Hetzner appears to impose unlisted “fair use” on traffic
In this technical retrospective (2022), @worldofmatthew shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 174 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 301 comments
It looks to me as if they know that the content is violating their terms and conditions.
As interesting as this discussion has been, I want to point out that we have no proof of any of this.
- The link says "my friend got this", so even the person who authored that post isn't claiming to have received this notice. This is a second hand report, at best. For all we know, their friend received this notice years ago, and mentioned it to the OP, who didn't realize it was old news.
- We don't even have a screenshot of an email like this (which could also be easily faked, but it would be more credible than that zero-effort text post), nor do we have any public statement from Hetzner.
- It's not like a flood of people are reporting this happening to them... I haven't seen a single person in this HN discussion mention receiving a similar notice from Hetzner. I didn't read the entire thread that was linked, but I also didn't see anyone there claiming to have personally received this notice either.
- The phrase "we’re writing to you today because of your traffic use" does not appear on any google results other than the linked thread, so this could be the first and only time that Hetzner has reached out to anyone about this, if it is even real, and even then... they might be motivated to cancel their contract with the customer for real reasons that they don't want to discuss with the customer, in hopes of lessening the drama. Companies do that sometimes, as crappy as it may be, so this whole thing could be a red herring if it only happens to one account.
If anyone does have additional evidence or anecdotes to contribute related to Hetzner getting upset at "unlimited" traffic usage, that would be nice to see. If this is a pattern that can be confirmed, then all of this discussion is absolutely warranted.
Hetzner might have sent this notice, but I've seen people get similarly flustered about other things on the internet that turned out to be fake. Can we gather some more evidence before raising our pitchforks? Literally anyone could have made up a story like this about any company, and people do make stories like this up.
Those are just my thoughts, but now that everyone has their pitchforks out, I doubt they are willing to provide benefit of the doubt to the accused party and wait for more evidence to show up.
Whenever I see that some resource is "unlimited", my take is that the company either doesn't know what the limit is, the company is gambling that users won't run into the limit, or they are just pretending that the limit does not exist.
Oversubscription is normal and I am happy to pay for a service that is oversubscribed. I just want to know what I am paying for. Am I paying for "guaranteed X GB/month, up to X+Y GB/month"? Cool, I love it. Are you gambling that enough users will sign up and pay you to subsidize unlimited bandwidth / unlimited storage / unlimited anything? I want to know.
A normal business relationship with a vendor should be profitable for the vendor. Yes, I have an interest in paying less money for services--but being able to use those services at all is usually more important than squeezing a few bucks in discounts out of the vendor. If my deal with a vendor is unprofitable for the vendor, it creates a risk that the vendor will in the future terminate the relationship, discontinue the service, or even go out of business.
It's up to the company to figure out what the right SLOs/SLAs/SLIs are. That's actually a core part of what I am paying for when I sign up for cloud services or colo services or whatever. There's a delicate balance where you figure out an SLO that is possible for the company to support, while still looking good in marketing materials, and understandable by technical end-users.
If your company provides infrastructure without SLOs, or if key SLOs are missing, then I'm going to be a bit hesitant. A missing SLO is a sign that your company hasn't done the work of figuring out how supportable a particular feature is (like "unlimited bandwidth").
I work for a cloud provider (not hetzner), and sorry, but this is normal behaviour for them.
Every infrastructure is based on the principle that nobody will use all of their ability at the same time. Road network? Good luck with a whole city in their cars at the exact same time. Power distribution? Tell that to the british grid when all of britain turns on their kettles at the same time during sports events (live broadcasts are out of phase from regions to the next to alleviate this issue). Or to their sewage system, where all toilets flush at the same time once the human byproduct of said kettles is produced.
So yes, this is a hosting provider where the bandwidth is shared, they overcommit it, otherwise they would not be able to do them for that cheap (in case of hetzner), or at all at a profit (for other providers that are not bottom-end). Here they tell it is unlimited, because there is no data cap. The same goes for virtual machines in a cloud environment, those too are overcommitted, and I can guarantee you that if you spawn AWS instances and use 80% flat of CPU 24/7/365 you'll get the same kind of email directing you to the cpu dedicated instances.
Actually, they even did you a favor for not kicking you out due to "trust and safety" flagging you as fraud (like sending spam or ddos, which they 100% should have btw).
250TB/month means this person is, basically, saturating a 1Gbps link 24/7. It's 761Mbps, which probably accounts for some overhead/latencies (f.e. downloading many pieces of a torrent or many articles of an NZB).
This is blatantly NOT fair use. I doubt that they in fact have a specific limit (having worked for large hosting companies with "fair use" policies in the past, it was "you'll know it when you see it"), but whatever limit you might choose is frankly well below this.
Yes, calling it unlimited is a bit misleading, but they truly can't compete with everyone else (who do the same thing!) if they don't. At this point, with how widespread it is, you should frankly assume that unlimited = fair use, and be working for it to change politically, not getting mad at companies.
I would also note that it sounds like their use has been consistently high over several months, which (IMHO anyway) lends some credence to calling it unlimited (as opposed to f.e. AT&T where "unlimited" means a set number of GB each month...).