'unmetered' bandwidth should be illegal

Never said regulation is the only path. I said it should be illegal, which is stronger than "I want a law tomorrow." The point is the asymmetry: they know the limit, I don't, and that's by design.

My 2TB throttle on Hetzner? No warning in the control panel. No email at 1.5TB. Just speed drops and I think my mirror's broken until I iperf it. That's not market pressure failing, that's dark pattern.

This. I migrated the mirror to OVH metered. 10TB base, overage per TB, I can see it burn in real time. Peace of mind is worth the EUR 15.

Same experience with a HostHatch storage VPS last year. "Unmetered" on the product page, 100Mbps throttle at 8TB with zero notification. I only noticed because my nightly rsyncs started failing timeout.

Their panel showed "unmetered" right up until I opened a ticket. Then "fair use, your usage profile is atypical." Mate, it's a storage VPS. What did you think I was storing, my resume?

I moved to Hetzner Storage Box for that workload. Metered, predictable, and the Helsinki pipe is solid from Manchester.

Confirmed, still SolusVM. The bandwidth module is basically decorative. My clients see a bar that never moves then suddenly their site loads like it's 2003.

I'm testing a Grafana + InfluxDB setup on the side, scraping vnstat from each node. Overkill for a 40-client operation but at least I can proactively message people. "You are at 80% of the soft limit, upgrade or throttle incoming."

Regulation would save me this labour. Small resellers get squeezed between marketing lies and customer trust.

This is the real victim yeah. The $5 customer gets throttled, complains to RAJ, RAJ has no data, looks bad. Meanwhile GreenCloudVPS sleeps fine.

I don't resell anything but I do recommend hosts to friends. Used to say "unmetered is fine for most." Now I say "if you can't see the limit, the limit is you getting surprised." Not as catchy.

Doug out, bringing snacks to this disaster thread

Regulation is a patch | the root cause is opacity | grep -r "unmetered" /var/log/marketing | awk '{print $1}' | xargs rm -f

The Unix way | everything is a file | including your bandwidth limit | it should be readable | not /dev/null

Hetzner's fair use clause | chmod 000 | even they cannot parse it | this is by design | the house always wins | until the pipe runs dry

https://www.hetzner.com

Running Minecraft on a $3 VPS since 2019. "Unmetered." I push maybe 200GB/month on a busy month, 20 players, never throttled.

But I know I'm the house edge. I'm the customer they want. The word "unmetered" keeps me from shopping around because I feel safe. If I ever scaled up I'd get the same surprise as armstrongvds.

My provider? Some random budget host that resells ColoCrossing. Not naming because I don't want to learn they already died.

Metered scares me as a budget user though. "What if I go viral?" At least with unmetered I know the worst case is throttle, not bill shock.

Viral on Minecraft? Maybe 2012 this happen

Metered with cap is safer than unmetered with hidden throttle. Bill shock you can plan for. Surprise throttle at 2AM you cannot.

My electricity in Tokyo is 27 yen/kWh. My GPU server cost more to run than to rent. This is why I read terms carefully. Every watt, every byte, every yen counted.

"Unmetered" is luxury marketing for people who do not count.

From New York: the regulatory angle is interesting but US-centric thinking. FTC has been asleep on this since forever. EU might move faster with consumer protection law but hosting is global.

I use Vultr for personal stuff — https://www.vultr.com/pricing/. They meter, they show it, they bill overage. Not the cheapest but I know my February bill before February ends.

The real fix is comparison sites adding a "throttle disclosed?" boolean filter. Right now LowEndBox just parrots "UNMETERED BANDWIDTH" in bold because it converts. Incentives are misaligned.

Fair. "Should be illegal" is normative, not legislative strategy. We agree more than we disagree.

My broader point: CloudCone, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Hetzner's metered products -- these exist because a market segment demands transparency. The segment grows when burned customers educate others. Your thread here is that education.

Regulation is slow and jurisdictionally fragmented. A community norm of "post your actual throttle experience" spreads faster. We are doing it now.

In DDoS context this is backwards. A metered host with CIR can absorb sustained attack without surprise billing. An "unmetered" host under attack gets nullrouted or terminated for "abuse" because your 3Gbps of reflected UDP is indistinguishable from intentional saturation to their automation.

I've seen this in Frankfurt datacenters. Customer pays for "unmetered," gets attacked, account suspended for ToS violation. The attack is not their fault. The suspension is.

CIR in contract. Everything else is prayer.