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.

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

“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?

8 years ago, hetzner had no cloud offerings

The dedicated servers still have 20 tb traffic included

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.

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

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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).

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.

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

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

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.

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

Per instance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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