Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

The word "tariff" has a few different meanings. I'd say they're using it correctly, just not with the same meaning that the word is commonly being used in the news right now.

In my country, "tariff" is seen in several contexts:

* A tax on imports, much in the news since the recent US election.

* A pub or bar's price list is known as the "bar tariff"

* Energy companies offer a selection of "tariffs" i.e. agreed contract rates for usage-based pricing. e.g. a 3-year-fixed-price tariff, a 100%-green-energy tariff, and so on.

* The portion of a 'life' jail sentence which must be served, before a prisoner can be considered for parole.

So I don't think it's incorrect to call a price list a "tariff", merely unusual.

So it's not unexpected to use the uncommon in English meaning of the word to describe these changes.

It sure reads to me like they raised the base instance price across the board. The biggest increases will be for those using over the new included bandwidth (min 1tb) but they are going up for everyone.

No they're not? AFAICT if I made a CPX11 using 0.1TB/mo, my price just went from 3.85 to 4.49.

> tariff (plural tariffs)

1. A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties themselves.

2. A schedule of rates, fees or prices.

3. (British) A sentence determined according to a scale of standard penalties for certain categories of crime.

...so Hetzner's usage of the word is technically correct™, even though native speakers might not use it in this context.

  > Until this change, customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs [...] for other customers who have used much more resources.
  

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.

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

But some examples of things that are profitable under the old regime, but maybe not at 20x the limit:

API services that consume media, whether to do some business logic specific thing or something specific, e.g. Transcriptions for videos, file conversion API, OCR API provider, etc.

If you try a video app without using WebRTC and peer traffic your bandwidth can blow up too. Even if you use something like push notifications with base64. There are lots of traps that use Bandwidth.

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]).

The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges in the world.

In Europe, and most other regions outside North America, these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of the world.

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.

Don't increase prices and claim it's to help the little guy.