Where's the surprise? It's the classic business 2-step - drum up interest with "too good to be true" features, then cut them back. The marginal customers who need those features leave (and are too expensive to keep), everyone else is used to your product and stays.

MBA value extraction 101.

That or they just didn't dimension well their prices and now it's biting them back.

I prefer to assume naivety over malice/negligence.

Hetzner has been in this business for a very long time and I’m sure half the German small to medium sized companies use Hetzner. They have costs as well and with virtual servers they just assumed the usage pattern was similar to their eu data center and that didn’t work out so they increase the prices a bit. So that on average their calculation works out again.

Like, this is not Netflix tripling the prices over a few years.

Until you remember that marketing is a separate department from finance which is a separate department from ops/engineering.

The engineers said 20TB in aggregate was fine but likely didn’t consider the “bad apples”. Marketing obviously wants to use the biggest numbers and then finance comes in with the hammer and dev points to egress as an simple way to upset rhe fewest number of real customers.

As an engineer, if you don't qualify whether your answer is average or max, you've messed up.

I'm confident the marketing folks would just say something akin to "shut up nerd", cash their bonuses, and leave you with the problem.

As an engineer, NEVER give out averages without checking that they are consistent with the distribution of the actual data.

Averages tend to skew once exposed to adverse selection.

Don't think you find much engineers in the marketing department though.

It does make sense: The average was low enough that a 20TB cap worked. Then marketing started boasting about the 20TB limit and attracted a bunch of high-bandwith customers, thereby driving up the average making 20TB decidedly "not fine".