Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

I think this might be a cultural thing. HN, SV, and the market for IaaS/SaaS products is a bit of an American monoculture, where "the customer is always right" and there's a strong desire to make the customer happy. I think this is mostly a good thing and especially a good way to build early stage companies, but in my experience it's less present elsewhere.

In some places companies are happy doing their own thing, don't need every customer, don't need to be everything to every customer, and won't fight for business in the same way. Does that limit them? Maybe? But I suspect not enough to be a problem most of the time.

I was customer for 10 years, but for business I needed a second account. Banned immediately even after I submitted a passport copy. Worked after contacting their support. Still happy customer (with both accounts). I think they're just very strict and get their (un)fair share of stolen credit card or stolen identity signups.

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.

Did you sign up as a private individual or was it a company account? I think they are extremely strict with private accounts, especially outside of EU. Most individuals only get a few resources for a few bucks per month, which probably isn't worth the business at all.

I know a few people who use Hetzner, smaller EU registered companies, zero issues. Also extending limits is just one click and gets approved after a few minutes.

And I totally get why they have to be strict. Blocked IPs are becoming an epidemic, I stopped using Digital Ocean, because I always got bad IPs, that were blocked everywhere. Also Hetzner is suffering from that. People are renting servers for little money and do bad things with the 20 TB traffic they get.

Same with me a few years ago. Their support told me that they didn't want me as a customer. It was my first interaction with them. I swear I'm just a regular nerd with a credit card :D

They are bizarre.

I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.

Because they're so cheap they have to worry about spammers and other sorts of abuse. It's more cost effective for them to refuse dodgy-looking accounts.

The big question is, were you using real information or did you put in fake info?

They're still in business because they're cheap and pretty reliable. But being cheap means there are things you can't get with them but can with others. For example, you can't pre-pay for the entire year ahead of time.

When I ordered a VPS at Netcup (a Hetzner alternative) they called me and asked me for the name of the hotel next to my place to check if I really lived at the address I provided. I guess that if i would have needed to look it up, that is, struggled a bit with the answer, they would have denied me as a customer.

Had exactly the same experience. I even provided my real drivers license -- something I normally would never do. Didn't convince them I am a real human being that matches what's on the ID.

I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.

Were you using your real information when you signed up? Were you using a disposable / privacy-first credit card? Did you try to obscure your name or register from a VPN? You're very upset at them accusing you of abuse or fraud, but you haven't actually made it clear whether any of the signals you provided them when signing up were aligned with what they'd usually see from abusive or fraudulent users.

This was between 2000-2010, but when I ran a linux consulting+hosting business our "provision a VPS with a credit card" was where we experienced the largest amount of fraud, by probably 100x. Certainly well over 10x. Might be why Hetzner was touchy?

Because they provide good service to most customers.

Your case is unfortunate, and I totally understand why you'd be taking you business elsewhere, but probably an outlier.

Otherwise, we'd need to ask the same about AWS et. al. as we've definitely seen more than enough wrong account closure complaints on here.

You're leaving out a crucial detail: did they just assume your real information was incorrect because the name is unusual or something, or did you actually provide incorrect information?

I'm not sure what was your concern - Hetzner is obliged by law to make sure their signing up a real person or a company and that their servers are not used for malicious intent.

You also don't know the strain brought by continual streams of fraud that their support has to deal with, all for being a relatively cheap option.

Always felt like they were in the business of blaming and hating their customers. Cloud providers that nitpick and judge every aspect of their customers’ business details and technicalities are a huge operational risk. This archaic practice is the reason generic cloud orchestration was a must, and it’s just not needed anymore.

I don’t care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.

> I don't know how they're still in business.

They're growing year after year, so clearly they're doing something right.

OTOH there is Azure where a very sophisticated Twillio phishing service was hosted. When reported to abuse Microsoft replied they were a valid customer. A week later it finally came down.

Yep. Same thing happened to me. I was not able to get my account working. Ever.

I have all my stuff on vultr now.

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.

I mean your transaction probably got flagged as fraudulent (like if your postal code didn't match your card), it's not that mysterious.

I think most online operators that have "spend $3 with us" tiers have to be super vigilant about card transactions, and when you fall into the cracks you're a bit SOL.

They are still in business because 99.99% of customers are not affected by this.

I'm happy customer for years and will be even with these changes.

> I don't know how they're still in business.

They have 400 GBit/s of DTAG transit.

Showing that they are rich as fuck without saying it.

Were you on a VPN or Tor at the time?

OVH did the same thing to me...

don't use a gmail account

same. fuck 'em. they are not even that cheap to begin with. they used to be, not today.

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.

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

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

https://microtronixdc.com/

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great

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

It's easy to never raise prices if you have 1000% markup.

If you use 20 TB each month the price will be 25.39€ instead of 5.39€. I can't think of any business that would seriously struggle with this 20€ monthly price increase.

Price increases are not a nice thing, but this one is not catastrophic.

While perhaps not like this, AWS has from time to time ensured average rate goes up or introduced charges for something previously free:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/new-featu...

See notes 1 and 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/

Never. I don't think AWS have _ever_ icnreased prices.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this attitude so commonplace?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings

The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

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

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

They are simply deflecting blame for their own enshittification.

Want to give a clue on who the culprit is?

I have 2 services that run above those figures:

1. the demo instance of my OSS software which is a bring your own storage Dropbox like UI for SFTP, S3, FTP, and every protocols imaginable: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash People tend to come in the demo to upload / download tons of stuffs

2. the docker registry for my oss stuff since I was kicked out of the docker open source program and now need to find a new place to store all the images. 10 millions downloads over the last few years, it does add up very quickly way above the 20TB limits if your image isn't super slim and try to selfhost everything

> video streaming?

Pet peeve but yes. It should not, in 2024, be considered a niche use case to deal with.. video. We’ve become accustomed to YouTube and their impossible-to-beat free hosting. But it’s really pricey to do streaming and so yes, we should expect large bandwidth being available. “Who needs X” is a question that should be reversed, instead we should ask “why not?”. When we have good affordable infra, we get cool new stuff and everyone benefits.

Structural monitoring in engineering for example. You need high quality pictures and have lots of drone data and files need to move to hyper scaler or on premise for GPU processing.

Cloudflare is not trustworthy and you don't always need to pay the "protection" fee. I.e. B2B where a day offline doesn't matter.

Cloud pricing is insane compared to Hetzner with regards to storage and CPU power. If you have some Linux knowledge it's perfectly stable. Support is top notch.

For 50€ per box you get 10gbe which is also nice. Not everyone needs 100% IaC like the big hyper scaler offer or geo redundancy etc.pp... even Hetzner has an API and you can even terraform their dedicated servers to some degree. It's 15 to 30 minutes vs. seconds but who cares.

1.5TB isn't much at all but keep in mind that if a "disproportionate percentage" of your Cloudflare bandwidth is used for images they reserve the right to boot you off [1].

https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...

There are many data streams you may want to process that take lots of network traffic. CT logs, monitoring aggregators, web crawlers, etc. For the traffic you initiate, there's no proxying/caching you can do.

Besides needing it: Not having to fear that an attacker spamming the machine with Mail or web requests or something incurs a bug traffic bill gives better sleep at night.

PeerTube comes to mind.

More people setup VPN servers these days. Spiked with the Iran protests. Wireguard makes it eas-ier. Circumventing some rules like content distribution.

blockchain nodes

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.

Sorry, is Hetzner a company from Canada, China, or Mexico? Are digital goods & services indicated to be under tariff as well?

I hope this experience teaches you to be more polite and open-minded even when you think you know what you are talking about.

How do you tax internet traffic?

> US imposes tariffs

That didn’t happen yet and isn’t even 100% guaranteed to happen. So maybe it would be reasonable to wait?

Also what makes you think they are shipping their servers from Europe? How is them being an European company even relevant?

Cool: then maybe they can precisely explain the full breakdown of these changes instead of hiding behind a word that explains nothing.

Because of announcements of tariffs?

Probably more likely has something to do with increased energy costs.

This is only for USA, isn't it?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's the language barrier. The German word Tarif doesn't mean the same as the English word tariff.

This has nothing to do with any possible trade wars or trade tariffs.

The word tariff is often used in telecom to indicate rates and fees for some given quantity of services, and that seems to be the use here.

By tariff they just mean contract pricing, not the tax kind.

> 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.

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

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

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

That's usually true if you see the actual costs of the thing.

In the case of data transmission if you were using some data transmission system where you were charged per byte based on the operator's costs (possibly time dependent so the cost per byte might vary depending on the amount of traffic on the provider's network and on the varying real time prices of the networks they connect to) then you would indeed see prices going down over time and performance going up.

Consumers, small businesses, and often even medium businesses generally hate that kind of pricing. They like fixed monthly bills. So providers offer that, setting the amount of data included in that price high enough that most customers won't ever come near it.

That tends to result in the lower bandwidth users actually paying quite a bit more than they would if they had per byte pricing and the higher bandwidth (but not so high as to go over the included data and hit overage fees) paying less than they would under the per byte model.

That can attract more high bandwidth customers and eventually the model of customer bandwidth usage that was used to set the price and bandwidth allowance is no longer accurate and gets adjusted.

Note that this means that price you pay is not just a function of the underlying technology costs--it is also a function of how other people are using the service.

Same thing happens even in non-technology areas. You probably wouldn't go into a fixed price "all you can eat" restaurant just to get a donut and cup of coffee. The fixed price is set to cover people getting full meals. And if a bunch of competitive eaters started coming in every day to do their training at that restaurant you can safely bet that the price is going to go up for everyone or there is going to be an asterisk added to "all you can eat" with a footnote that puts some sort of cap on it.

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!

Not when there is a duopoly on one market (US) and hundreds of companies on other (EU).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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)

hotels in India also use the word tariff for room rates, as in, see the tariff chart on the wall behind the reception desk.

I vaguely remember the word tariff being used to refer to fees or duties in a history class growing up, but as you've noted, it's not used this way in American English anymore. When I got the email from Hetzner this morning, I thought they were taking preemptive action against some tariff/sanction that Trump must have announced against EU data companies.

Ah, at first I wondered if this had something to do with Trump getting elected and his claims that he will implement massive (import) tariffs.

I think you are probably misreading the situation. My guess is that their costs went up and they are now increasing their prices so they don't lose money.

It’s not an individual customer thing. It’s a subsidy for early customers to get market share > raise prices.

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.

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.

Maybe that's exactly what happened. So now nobody is covering the free loaders and they need to charge them.

> 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.

They're only raising the prices of customers whose servers use more than a terabyte per month. Based on my experience, it's not easy to go over a terabyte of bandwidth for most web services. I doubt the majority of their customers will see any change in price.

Sucks to pay a dollar per terabyte extra if you're downloading a petabyte per month through your hetzner VPN, but this sure beats raising everyone's prices because two or three companies decided to use Hetzner to build a CDN.

This is why you can't offer unlimited anything, and why we can't have nice things.

Yeah, I really don't understand that part of the message. It'd make sense if they were lowering prices elsewhere, but now they just... raise them? I seriously don't see how that benefits _anyone_ except Hetzner.

Agreed. This was an incredibly stupid statement to make because they didn't reduce prices anywhere. This was not a price re-balancing, but a price hike.

No, they realized that nobody switches away from AWS because of their expensive bandwidth.

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.

Yes. And you're not even exploiting the system, just using it as it is - bandwidth really is cheaper over here.

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.

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!

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!").

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.

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.

As a long term linode user, I think the enshittification is well underway :(

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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 wouldn't be amazed if Hetzner benefits significantly from peering, which is much more widespread in US than in Europe. Interesting piece on this from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

It's quite possible that their costs really are significantly lower in Europe. No idea what things are like in Singapore.

They don't pro-rate the included traffic quota for servers that don't run a full month?

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.

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.

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.

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).

They still exist, called ionos now: https://www.ionos.com/

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.

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/ (bottom of the page)

Pretty clear this is only affecting US cloud services so you arent affected.

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.

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.

Which duopoly are you thinking? AWS, GCP, Azure + smaller (still significant) Digital Ocean, Linode?

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.

That is correct, incoming traffic is still free

> 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.

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

The pricing applies immediately only for new customers. For existing ones, it applies from Feb 2025.

Presumably by looking at their competition, and realizing they’re still a better option.

What if their choice was either raise prices or lose money?

We use Hivelocity. Not exactly the same service (bare metal).

Less than a week for newly created resources. At least they’re allowing until February for existing resources.

Haven't been able to find a link. Seems like it was only distributed by email — which isn't great communication IMO

Per instance.

Literally quoting billing support: "It is a privilege to have the right to be a Hetzner customer"

For speed that's how it works, but not for data caps.

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.

Same here - their compute pricing and performance were excellent value compared to the major cloud providers.

I did 4 days ago! Very upsetting email.

That's exactly how these things spread - as soon as one provider gets called out for good value, they seem to "adjust" their pricing.

Yeah. OVH prices things out that way.

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