Hetzner's the goat for that eh? Their cloud ToS actually lists the throttle percentages mate? Rare as.
Still cooked that CloudCone can sell a 2-core then call 15% abuse. That's one core at 30% or both at 15%? Either way mate my phone uses more CPU checking emails.
This is the bar. Publish your limits or don't sell the resource.
My OVHcloud issue was their Gravelines location. SMTP headers read for "quality assurance" — their words, not mine. I was on their 4 EUR VPS at the time. Moved everything to my basement, bought a used Dell R730 off eBay Portland local. Power bill went up 30 bucks but I know exactly what's happening to my packets.
30 USD? That's the hidden cost nobody talks about with self-hosting. My rack in Manchester costs me more in electricity than my first flat did in rent, adjusted for inflation.
Back on topic: I found another gem. Ionos (used to be 1&1) has a clause about "content scanning for brand alignment" in their email ToS. Not marketing. Brand alignment. I noped out.
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Ionos runs massive oversold nodes in their Amsterdam location, I know from inside. The ToS lets them move your VM for "platform optimization" with zero notice. I've seen 3AM migrations to worse hardware because the node was full.
Ask me about overselling? Fine: their "dedicated vCPU" still shares L3 cache. Read the definitions appendix, not the marketing.
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Cache is the new oversell— is it. We buy cores, we get fractions, we complain, they point to clause— is it.
Hetzner I use for domains only. For hosting, Contabo we tried, "fair use" on NVMe they said after two weeks— is it. 200 GB written per day, limit they decided— is it. No number in ToS, invented later— is it.
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Contabo! I used them for a project in São Paulo, latency terrible but price was good. Then I found the clause about "excessive I/O" with no definition. Same game.
This is why I now use ChatGPT to summarize ToS before buy. Not perfect but catches the creative definitions. Saved me from a "unmetered bandwidth" that excluded UDP in footnote 4.
In France we have Loi Hamon for consumer protection, but VPS is B2B, excluded. I use Scaleway in Paris, their ToS is actually readable, limits are explicit. Not the cheapest but I know the rules.
CloudCone's https://cloudcone.com 15% clause would not survive a DGCCRF complaint if marketed to consumers. But they market to "developers", B2B, no protection. This is the trick.
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Frankfurt perspective: Leaseweb DE operates under German law, B2B contracts are harder to challenge. The "fair use" post-suspension trick works because the ToS says they "may define fair use as needed for platform stability."
I read tickets for fun now, but I wrote them for three years. The number of customers who actually read before screaming is maybe 2%. The rest sign, break rule, then discover rule.
I was in that 98%. Then my k3s cluster got throttled by a "resource optimization" I never agreed to. Took me 2 days to find the clause, buried in a "platform updates" email from 2021.
Yaml victim indeed. Now I version control my ToS screenshots. git commit -m "agreed to this nonsense on 2024-03-15"
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Retired 2019. Started homelab 2020. Haven't slept since.
Phoenix heat killed my first homelab summer. Now I run everything on a NUC in a closet with a bathroom exhaust fan. ToS I write myself, in my head, and I break them constantly.
Serious though: anyone using Proxmox with ZFS? My arc hit 90% RAM and I thought I was hacked. Nope, just me not reading the defaults.
