Hetzner cuts traffic from 20 TB –> 1..5 TB on US VPSs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-ho...

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.

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.

"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."

So... raising the prices for everybody instead?

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.

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) and with over 100000 users at peak, it only needed about 1.5TB of bandwidth.

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

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?

LB11 going from 20TB to 1TB for the same price is wild if you’d built a business on this platform.

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?

Massive loophole.

Am I correct that this only applies to outgoing WAN traffic? Incoming/internal is still free?

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€.

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.

  * 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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

This behavior, and the cute little "cancel anytime!" has made me pause suggesting Hetzner in my circles as I re-evaluate their company.

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?

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.

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.

Fuck.

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

"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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264668

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264789

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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