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Of course advertising one thing then saying, "well, actually, no" means you lied. Even if you're "nice" about it.

It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.

no, this is more like running a buffet restaurant with an all you can eat buffet.

98% of your customers show up and eat three gargantuan heaping plates, are totally satisfied, and can barely walk back to their cars.

the other 2% show up at 3 in the afternoon, stay for six hours, eat ten plates of crab legs and roast beef.

maybe you notice those 2% of customers and say nothing.

if the same person comes back every week and loads up on ten plates of crab legs, you nicely remind them of the socially acceptable use of an all you can eat buffet.

Honest all-you-can eat buffets do not cut people off, they post time-limits.

https://blorg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bacchanal-buffe...

to extend this analogy, the posted time limit at the entrance of the buffet is similar to what's in their TOS/AUP that the customer agreed to before ever starting the service in the first place.

I think the biggest difference is that "Please don't stay here more than 2 hours" clearly means that you can't sit around and eat all day.

"[don't do things that] impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product" doesn't make it very clear that there are data caps.

This behavior leads me to disregard any advertising of "all you can eat" as a lie, and the speaker of that lie as a dishonest business. American Airlines dealt with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwQr3VcoUvM

yarrr, tis not a man, tis a relentless eating machine

Fine, but getting back to the analogy, you have to specify how your bandwidth is limited from the outset, you can't just offer it as unlimited and then say, "Nooooooo, you obese whale, not like that!" once it disadvantages your business.

No. You accept those 2% as cost of doing business.

Yeah of course you made certain calculations when you started your business, including that most people would start loading up their (small) trays with the first items, which are the cheapest and so not cost you much, but you also accept that not everybody is going to do that.

A business is a business and social acceptableness has nothing to do with one another. One is a business and the other is a social situation. If I know you personally, it is a social situation. If I have paid money, it is business situation.

Yes — the “lie” was before that, when they told the person untruthfully a cheap instance would have a certain bandwidth and unlimited traffic.

Lying to close a deal is fraud: they should have disclosed the limits upfront.

If they want to charge for high utilization of bandwidth, they should bill for traffic — like everyone else.

I’ve also never had a buffet try to restrict “unlimited” in the way you’re suggesting — they’ve been quite upfront about their restrictions.

> If you have a sustained near 800 Mbps of outbound traffic you should be doing it from something much more serious than an absolute bottom of the barrel lowest cost no-SLA dedicated server.

Well, they could put that in the policies or the offer. Or be more specific in the email.

But 1G isn't really that much. I don't have a use for that much bandwidth at the moment, but it's not like you need that much compute to pump out 1G, so pick the offering with enough compute and enough bandwidth, and there you go. You don't always need an SLA, especially if you can load balance over multiple bottom of the barrel hosts. Unmetetered 1G for not a lot of money is a credible offer, so I'd take an established provider at their word; lots of hosting offers have a port speed and a traffic limit and overage fees listed.

What part of, "Don't advertise something as 'unlimited' if it isn't unlimited" is difficult for you?

It seems pretty damn simple. Hetzner used to have transfer limits. It was 20 TB for cheap servers when I was using them (2017-2019). It was bumped up to 50 TB in 2020.

I don't disagree with you that a user consuming 250 TB of transfer should be paying for that transfer, though. I'm disagreeing with the marketing. It's deceptive, and it causes problems that are the genesis of this post. You know what's supremely simpler? Just commit to a hard limit on transfer and be done with it.

> reaching out nicely to a customer

Threatening termination for using what was advertised does not seem very nice to me - especially when they specifically removed traffic limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120500

I guess their routers just run out of packets like buffets run out of crab legs, huh.

There's a difference between saying "unlimited" and "up to n Mbps * t transfer per billing period".

We don't know or care how our packets are being measured. If there's a limit to them beyond the physical link, then it's not unlimited. "Unlimited packets internally but we will reduce the egress rate after a certain amount" also isn't "unlimited".