in the US
        • immibis 2y ago
          Yes. I suspect that because of the low number of residential ISPs there's less internet infrastructure in general and less competition. Who needs peering if there's only Comcast? You point out that networks can exist that don't serve residential customers, but who do they serve - mostly other networks which don't exist because they can't serve residential customers. The entire US is just the access region for a few networks to backhaul to NYC, Chicago and SF, not a full fledged network itself.
• dmazin 2y ago
  Oof, that reduction in bandwidth is huge. Am I correct that this only applies to outgoing WAN traffic? Incoming/internal is still free?
  • CallMeMarc 2y ago
    That is correct, incoming traffic is still free
• mythz 2y ago
  Was also disappointed after receiving this update today, price increases across the board and gone are the days of generous 20TB free traffic which we've been enjoying for over a decade. Our Hetzner VMs now limited to 1-3TB free traffic, feels like the end of an era.
  • dizhn 2y ago
    This is only for USA, isn't it?
  • risyachka 2y ago
    It was expected considering during the last year everyone on Twitter was shouting left and right that everyone should use Hetzner because it is cheap. Yeah it was cheap - only because the demand was low and they were competing on price. Now it will only go up.
    • jeremyjh 2y ago
      Its still a really good price though.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • bradley13 2y ago
    But, really? What are you doing, that your VMs need more than 1TB of data per month? That's a huge amount! That's 23MB per minute, continuously. If you have a website with that kind of reach, the prices seem entirely reasonable.
    • authorfly 2y ago
      I agree it is still reasonable. But some examples of things that are profitable under the old regime, but maybe not at 20x the limit: API services that consume media, whether to do some business logic specific thing or something specific, e.g. Transcriptions for videos, file conversion API, OCR API provider, etc. If you try a video app without using WebRTC and peer traffic your bandwidth can blow up too. Even if you use something like push notifications with base64. There are lots of traps that use Bandwidth.
• steve1977 2y ago
  At least from that link, they are not talking about bandwidth, but included traffic.
• Alifatisk 2y ago
  That’s a bit harsh but probably for understandable reasons, I wonder if DHHs shoutout to Hetzner in his last demo had an effect.
• pietz 2y ago
  A lot less bandwidth and higher prices with less than a week until it goes live. That's insane.
  • jkaplowitz 2y ago
    Less than a week for newly created resources. At least they’re allowing until February for existing resources.
• dzonga 2y ago
  I think this is fair. All their competitors have crazy pricing for bandwidth, so why should be they be generous ?
  • raverbashing 2y ago
    That's, non ironically, the answer Pulling the price too low in comparison, let's say with AWS, will just make your life harder but will not squeeze them in any way
• machinekob 2y ago
  So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working. Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it? I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?
  • killingtime74 2y ago
    Which duopoly are you thinking? AWS, GCP, Azure + smaller (still significant) Digital Ocean, Linode?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• machinekob 2y ago
  So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working. Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it? I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?
  • omnimus 2y ago
    Seems like the companies in US trust AWS just in case and this too cheap german company is suspicious. I would take guess that those who actually use Hetzner in US use it solely to abuse the generous traffic and not care that much about compute. Where in EUrope many companies never jumped on AWS in the first place.
  • acdha 2y ago
    AWS, Microsoft, and even Google provide a lot of features large enterprises want. A cheaper competitor which expects you to build more of that yourself entails larger staffing costs and that’s going to sound riskier if you aren’t great at consistently delivering software projects.
  • marcinzm 2y ago
    The per capita GDP of Germany is $52,745.76. The US is $81,695.19. The EU as a whole is $43,194. Median household income is $38,971 in Germany and $80,610 in the US. When people cost twice in one place versus another companies will focus on more expensive but less people intensive approaches.
    • machinekob 2y ago
      However, we are also considering infrastructure costs. The median salary in Germany is approximately 60,000 USD, which should probably be taken into account when comparing company costs to those in the USA, which are around 70-80,000 USD.
    • sokoloff 2y ago
      > Median household income is $38,971 in Germany That is a median "disposable income" (after taxes and transfers), which is not directly comparable to the US figure you cited (which is gross [before taxes]).
• fabian2k 2y ago
  Is traffic generally much more expensive in the US than in Germany? This seems to be a US-only change and I'm wondering a bit about the reasoning here and whether to expect this to also change in other regions.
  • jsheard 2y ago
    Not really, CDNs with regional pricing usually charge almost if not exactly the same amount for NA and EU traffic. It's the other regions that tend to be more expensive. I wonder if this has anything to do with how Hetzner operates in each region, they run their own EU datacenters but AFAIK they just rent rack space in the US, so they're more at the mercy of upstream providers.
    • machinekob 2y ago
      From Cloudflare blog about why EU prices are lower (around 50% cheaper than US at least according to cloudflare) The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges in the world. In Europe, and most other regions outside North America, these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of the world.
      • rsynnott 2y ago
        There _are_ non-profit neutral exchanges in the US (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Internet_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Internet_Exchange), but they're just not as dominant as they are in Europe.
• QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  It sounds like I can just move my bandwidth hungry servers to europe and eat the latency penalty- is that a correct read?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • leca 2y ago
    That's correct but assuming you want > 300 MB/s from EU to NA that will be a struggle. If you don't care about high upload/download speed from/to NA<->EU then yes, that's a good move. Otherwise closeness in geo is still king.
    • crest 2y ago
      As long as the link doesn't drop or reorder packets too badly a >300MB/s (or probably given we're talking about small virtual machines 300Mb/s) flow doesn't require much tuning. For a single long lived TCP connection allowing the window size to scale to ~2x the expected bandwidth delay product should be enough. So a simple things like large HTTP uploads or downloads will work fine once the congestion window has grown. The real problem is going to be anything more complex than that. Most request-response protocols too chatty and won't send enough independent outstanding requests to fill up the bandwidth delay product of an intercontinental link which will kill the throughput. Also users don't like to wait for slow responses no matter what throughput you can sustain for large transfers.
  • immibis 2y ago
    Yes. And you're not even exploiting the system, just using it as it is - bandwidth really is cheaper over here.
• mrbluecoat 2y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264789
• bilekas 2y 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. That is utter nonsense. If the customers who are 'covering the costs' have a problem, they can move? Yet even still they are charging those SAME customers who now actually receive less resources, even if they were using them or not.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    > That is utter nonsense. Hardly. Some level of cross subsidisation happens in all service of this nature. Depending on use youre either paying or receiving Most Providers and customers just ignore it as inconsequential though.
    • bilekas 2y ago
      The reasoning the gave still doesn't pass the smell test. If it's as they say, then they wouldn't increase the price they would tariff the traffic. Like other providers. Don't increase prices and claim it's to help the little guy.
  • jeremyjh 2y ago
    The problem with their old pricing structure is that it attracts high-utilization customers who will max out their transfer every month. But yes, they raised prices for all of us. Their pricing was so low, my guess is it was never profitable enough to be worthwhile long-term. It brought them a lot of business, some of which they'd be happier without under the old terms.
  • zapkyeskrill 2y ago
    Maybe that's exactly what happened. So now nobody is covering the free loaders and they need to charge them.
• TomK32 2y ago
  Doesn't bother me with those measly 50GB my mail server is using in a month...
• dietr1ch 2y ago
  Weird, one would expect that in anything related to technology either prices go down, or performance goes up over time.
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    True, so what gives? Just them wanting more money now that they got enough customers? They probably did some calculations and realized that damn, they could pocket more money so might as well try their luck. Like yeah, let us assume they have 10k customers: 7.05 * 10000 is 70500, 8.99 * 10000 is 89900, that is 19400 USD more for them, and that is just for one!
    • HighGoldstein 2y ago
      Or the cause is one step removed, for example the handful of giant companies that control all US internet infrastructure, versus the hundreds all over Europe.
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        Yeah, so that probably means the count of users is higher than the previously assumed 10k. They can do it, so they will do it.
  • machinekob 2y ago
    Not when there is a duopoly on one market (US) and hundreds of companies on other (EU).
    • anon7000 2y ago
      How is there a duopoly in the cloud market in the US?
      • adventured 2y ago
        [flagged]
• johnisgood 2y ago
  I thought of giving a recommendation here but I fear that they would raise the prices too... :|
  • benocodes 2y ago
    That's exactly how these things spread - as soon as one provider gets called out for good value, they seem to "adjust" their pricing.
    • BonoboIO 2y ago
      Hetzner had these good prices for decades now. They are still dirt cheap for cloud and dedicated
• isoprophlex 2y ago
  I run a dedicated server with them that does about 1 TB inbound / 50 GB outbound daily. If they start fucking people over on the dedicated servers as well, this product is basically dead because I can't find anywhere else that allows me to do this at the current price point... Unless of course I slap a box under my desk and hook it up to my fiber internet.
  • thg 2y ago
    The traffic limit is outbound only. There is no limit on inbound / internal traffic. So even if they were to hit you with a 5TB / month limit, you'd be just fine. https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ (bottom of the page)
    • immibis 2y ago
      This is correct. No idea why it was flagged. Hetzner only counts outbound traffic.
  • esskay 2y ago
    Pretty clear this is only affecting US cloud services so you arent affected.
• shubhamjain 2y ago
  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-hosting-servers-so-cheap/post-90812.html https://forumweb.hosting/13663-why-are-hetzners-dedicated-ho...
  • esskay 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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).
• ptero 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      OVH is comparable and has locations in North America.
  • SixThreeOne 2y 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.
• sigio 2y ago
  Traffic over-usage is $1 per TB, so this is still quite fair, only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.
  • jgalt212 2y ago
    so still order or orders of magnitude cheaper than the the big 3 hyperscalers.
    • tecleandor 2y 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...
      • glzone1 2y ago
        AWS drops to $50/TB - still 2x to 10x maybe? A lot of CDNs cost a surprising amount or hide pricing.
  • jsheard 2y 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 2y ago
      $80!! EC2 is a scam
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • jsheard 2y ago
        It's $120/TB for the first 10TB in a month, so you need to be spending >$1200 just on bandwidth every month before you even get the "discounted" rates.
• WolfOliver 2y 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." ... This argument does not make sense. I use very few resources but have to pay more.
  • nh2 2y ago
    The argument would make sense if the prices of any Hetzner service decreased (no longer necessary to substitute high traffic users). But all prices in this message increase.
  • aendruk 2y ago
    Yeah, my price just changed from €7.05 to €8.99—in the name of fairness to low impact users? It’s brazenly nonsensical. It would be so much better if they’d just said “sorry but we need to raise prices”. The attempt to sugarcoat it is insulting to begin with, and it’s only made worse that their backwards excuse comes across as thoughtlessly trampling us.
• DataDaemon 2y ago
  Inflation, the real inflation is 10%
  • GavCo 2y ago
    Inflation doesn't explain reducing the included traffic from 20TB to 1TB while simultaneously increasing prices. This is a much more dramatic change than what inflation would justify.
    • flumpcakes 2y ago
      Things are rarely priced at actual face value. You purchase a 10Gb/s firewall for $100,000 - you will not be using 10Gb/s traffic for the lifespan of this device. Applying this to Hetzner: You sell a service with X bandwidth included free because you know that only Y% is only ever used on average. Now people exploit the X allowance - spinning up new virtual machines to multiply this already generous allowance to get unlimited bandwidth for a fee 1/10000th of other commercial offerings. Your Y% costing is now completely invalid. You reduce the allowance 20x to mitigate this. I can't blame Hetzner at all for this, especially when Google/Amazon/Microsoft are printing money with their insane bandwidth costs. You know they are insane when they then change the rules to say it's completely free if you are migrating to a different provider - suddenly it doesn't cost anything at all for egress? Oh, it was actually upcoming monopoly investigations that might have taken a dim view...
• nottorp 2y ago
  So, do bandwidth limited (instead of traffic metering limited) VPSes still exist? I mean, to pull numbers out of ass, instead of $5 for 1.5 Tb of metered traffic on a 10 Gbps pipe, the $5 pays for 10 mpbs without metering. I know protecting the client from extra unforeseen charges isn't predatory enough, but maybe some offerings like that still exist.
  • christophilus 2y ago
    Yeah. OVH prices things out that way.
• cess11 2y ago
  [flagged]
• glzone1 2y ago
  When has AWS done something like this? LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.
  • maccard 2y ago
    Never. I don't think AWS have _ever_ icnreased prices.
    • glzone1 2y ago
      Right - I’ve been on them since EC2 flat network / simple DB days and was trying to remember if I ever got an email like this. I know google has jacked rates (maps etc) and killed services (I used their first paas before it was basically abandoned) I have argued online with folks about their pricing - my point usually being as soon as you try to do Netflix or YouTube on the “Free” or unlimited or ultra low cost providers - you find out it’s a lie. My impression was hetzner had started null routing customers for “abuse” who used a lot. No idea if that’s true, but used to be the way the “unlimited” VPS providers did it.
    • bhouston 2y ago
      They have, but usually it is via introducing additional fees to services/transactions, eg: https://www.astuto.ai/blogs/understanding-the-aws-public-ipv4-price-hike https://www.astuto.ai/blogs/understanding-the-aws-public-ipv... https://www.wiv.ai/navigating-the-rising-tide-of-aws-pricing-a-finops-perspective-on-extended-support-fees-and-automation-strategies https://www.wiv.ai/navigating-the-rising-tide-of-aws-pricing...
      • glzone1 2y ago
        The IPv4 charge is a good one! I thought this was to allow them to be more relaxed about the limit (5 per region) which is how they used to control fully free services that cost them. But an increase for sure - they did note the supply of free ARIN allocations was gone
        • 2y ago
• nh2 2y ago
  What their announcement does not cover is whether or not the 1 EUR/TB price above the free quota will still be active in the US.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• bhouston 2y 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 2y 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?
    • yurishimo 2y 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.
      • hyperpape 2y ago
        As an engineer, if you don't qualify whether your answer is average or max, you've messed up.
        • drpossum 2y ago
          I'm confident the marketing folks would just say something akin to "shut up nerd", cash their bonuses, and leave you with the problem.
        • 2y ago
• Havoc 2y ago
  The old allowance always struck me as unusually generous tbh
• conartist6 2y ago
  Wow. You literally cannot pay them 10 times the price to give you that much bandwidth now. If you were using 20TB they just don't want you as a customer anymore
  • rvnx 2y ago
    Literally quoting billing support: "It is a privilege to have the right to be a Hetzner customer"
    • conartist6 2y ago
      What the... "a privilege to have the right?" I don't think they know what rights are...
• trollied 2y ago
  They recently changed to bill by the hour. Not hard to destroy and reprovision once you're near the traffic limit. Massive loophole.
  • CodesInChaos 2y ago
    They don't pro-rate the included traffic quota for servers that don't run a full month?
    • rmoriz 2y ago
      No.
  • hypeatei 2y ago
    Yeah but if you're running something that is using a ton of bandwidth, presumably it's a service that needs to be online and reliable. Being cheap and constantly cycling out servers introduces complexity to your system. Hetzner could also easily change their terms to close this loophole if it's an actual problem.
    • qeternity 2y ago
      You can automate it with zero downtime on kubernetes. And since internal traffic is free, you just need to cycle the ingress servers. Pay for the cheapest instance, get 20TB of egress. Churn em and burn em.
      • socksy 2y ago
        I bet that costs more than 20€ to do
• johnisgood 2y ago
  [dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668
• jgalt212 2y ago
  As a Hetzner client, any price rise is disappointing. We are compute-heavy, not egress-heavy, user so will be largely unaffected by these changes, but I'm still a yuge Hetzner fan.
  • jimminyx 2y ago
    Same here - their compute pricing and performance were excellent value compared to the major cloud providers.
• qwertox 2y ago
  > for other customers who have used much more resources So, "Pi mal Daumen"* this means that US customers have a bandwidth consumption which almost an order of magnitude higher than that of European and Singaporean customers? I wonder what it consists of. * π x thumb = ballpark figure
  • xmodem 2y ago
    Hetzner has been an established player in Europe for a long time. It seems plausible that they have enough customers who use small amounts of bandwidth to subsidise the heavier users. Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with better pricing than established players, it stands to reason that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be the heavier users.
    • mrgaro 2y ago
      EU transit costs and peering agreements are much more relaxed and cheaper than in US
      • everfrustrated 2y ago
        Europe is also a lot smaller network wise. Hetzner only have to get their traffic to Frankfurt to get connected to practically the whole of Europe. For the US, Ashburn N.Virginia is good but it's still only a single coast.
        • inemesitaffia 2y ago
          They are definitely paying under 2c/TB for traffic though.
          • everfrustrated 2y ago
            Routers, optics & interconnects aren't free. $0.01/GB is very reasonable.
• UltraSane 2y ago
  I would think an auction system would be the best system to price bandwidth.
  • bhouston 2y ago
    Theoretically would be cool. Basically you have a docker that can run anywhere and you automatically migrate it based on prices between different service providers. The issue is there isn't incentives for the cloud providers to do this, because it wouldn't benefit the incumbents. Maybe if the government mandated it at some point, like phone number portability was mandated.
    • brookst 2y ago
      It’s also bad for customers because you wouldn’t have predictability in your cost structure.
  • simplecto 2y ago
    Enron tried this in the late 90s/early 2000s. That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books), but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth’s value is highly dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to create a seamless trading market. There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this problem. I remain highly skeptical.
  • remram 2y ago
    That could work for some use cases where you transfer in bulk, like backups, CDN sync, research data transfer, etc. Either auction or off-hours or "spot"/low-QoS.
• crest 2y ago
  I would like to know more about their bandwidth costs to learn if: * they have to pay that much more for (outbound) traffic in the US * miscalculated their US expansion and are trying to recoup * they think customers will only bitch, but stay anyways
• repple 2y ago
  I wonder what proportion of traffic is AI model weights being served. They are huge files, lots of mostly duplicated + fine tuned versions, lots of interest to download the latest and greatest, lots of ML aficionados grabbing them.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sundarurfriend 2y ago
  This thread is where I'm learning that American English uses tariff mainly for import tariffs. Here in India, the most common usage of it is to talk about telecom tariffs - mainly mobile, sometimes broadband. So it didn't even occur to me when reading the question that it might have anything to do with import tariffs, until I read some comments that misunderstood it that way.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Not just mainly, but exclusively in my experience. (Import/export tariffs.) Until this thread, I have never encountered the term "bar tariff" for a list of drink prices, or "energy tariff" instead of rate. Those uses are simply not American English, and you would be misunderstood. Hetzner is a German company so I find myself wondering if this is a British usage, or a mistranslation of the German word "tarif" that should be "rate"? (A common mistranslation category known as "false friends".) TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_(disambiguation)
    • hyperpape 2y ago
      Unclear to me why you're being downvoted. I previously knew non-US people refer to rates as "tariffs", but I never heard it in a US context. It's not rare, it's just not a meaning of the word Americans typically know.
    • willyt 2y ago
      One of the most frustrating things about Duolingo is that they refuse to have an International English setting for the language you are learning from. I’m trying to learn french but WTF is a ‘stroller’ or an ‘eggplant’ or even more frustrating are the ones where the word is almost the same in the UK as in France e.g ‘athlétique’ in French is ‘athletics’ in UK English but ‘track’ in US English.
    • Symbiote 2y ago
      It's perfectly acceptable British English. 21 occurrences of "tariff" on one of British Gas' pages: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/off-peak-electricity.html https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/off-peak-electric... ("Your energy provider may offer time of use tariffs and cheaper night-time electricity rates.")
• Anna3321AQ 2y ago
  [dead]
• heraldgeezer 2y 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. Isent this how every ISP works? You and all your neighbors can subscribe to 1Gigabit because they don't anticipate everyone maxxing out the bandwidth at once?
  • josephcsible 2y ago
    For speed that's how it works, but not for data caps.
    • heraldgeezer 2y ago
      "data caps" aren't real though from a networking perspective. A router or switch will push packets at line rate speed, not based on the total amount of storage or cap.
• dpeckett 2y 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 2y 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.
    • dpeckett 2y ago
      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 2y 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.
      • naniwaduni 2y ago
        They're giving two business days' notice for new product and three months for existing product?
        • josephcsible 2y ago
          December 1st's change isn't just for new customers. It's for newly-created or rescaled servers belonging to existing customers too, and it's plausible that those operations might happen a lot for some customers. And Thanksgiving and Black Friday are holidays for almost all American tech workers, so I'm not counting them as business days.
• evantbyrne 2y ago
  Is this a signal of a larger pivot in their business model towards targeting a higher-cost US enterprise market? A lot of brands have successfully transitioned to selling the same goods at luxury prices recently-maybe a webhost with a decent enough reputation can do the same.
  • phil21 2y ago
    Probably more they don't need or want the companies gaming this pricing at scale any more. If you are spinning up a $5/mo VM, using 19.5TB of bandwidth on it, then spinning it down and firing up the next, you are a cost center. This change boots those customers off the service entirely without having to write complicated ToS. The price change for average customers won't even be noticed on the next monthly bill, so it's likely seen as a win/win at the moment. At some point the marketing dollars stop getting spent as heavily when you reach a certain market saturation. Calling this luxury pricing is certainly a stretch considering it's an order of magnitude less than the large cloud providers still. It's just not below cost any longer.
• switch007 2y ago
  Nobody likes price rises but many companies are doing it due to disappointing year end financials and needing some positive news for next year. IMO 2025 will a big year for being forced to run lean (no DevOps teams trying to emulate Google, ditching pointless microservices architecture, reducing JavaScript churn etc) and having to be agile in responding to vendor price changes. And of course CTOs desperately thinking AI will reduce the wage bill with no impact
• usernamed7 2y ago
  I went from being a big fan of hetzner to being pretty angry because of this change and how it was communicated. The price change is one thing, the MASSIVE change in traffic you get for it is another. Together, they suck. to go from 20Tb to 1Tb feels like a massive bait-and-switch.
• nature556 2y ago
  lol, it's wierd
• dark-star 2y ago
  I wonder what's so special about Ashburn and Hillsboro... Did the local ISPs suddenly increase the prices or what?
• christophilus 2y ago
  I think OVH has a more logical bandwidth policy. They give you a certain Mbps cap, and that’s that. I haven’t used them personally, though, so can’t vouch for the experience. I’m curious to hear from folks who have used both providers.
  • apitman 2y ago
    From what I've heard if you actually saturate the link they'll get in touch. I'm not aware of any truly unlimited data transfer plans from VPS providers.
• koolba 2y ago
  Is the traffic pricing per instance or aggregated? So would having multiple servers but one going over the 1 TB limit cause an overage, or do they look at the total across all servers?
  • bakugo 2y ago
    Per instance.
• quickslowdown 2y ago
  I finally gave in to all the word of mouth marketing and moved to Hetzner about a month ago. Fuck.
  • kilroy123 2y ago
    I did 4 days ago! Very upsetting email.
• ouEight12 2y ago
  > customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources Literally the business model of every "shared resource service model" on the planet. Hetzner's entire business model is built on this... them acting like they're shocked to discover this is... disingenuous at best.
• apitman 2y ago
  I would love to see a VPS with transparent upstream costs so we have some idea of what's fair.
• atomic128 2y ago
  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 2y 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).
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      Completely unrelated, but I’m surprised how many people actually use the Ryzen 3600, from desktops to servers, it seems to be everywhere.
      • terribleperson 2y ago
        I expect to see the same thing from the 5600. With AMD still selling 5000-series CPUs and their prices so low, they must be incredibly tempting to anyone who needs a lot of CPUs.
    • throwaway2037 2y ago
      What is your annual electricity cost for that server in your closet?
      • christophilus 2y ago
        I’d like to know this too, along with how you mitigate traffic spikes while using the internet connection as both your home internet and your public internet.
• czhu12 2y ago
  What are some examples of applications people are running that: 1. Require 20TB of bandwidth / month 2. That bandwidth can't be shielded by Cloudflare and others? Is it like... real time video streaming? Gaming servers? I can't imagine a web app getting anywhere close to that. I run a mid sized NFT art creation website that generates both images and GIF's (https://mintables.club https://mintables.club) and with over 100000 users at peak, it only needed about 1.5TB of bandwidth.
  • ironhaven 2y ago
    BitTorrent seedbox. If you are apart of a private torrent tracker you may download 5tb and upload 10tb of data per month to be in good standing within that tracker’s community
    • lysace 2y ago
      Yeah, this is it.
    • Filligree 2y ago
      I've always wondered how ratios like that are supposed to work. Surely the ratio has to be 1.0, averaged over all users.
      • kiney 2y ago
        most trackers have some kind of bonus point system
        • extraduder_ire 2y ago
          I think certain torrents being marked freeleech to not count against accounts' ratio is what causes the bulk of the imbalance in total uploads versus downloads. It's necessary too, to increase availability on torrents.
    • Fnoord 2y ago
      Good thing I pay only 30 EUR a month for symmetric 1 gbit fiber. Right now with BF you can find BF deals cheaper than 2 USD a month, and then there's Usenet.
• AlchemistCamp 2y ago
  It's now more expensive for bandwidth than Digital Ocean, completely destroying what was its value proposition previously.
  • jorams 2y ago
    I'm not sure what math you're basing this on, but it's far from correct. They include slightly less transfer in the instances, but their overage pricing is about 10% of DO and their instances are so much cheaper that you'll be paying much less even after adding a few TB. For example compare the CPX11 to the cheapest similar offering from DO: CPX11: 2vCPU, 2GB, 40GB storage (NVMe), 1TB transfer, ~$5 per month DO Basic: 2vCPU, 2GB, 60GB storage (non-NVMe), 3TB transfer, $18 per month Add 2TB more transfer at Hetzner and you're at ~$7 per month. Still a bit less storage though, let's also compare it to the CPX21: CPX21: 3vCPU, 4GB, 80GB storage (NVMe), 2TB transfer, ~$9.50 per month. Add 1TB of transfer and you get more of everything for ~$10.50, ~40% less than at DO. And bandwidth overages at DO are about 10x as expensive. We can also compare a higher tier: CPX41: 8vCPU, 16GB, 240GB storage (NVMe), 4TB transfer, ~$32 per month CPX51: 16vCPU, 32GB, 360GB storage (NVMe), 5TB transfer, ~$63.50 per month DO Basic: 8vCPU, 16GB, 320GB storage (non-NVMe), 6TB transfer, $96 per month
    • AlchemistCamp 2y ago
      I was basing it off of the transfer per instance. Using DO, that transfer limit is pooled, so if you need a lot of bandwidth, the best option was to get a lot of $5/month droplets, which each came with 1TB/month. Looking at their pricing just now, it looks like it's $6/month for that droplet, which changes things a bit. Now, as long as you're willing to get droplets purely for the bandwidth allotment, DO's bandwidth costs $6/TB. That's more than almost every Hetzner option listed by the OP, but not all of them.
      • jorams 2y ago
        But overages from Hetzner are $1.05 per TB, which is significantly less than $6, so you can just get whichever instance you need and let it roll.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• imperialdrive 2y ago
  Those are some steeeep drops. I'm curious how they settled upon such numbers.
  • Aeolun 2y ago
    Presumably by looking at their competition, and realizing they’re still a better option.
    • veeter 2y ago
      Staying competitive swings both ways.
• lordofgibbons 2y ago
  I created an account with Hetzner earlier this year, and confirmed my Credit Card with them, but a few second later, they auto-suspended my account before I could log in. I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere. I don't know how they're still in business.
  • vdfs 2y ago
    I've been reading about how great Hetzner for years but i couldn't get past the sigup page where they require a credit card just to create an account.
    • aryonoco 2y ago
      Honestly if you are providing computer resources, that's pretty standard now and one of the only lines of defence against abuse
    • megous 2y ago
      Is that a US thing? I'm reasonably sure I did not give them my debit card.
  • Simon_ORourke 2y ago
    That's a particularly, but unfortunately good example of how awful they are as a company. The sooner they get pushed out of business the better.
  • viraptor 2y ago
    It's always a balance between how much fraud you allow and how many real customers you reject. They set their threshold at an interesting level, but maybe they're happy with that choice.
    • Buttons840 2y ago
      You're right. But unfortunately this mindset moves us closer and closer to having algorithms exclude people from society and life. And as the stories already told here show, it can happen to any of us for no apparent reason. It's like, imagine a magic wand that, if waved, would make life a little better for 99% of society, but much worse for 1%. Would it be moral to wave that wand?
• jstsch 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • guessmyname 2y ago
    > 1890k =-0;.9l, km8nubh6ydes3w2q1 What is the meaning of your comment?
    • exe34 2y ago
      dead drop maybe?
• cjaackie 2y ago
  It’s kind of not the brightest to both raise prices and reduce services at the same time, who’s in charge over there? Maybe I’m missing something ?
  • StressedDev 2y ago
    What if their choice was either raise prices or lose money?
• consumer451 2y ago
  Is anyone old enough to remember 1and1? Similar arc?
  • dindresto 2y ago
    They still exist, called ionos now: https://www.ionos.com/ https://www.ionos.com/
    • consumer451 2y ago
      Yes, I should have been more clear. It was another Germany? based provider that gave excellent, even free prices... until they didn't.
  • danpalmer 2y ago
    Maybe I'm too young to remember the good times, but to me 1and1 were just the European GoDaddy. Mostly targeting small businesses who didn't know any better and ripping them off with bad services at inflated prices, through a lot of well targeted marketing. Selling things like email with a 250MB inbox and 2MB attachment limit far beyond the time when that was a reasonable offering, and at a far higher price than that was worth (being worth roughly zero).
    • consumer451 2y ago
      They started with free .com registration. They grew their business with this offer, and then degenerated into what you described.
    • duskwuff 2y ago
      1and1 were also notorious for aggressively trying to collect on "debts" - more than one person I know had 1and1 send debt collection letters to their parents over renewal fees for hosting plans they didn't even want.
• themgt 2y ago
  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.
  • princevegeta89 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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?
      • fabian2k 2y ago
        For Hetzner you rent actual physical servers. There is nothing virtualized there, it's real hardware without abstractions.
        • consumer451 2y ago
          Thanks, I guess what I meant to ask is that is it normal for people to virtualize their own dedicated server these days by default? Would this be a best practice to avoid hosting vendor lock-in?
• mobeigi 2y ago
  To be fair their pre-change allowances were insanely generous.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• JSDevOps 2y ago
  Used Linode for years. Brilliant service. Not sure how the Akamai takeover will pan out. Anyone else looking to migrate. https://www.serverhunter.com/ https://www.serverhunter.com/
  • loloquwowndueo 2y ago
    Well the Akamai takeover was 2 years ago, so fairly certain whatever you have now is how it ended up panning out. I did panic a bit when it happened but my Linode just keeps working so I’m not unhappy.
    • JSDevOps 2y ago
      Was it two years ago?? I could have sworn it was less than a year ago. Anyway yeah I’m happy with Linode
  • acaloiar 2y ago
    Ironically one of the reasons I abandoned Linode for Hetzner was because I assumed Akamai would ruin it. I still have stuff on Linode and I don't think Akamai ruined it. With that said, Hetzner's prices are still cheaper and I've never had issues with their service, but I feel gaslit by this announcement.
    • flyinghamster 2y ago
      As an age-old Linode customer from the UML days, I'd say that Akamai has done a good job with it. I've had nothing to complain about.
  • keyle 2y ago
    As a long term linode user, I think the enshittification is well underway :(
• beefnugs 2y ago
  They specifically mention tarifs, maybe its political. Can't expect that kind of thing to get thrown around without international response.
• TZubiri 2y ago
  This has nothing to do with Hetzner. It's because of the US tariffs. "I’ve been a big fan of Hetzner. Unfortunately they’ve made a feeble attempt to dress this change up in the name of “fairness”." Hetzner is a company know for it's precise pricing structure. An increase in prices would be correlated to an increase in costs, and in fact the next paragraph Hetzner writes: "With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible " Bottom line, the US imposes tariffs, this increases the prices of imported products, of which Hertzner is one, (Servers from Europe) How can you write an entire article to complain about a price increase and not see that it was actually your country that increased the price.
  • fabian2k 2y ago
    They're not importing the VMs from Europe. And there are no new tariffs yet, inauguration is in January so there are only various announcements so far. They're using tariff to mean price, which is an unusual choice and likely because it was written by someone from Germany. This would not necessarily sound out of place to a German speaker as "Tarife" is a common way to describe differently priced plans for any kind of service.
    • cameronh90 2y ago
      It's British English. Tariff is used to mean import duties, business prices (e.g. "phone tariff") and also prison sentences (e.g. "whole life tariff"). Though given the political context, it would probably have made sense to use a different word.
      • lxgr 2y ago
        It's most likely imprecise wording due to a linguistic false friend from German (Hetzner is a German company); see also my other comment.
        • cameronh90 2y ago
          It's not a false friend, it is the same word. Not only do they share an etymology (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing. It's also used in a bunch of other European languages in essentially the same way, with either a similar or identical spelling. It's only US English where some of the meanings that are still common elsewhere are no longer used. It's actually kind of amusing that Americans would struggle to understand the meaning of an English word, but a French or Italian speaker would understand it. I wonder if there are any other words like this.
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Yes this hit me. We use a ton of traffic. Any alternatives? Although the pricing isn't too bad even with the increase, nice to have backups.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    We use Hivelocity. Not exactly the same service (bare metal).
• getcrunk 2y ago
  Good for them! Continue to be profitable and competitive so I can keep using them 20 years from now when they still decimate big cloud at 100x pricing or big cloud value add layer companies at 200x pricing
• hoechst 2y ago
  I personally use 0TB per month across 6 CPX21 servers (I know I’m over-provisioned; that’s not the point). Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..). People probably spam-provisioned cheap CPX boxes to get cheap bandwidth. Also, complaining about a "large 27.52% price increase" is kind of absurd when the absolute value of the increase is just under 2€.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > Kinds of is the point tho, you're hogging resources you don't actually need (not talking about traffic here ..). That seems backwards? They're not hogging anything, they're paying for network they're not using; this is excellent for Hetzner.
• lincon127 2y ago
  Checks out
• anacrolix 2y ago
  Hetzner suck. So do Vultr (OVH?). People learn about the bad things cloud providers do but still go crawling back
• danpalmer 2y ago
  The bandwidth reductions look like they bring the US in line with Singapore, i.e. typically 20TB of bandwidth in the EU and 1TB in Singapore, US moving from 20 to 1. I wonder if their cost base has changed significantly. Singapore having just 1TB included makes sense because in Singapore traffic is charged differently and costs a huge amount for all companies. I wonder if the colo provider for Hetzner in the US has screwed them over in some way.
• shrubble 2y ago
  My take on this is that there’s a price increase on power consumption and Hetzner decided to bump the prices now; perhaps they are facing a power price increase in January 2025. Do Ashburn or Hillsboro publish their power prices and have they increased in the past year?
• thisiscrazy2k 2y ago
  I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the streets to lay cable. So is bandwidth going to the cable? I am asking that because I never quite understood 3g/4g/5g costs. In my youth it was $0.10US for a text message. Now in my country, no one would pay to send a standard text. It's free even on PAYG. I'd imagine there is similarity?
  • 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
    On a Hetzner level, you don't quite know, as bandwidth deals between large hosting companies and IP transit providers like Hurricane Electric, Cogent, Zayo, etc, are typically protected by non-disclosure agreements. Unless you are a big enough fish (FAANG size) in the internet pond to do free peering with all the big boys, the contract with be negotiated for a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth (specified in megabits or gigabits per second), not like the terabyte like in the consumer LTE context.
  • Phil_Latio 2y ago
    Cloud providers make their money with the high bandwith costs. I can get 10 gbit/s line for ~$3,000 a month with a dedicated server. That's 3 PB of data and according to AWS cloudfront calculator it would cost ~$90,000 with them... So yeah, people get ripped off, just like with SMS in the past. Most don't know this or think it's fine, because "cloud" has benefits that justify the costs in the end ("I don't have to pay for sys admin!").
  • BlueTemplar 2y ago
    My first smartphone had a data plan which cost 1024€/Go. And I was happy about how cheap it was (it got more expensive shortly after). Cellular towers aren't cheap: you need to install quite a lot of them, especially in big cities!
• mark_l_watson 2y ago
  I have been a fan of Hetzner for many years. $1/terabyte overage charges seems reasonable. I live in Arizona, but have always rented Hetzner servers or VPNs in Germany. I imagine the service is much the same using servers in the USA?
• deleted 2y ago
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• tribby 2y ago
  hetzner is really known for its german bandwidth prices, a change in the US is fairly insignificant IMO. for most applications you could just put a free CDN in front of the cheaper german service to reach the US
• spl757 2y ago
  If you are procrastinator, Hetzner is not for you.
• recursivegirth 2y ago
  Hetzner has never really competed well in the US market and I often find Lightsail, OVH, and Digital Ocean cover my hosting needs pretty well. For what it is worth, I have also have used 2nd-hand resellers like SoYouStart (OVH). You get what you pay for, but ballin on a budget is totally possible. Back in the day I used 1&1, I wonder how they are faring these days. I am sure there are dozens of other viable providers, you just need to shop around.
• gigatexal 2y ago
  I never thought the 20TB of bandwidth was going to last forever. I guess here we are.
• danielovichdk 2y ago
  While all the guesswork ? They explain clearly why this is happening. And it seems fair. "With the new tariff structure, we want to make conditions for our customers around the world as fair as possible. To do that, we will calculate our prices based on local conditions in Europe, Singapore, and the USA. 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. The new prices will give our customers the best possible price for the resources they use."
  • iforgotpassword 2y ago
    It doesn't seem so fair if you didn't know that in advance. I don't do research on what actual costs a provider I sign up with has, and whether a product might be subsidized in some way. If I relied on those 20TB a month I now got a 100 to 400% price increase. I really like hetzner and their service quality, but that does leave a bad taste... I seems like they badly miscalculated.
    • bashy 2y ago
      If the location (USA) is key, then fair enough but if not, just buy one of their dedicated servers and get unlimited[1] traffic. Only outgoing external traffic is counted. [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
    • HelloNurse 2y ago
      They are telling in advance: changes are effective from February for old contracts.
    • mafuy 2y ago
      Well, a month ago they did not know that insane tariffs are going to exist suddenly. They are telling this pretty much as soon as they could.
      • christophilus 2y ago
• TekMol 2y ago
  Does Hetzner provide a way to limit how much traffic a cloud server can use? I'm always afraid to use paid services to host my hobby projects, because what happens when some malicious or stupid actor with huge bandwith hotlinks an image from my site or downloads it in a loop? What would be perfect would be a way to set an upper limit of say 100 TB per month after which the cloud server does not accept outbound traffic anymore and I get an email. Or is the network speed already enough of a protection? Their site says it is a 1GB connection. That should limit the traffic to 300TB per month? If so, that would also be fine with me.
• betimsl 2y ago
  I don't know why people praise Hetzner. They're not as good.
• indulona 2y ago
  charging for bandwidth is theft in the first place. pure scam. sure, companies that built the infrastructure had to get heir money back, but that was in the past. they are now just milking their position where very few companies in the whole world can compete. not even patents are exclusive for ever. yet these companies treat their cables like they are a goose laying golden eggs now and for ever. this is one thing where governments should step in.
• urda 2y ago
  This feels like a bait-and-switch, especially after taking the time to learn Hetzner and start telling my peers about Hetzner. I understand that pricing structures need to update, but good god existing users should have been kept as-is going forward. This behavior, and the cute little "cancel anytime!" has made me pause suggesting Hetzner in my circles as I re-evaluate their company.
• j45 2y ago
  For anyone regularly above the new 1TB limits, or using close to 20TB already on these services - what kinds of use cases are these? If it was a basic, or private CDN, for example, the lag time might be pretty negligible to stream out of EU for the extra bandwidth.
• fusl 2y ago
  Their email makes sense, except it doesn't. As someone who considers themselves a low traffic usage customer, running hundreds of Hetzner Cloud servers - each averaging less than 10GB of data transfer, with only a few servers reaching the previously included 50-60TB/month - I’m now facing an overall increase in costs. Not only are the per-server prices higher, but the drastic cut in included bandwidth (without a corresponding option for bandwidth pooling) means I'll be paying significantly more despite my usage being well within "low traffic" by their standards. It’s frustrating that Hetzner never introduced a bandwidth pooling option for customers where it would make sense, especially in scenarios like mine where usage is highly imbalanced across servers. At this point, Vultr and Linode are starting to make a lot more sense, even with their more expensive traffic pricing, since both providers offer traffic pooling. This feature would have significantly softened the blow of Hetzner's pricing changes, but instead, they’re pushing costs onto loyal customers who don’t fit neatly into their new model.
• solax 2y ago
  Their claim that "low usage customers subsidize high usage ones" is particularly disingenuous - if that were truly the issue, they'd offer better rates to low-bandwidth users rather than implementing blanket increases and severe bandwidth reductions across the board. What's most troubling isn't even the price hike itself, but the 3-day notice period. For those of us running auto-scaling infrastructure, this is essentially immediate - new instances will pull from the new pricing tier right away, even if existing instances have until February. This kind of abrupt change makes it hard to trust them for production workloads.
• 6451937099 2y ago
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