> I'd like to see how many people in this thread saying "but they promised UNLIMITED..." have ever actually worked in network engineering for a colo/hosting ISP.
Raises hand
The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.
reaching out nicely to a customer that's probably in the top 0.02% of your bandwidth users for their package/plan and asking them to move to a more serious/expensive service is not a lie...
i should also note that a very common reason for a dedicated hosting company's server to go wild on upstream bandwidth is something misconfigured or compromised, and being used maliciously by some external 3rd party. not actual bandwidth usage from the paying customer. this is mentioned in a nicer way in the email.
they probably could have just cut them off arbitrarily. nothing obligates them to keep a customer.
this is actually really nice on the part of the hosting ISP in my opinion.
If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.
this is "unlimited" in the same way that an all you can eat buffet restaurant is unlimited, with some caveats.
no, this is more like running a buffet restaurant with an all you can eat buffet.
98% of your customers show up and eat three gargantuan heaping plates, are totally satisfied, and can barely walk back to their cars.
the other 2% show up at 3 in the afternoon, stay for six hours, eat ten plates of crab legs and roast beef.
maybe you notice those 2% of customers and say nothing.
if the same person comes back every week and loads up on ten plates of crab legs, you nicely remind them of the socially acceptable use of an all you can eat buffet.
to extend this analogy, the posted time limit at the entrance of the buffet is similar to what's in their TOS/AUP that the customer agreed to before ever starting the service in the first place.
I think the biggest difference is that "Please don't stay here more than 2 hours" clearly means that you can't sit around and eat all day.
"[don't do things that] impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" doesn't make it very clear that there are data caps.
No. You accept those 2% as cost of doing business.
Yeah of course you made certain calculations when you started your business, including that most people would start loading up their (small) trays with the first items, which are the cheapest and so not cost you much, but you also accept that not everybody is going to do that.
A business is a business and social acceptableness has nothing to do with one another. One is a business and the other is a social situation. If I know you personally, it is a social situation. If I have paid money, it is business situation.
This behavior leads me to disregard any advertising of "all you can eat" as a lie, and the speaker of that lie as a dishonest business. American Airlines dealt with this.
Fine, but getting back to the analogy, you have to specify how your bandwidth is limited from the outset, you can't just offer it as unlimited and then say, "Nooooooo, you obese whale, not like that!" once it disadvantages your business.
> If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.
Well, they could put that in the policies or the offer. Or be more specific in the email.
But 1G isn't really that much. I don't have a use for that much bandwidth at the moment, but it's not like you need that much compute to pump out 1G, so pick the offering with enough compute and enough bandwidth, and there you go. You don't always need an SLA, especially if you can load balance over multiple bottom of the barrel hosts. Unmetetered 1G for not a lot of money is a credible offer, so I'd take an established provider at their word; lots of hosting offers have a port speed and a traffic limit and overage fees listed.
What part of, "Don't advertise something as 'unlimited' if it isn't unlimited" is difficult for you?
It seems pretty damn simple. Hetzner used to have transfer limits. It was 20 TB for cheap servers when I was using them (2017-2019). It was bumped up to 50 TB in 2020.
I don't disagree with you that a user consuming 250 TB of transfer should be paying for that transfer, though. I'm disagreeing with the marketing. It's deceptive, and it causes problems that are the genesis of this post. You know what's supremely simpler? Just commit to a hard limit on transfer and be done with it.
Threatening termination for using what was advertised does not seem very nice to me - especially when they specifically removed traffic limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500
I guess their routers just run out of packets like buffets run out of crab legs, huh.
There's a difference between saying "unlimited" and "up to n Mbps * t transfer per billing period".
We don't know or care how our packets are being measured. If there's a limit to them beyond the physical link, then it's not unlimited. "Unlimited packets internally but we will reduce the egress rate after a certain amount" also isn't "unlimited".
It's not a lie, it's marketing (.. well I guess that is a lie then).
Unlimited plans exist because demand isn't consistent, and shared bandwidth provides a way to lower prices. If I was guaranteed max bandwidth on 5G all the time on my cellular plan, I'd pay a lot more than $40/month.
The actual limits are there and detailed in the terms and conditions, and often the marketing material will say that additional terms apply. It's the customers fault for assuming "unlimited" means actually unlimited, which is unrealistic and also not what a typical customer would think.
How does Hetzner lie here? They provided unlimited 1-ish GBit/s sustained for every month they were in contract. It is their right to choose to not do business with that user as laid out in the short ToS.
"I know I leased you this entire acre on an ongoing basis, and said you could plant on the whole thing, but now that I see you're actually planting the entire acre and not just a quarter-acre, I'm terminating your lease at the end of the current term—which is compliant with our lease agreement—because I didn't ever actually intend to let you plant on the whole thing even though I listed that, explicitly, on the advertisement for the land"
That means a lie was told.
The reason for not continuing the service means they lied. That it doesn't violate their ToS is beside the point—they offered something that they did not intend to let people actually use. The evidence is precisely the fact that they'll stop doing business with you if you actually use what they sold you (and don't agree to pay them more money).
As long as they didn't interfere with the plants that were planted, like throttling the connection, they offered exactly what they promised. Hetzner never offered unchanging contracts. Hetzner made a material claim. They fulfilled that claim from all i can see. You can get unlimited 1 Gbit/s traffic at Hetzner for a month at said price.
Raises hand
The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.