Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

469 points · hyperknot · 9 days ago

Just received by email:

We are writing to inform you about important changes to the tariff structure of our Cloud servers (CCX and CPX lines) and our Load balancers at our US locations in Ashburn and Hillsboro.

What will change?

Starting on 1 December 2024, 01:00 am CET, we will begin charging new prices for newly-created Cloud servers and introduce new amounts for included traffic for Cloud Servers and Load balancers at the US locations in Ashburn (ASH) and Hillsboro (HIL). This also applies to existing Cloud servers and Load balancers that are switched to a different tariff using the “Rescale” function. For any existing Cloud servers and Load balancers you have at these locations, the new prices and the new amounts for included traffic will apply later, starting on 1 February 2025, 01:00 am CET. The price for traffic overage will remain unchanged in the new price structure.

What are the new prices and amounts of included traffic?

Below, you can see a list of the old and new prices and the included traffic.

Product Old price New price Old included traffic New included traffic

CPX11 € 3.85 € 4.49 20 TB 1 TB

CPX21 € 7.05 € 8.99 20 TB 2 TB

CPX31 € 13.10 € 15.99 20 TB 3 TB

CPX41 € 24.70 € 29.99 20 TB 4 TB

CPX51 € 54.40 € 59.99 20 TB 5 TB

CCX13 € 11.99 € 12.99 20 TB 1 TB

CCX23 € 23.99 € 25.99 20 TB 2 TB

CCX33 € 47.99 € 49.99 30 TB 3 TB

CCX43 € 95.99 € 99.99 40 TB 4 TB

CCX53 € 191.99 € 199.99 50 TB 6 TB

CCX63 € 287.99 € 299.99 60 TB 8 TB

LB11 € 5.39 unchanged 20 TB 1 TB

LB21 € 16.40 unchanged 20 TB 2 TB

LB31 € 32.90 unchanged 20 TB 3 TB

All monthly prices are excl. VAT and excl. IPv4 addresses. Why are we making these changes?

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.

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685 comments

themgt · 8 days ago

As a Hetzner bandwidth enjoyer affected by this, this is why (HN cough) multi-cloud/dedi k3s is great, because if you get rug pulled you just migrate to another provider with better prices.

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.

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bhouston · 9 days ago

> 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.

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.

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dpeckett · 9 days ago

This is typical of Hetzner, if a product SKU is losing money they very quickly make changes, even going as far as to discontinue the product entirely (eg. GPU servers). They definitely don't seem to be a fan of loss leaders.

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.

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sigio · 9 days ago

Traffic over-usage is $1 per TB, so this is still quite fair, only in singapore is traffic really expensive at $8/TB.

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jpalomaki · 9 days ago

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.

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