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Hetzner raises US cloud prices while lowering included bandwidth by 95% (twitter.com)
99 points by koolba 2 hours ago | hide | past | web | 42 comments | favorite





Am I calculating right that 20TB per month means around ~60Mbits per second for 24/7? Not a network expert, but it is hard to see how this could be sustainable for less than €5/month.

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.


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.

I think I'm missing something then. If that were true, wouldn't you lower the network allowance and then make the product cheaper or at least priced the same? This would have the no-traffic users paying "their fair share" and the overage costs (or higher traffic addon) would make up for the heavy users.

The current plan makes everything more expensive for everyone. They would do this if a) they never had a sustainable model in the first place or b) they were just being greedy


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.

Internet is much cheaper in Europe than in most other regions and there's more of it. Europe is effectively the center of the Internet. Most of the time (in regions like Asia-Pacific and Africa) this is simply due to having more time and money to build it, but when comparing Europe to the USA, it's probably because of regulatory structure - more competition, less monopolization.

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

IIRC a while back one of the CDNs had a post about their transit costs; they worked out _way_ lower in Europe than in the US. I don’t think Hetzner Germany is increasing prices here, just the US one?

Did they finally realize how AWS/Azure/Gcloud actually generate their exorbitant profit margins?

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

Bingo, lots of people are loud about this online and many influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it’s easy to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up less than 1% of a serious company’s revenue for AWS.

I’ve liked using Hetzner before and I’m curious how they’ll go after the market now. This is probably the wrong move though; Cloudflare realized this same fact some time ago but they kept their prices low to avoid cultivating ill will.


There probably are a number of things about AWS (see also no hard price caps) that people on forums froth at the mouth about but which most customers AWS actually cares about are largely indifferent about.

> lots of people are loud about this online and many influencers screaming about this on Twitter, so it’s easy to conflate that as a pressing issue. Ultimately a thousand indie devs mad about bandwidth extortion are still making up less than 1% of a serious company’s revenue for AWS.

So basically, by getting worked up publicly about this, those people provide free marketing for Hetzner?


What do you mean?

News Hacker isnt representative sample that also understands the insustry and the business?


AWS negotiates on bandwidth, too, so I imagine the actual savings would be a lot smaller for most customers unless you have some business which is heavily dominated by egress pricing.

I would like to know more about their bandwidth costs to learn if:

  * 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 think this is fair. All their competitors have crazy pricing for bandwidth, so why should be they be generous ?

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


Wow. You literally cannot pay them 10 times the price to give you that much bandwidth now. If you were using 20TB they just don't want you as a customer anymore

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

It sounds like I can just move my bandwidth hungry servers to europe and eat the latency penalty- is that a correct read?

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

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.


As long as the link doesn't drop or reorder packets too badly a >300MB/s (or probably given we're talking about small virtual machines 300Mb/s) flow doesn't require much tuning. For a single long lived TCP connection allowing the window size to scale to ~2x the expected bandwidth delay product should be enough. So a simple things like large HTTP uploads or downloads will work fine once the congestion window has grown.

The real problem is going to be anything more complex than that. Most request-response protocols too chatty and won't send enough independent outstanding requests to fill up the bandwidth delay product of an intercontinental link which will kill the throughput. Also users don't like to wait for slow responses no matter what throughput you can sustain for large transfers.


So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working. 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?

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.


> Median household income is $38,971 in Germany

That is a median "disposable income" (after taxes and transfers), which is not directly comparable to the US figure you cited (which is gross [before taxes]).


However, we are also considering infrastructure costs. The median salary in Germany is approximately 60,000 USD, which should probably be taken into account when comparing company costs to those in the USA, which are around 70-80,000 USD.

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.

This is pretty steep... their website still seems to list the old included traffic and price (though okay, I guess they still have 3 days to update). Is there a more official link, or was it distributed through email?

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

Good. Maybe they can stop null routing traffic to paid customer accounts because their abuse detection false-positives constantly.

I run a dedicated server with them that does about 1 TB inbound / 50 GB outbound daily.

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.


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)


This is correct. No idea why it was flagged. Hetzner only counts outbound traffic.

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

A lot less bandwidth and higher prices with less than a week until it goes live. That's insane.

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

At least from that link, they are not talking about bandwidth, but included traffic.

So, do bandwidth limited (instead of traffic metering limited) VPSes still exist?

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.


Just got this via email. Well that's great, just as I moved a high bandwidth client to them a couple months ago. I love the "if you don't like it feel free to cancel" in the email also. SMH.

Unity moment.

Oh shit, did some VC or PrivEquity buy Hetzner? Will we have HWS soon?...

That’s a bit harsh but probably for understandable reasons, I wonder if DHHs shoutout to Hetzner in his last demo had an effect.

Doesn't bother me with those measly 50GB my mail server is using in a month...



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