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That's what a friend said also. If you look beyond the marketing material, hoever, the ToS says: > OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service band

by Aachen 2y ago

That's what a friend said also. If you look beyond the marketing material, hoever, the ToS says: > OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would they eat those costs for you? I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history: > it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then > I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection advertised to be capable of 500mbps×24h = 5.4TB/day... that's reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a 5$/month VPS

derefr 2y ago
> is a meter attached Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to saturate their network switches they’ll add one, to figure out who’s disrupting everyone else’s QoS.
- derefr 2y ago
  Forgot to mention, OVH makes the current topology and traffic saturation of their network switches public: http://weathermap.ovh.net/ http://weathermap.ovh.net/ (I think they mostly do this so that customers can see and verify that any DC-level peering relationships, or per-customer site peering contracts [a.k.a. "OVHCloud Connect"] are being taken advantage of to flow the customer's traffic. But it's convenient for other things, too.)
matt-p 2y ago
> is a meter attached Yes, of course. Having flow data (or monitoring ports/interfaces) for traffic engineering and management is pretty essential, not least for determining when capacity upgrades are needed. I understand both sides of the argument here. The idea of offering "unlimited" is appealing because most users of a typical 2GB RAM virtual machine (as an example) consume less than 1TB of bandwidth per month. Offering unlimited bandwidth removes the hassle of overage charges/billing queries and eases customer concern/friction. Both sides benefit from this. However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth? Should providers avoid offering unlimited bandwidth unless it's truly unlimited? From an engineer's perspective, yes, I agree. But this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"—just to address a handful of users who take full advantage of it. It's tough, so IME most such providers leave something in their terms that allows them to intervene in extreme cases but typically exercise restraint in doing so, usually only doing it manually if they notice that 'extreme' usage is damaging other users experience e.g it's serious and prolonged usage.
- saurik 2y ago
  Doing billing like this is awkward as you just don't know what you are going to get. And, in a world where most people are in fact using small amounts of bandwidth, what you have done is caused people who use small amounts of bandwidth to pay MORE than they should, as they are effectively paying the price of the bandwidth for the average user: if you use less than the average, you are subsidizing the people who use more than the average. Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either has to raise rates for everyone or they have to start claiming some uses of bandwidth are "egregious". The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user from paying even more than the too much you are already charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users), you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes out the window :/. The real reason any of this works is just that people in fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time, and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS than they often do today, but everyone would be paying little enough that this idea that it is a big customer "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over sudden utility overages.
  - ghssds 2y ago
    View this as an insurance and it suddenly all makes perfect sense. You pay a little more so if this month your usage pikes, you won't get a surprise invoice you didn't budget for, and you won't get cut either. At worst, you'll get rate-limited. This price stability is valuable and paying extra to get it isn't being charged an unfair price. Of course if you don't find it beneficial, you should choose another offering.
    - saurik 2y ago
      This is only relevant because the cost of bandwidth is excessively high--much higher than it should be--and so people essentially need to pay for this gouging-insurance.

by Aachen 2y ago

derefr 2y ago

> is a meter attached Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to saturate their network switches they’ll add one, to figure out who’s disrupting everyone else’s QoS.

derefr 2y ago
Forgot to mention, OVH makes the current topology and traffic saturation of their network switches public: http://weathermap.ovh.net/ http://weathermap.ovh.net/ (I think they mostly do this so that customers can see and verify that any DC-level peering relationships, or per-customer site peering contracts [a.k.a. "OVHCloud Connect"] are being taken advantage of to flow the customer's traffic. But it's convenient for other things, too.)

matt-p 2y ago

> is a meter attached Yes, of course. Having flow data (or monitoring ports/interfaces) for traffic engineering and management is pretty essential, not least for determining when capacity upgrades are needed. I understand both sides of the argument here. The idea of offering "unlimited" is appealing because most users of a typical 2GB RAM virtual machine (as an example) consume less than 1TB of bandwidth per month. Offering unlimited bandwidth removes the hassle of overage charges/billing queries and eases customer concern/friction. Both sides benefit from this. However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth? Should providers avoid offering unlimited bandwidth unless it's truly unlimited? From an engineer's perspective, yes, I agree. But this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"—just to address a handful of users who take full advantage of it. It's tough, so IME most such providers leave something in their terms that allows them to intervene in extreme cases but typically exercise restraint in doing so, usually only doing it manually if they notice that 'extreme' usage is damaging other users experience e.g it's serious and prolonged usage.

saurik 2y ago
Doing billing like this is awkward as you just don't know what you are going to get. And, in a world where most people are in fact using small amounts of bandwidth, what you have done is caused people who use small amounts of bandwidth to pay MORE than they should, as they are effectively paying the price of the bandwidth for the average user: if you use less than the average, you are subsidizing the people who use more than the average. Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either has to raise rates for everyone or they have to start claiming some uses of bandwidth are "egregious". The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user from paying even more than the too much you are already charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users), you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes out the window :/. The real reason any of this works is just that people in fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time, and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS than they often do today, but everyone would be paying little enough that this idea that it is a big customer "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over sudden utility overages.
- ghssds 2y ago
  View this as an insurance and it suddenly all makes perfect sense. You pay a little more so if this month your usage pikes, you won't get a surprise invoice you didn't budget for, and you won't get cut either. At worst, you'll get rate-limited. This price stability is valuable and paying extra to get it isn't being charged an unfair price. Of course if you don't find it beneficial, you should choose another offering.
  - saurik 2y ago
    This is only relevant because the cost of bandwidth is excessively high--much higher than it should be--and so people essentially need to pay for this gouging-insurance.