Plex blocks IP addresses from Hetzner as of October 12, 2023

[secsudo]

Summary

Already in the past, Plex GmbH has made some unpopular decisions in the further development of its self-hosting media library and streaming service. (As already shown in some videos on the LTT Youtube channel). Now they seem to want to crack down on piracy and the distribution of it through their products with little regard for long-time legal users.

 

Over the past few hours, Plex users running their server on a VPS or dedicated server at Hetzner have received an email stating that Plex will completely block access to these servers hosted at Hetzner as of October 12 in accordance with your terms of service.

 

In the official Plex forums, the incomprehension of the users towards this decision is already apparent a short time later. to completely block one of the largest cosumer hosting providers.

Especially users from countries like Germany, where upload rates for their private Internet connection are around 30 MBit/s according to Statista (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/416534/umfrage/durchschnittliche-internetgeschwindigkeit-in-deutschland/), operating with a cloud provider is often the best solution for watching high-resolution movies on the road or with the family.

 

Many posts from users also question whether this step is actually able to stop criminals from sharing copied movies, as they are likely to have switched to another cloud provider within a few hours.

 

Also the statements and explanations of the Plex employees do not make the users feel comfortable, because they seem very dismissive and little explanatory.

Quote

This is a super-important topic and one I’m personally invested in. First off, I have some bad news for you: I’m afraid we can’t really give any juicy details about what exactly we’re doing or how we investigate these types of accounts & services. That type of stuff is almost like “trade secrets” and we don’t want to tip our hats to any of those nefarious folks who might be lurking and reading.

[...]

Most of the action here all happens in the shadows and it isn’t very visible to regular, legitimate users. And if we’re doing things right, it shouldn’t be visible or impact regular users. But you’re absolutely correct that this is an important area and one we’ll continue to focus efforts on.

(Source: https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-fireside-in-the-forums/851849/176)

 

Quote

We don’t really have anything else specific to say that wasn’t covered in the email sent to affected users. If an affected user wishes to continue using their Plex Media Server without issue, they should move it to be hosted from home. [...]

Source: https://forums.plex.tv/t/not-allowed-to-use-hetzner/853570/15

 

My thoughts

Making piracy and its distribution more difficult is an important step that even product manufacturers like Plex need to address. However, I doubt that this is the right approach. Many users who either don't have a fast enough internet connection or don't have the hardware at home to follow the Plex staff's recommendation and run the Plex server at home will have to look for alternatives like Jelly to continue enjoying their media library. This approach will probably only cost Plex more users and will have no real effect in the area of piracy. 

There is also the question of whether users of other hosting providers will face similar problems in the future if it is now the official company policy to block hosting providers.

 

Sources

https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-fireside-in-the-forums/851849/176

https://forums.plex.tv/t/not-allowed-to-use-hetzner/853570/15

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/416534/umfrage/durchschnittliche-internetgeschwindigkeit-in-deutschland/

https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/plex-blockt-zugriff-auf-hetzner-server/

[strajk-]

Use Emby instead.

[Lurick]

3 minutes ago, strajk- said:

Use Emby instead.

Because Emby will be okay with people selling access to their Emby instances?

 

 

To the article:

This has been an ongoing battle for a long time but Plex is now being forced to do something at a larger scale because it's one of those places where a lot of people are profiting off pirated content by selling access. I'm sure this wasn't a lightly taken decision and Hetzner (at least I wouldn't be surprised) probably pushed for some of it too. Hetzner already took away GPUs because people were mining on them back in the day too.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

Hetzner already took away GPUs because people were mining on them back in the day too.

A cloud hosting service discontinued their GPU compute services because of crypto? Wow.

 

I guess it wouldn't have been just as easy to add a ban in their terms of service? Let good people continue to have access who can't afford to host stuff themselves.

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

A cloud hosting service discontinued their GPU compute services because of crypto? Wow.

 

I guess it wouldn't have been just as easy to add a ban in their terms of service? Let good people continue to have access who can't afford to host stuff themselves.

Without a way to detect it quickly and accurately putting it in the ToS is rather pointless to addressing the business cost issue it places on them.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Lurick said:

Hetzner already took away GPUs because people were mining on them back in the day too.

Source on this?

When I looked just now they still offer GPU servers. It's just that they are in limited supply, and Nvidia has some clauses about using GeForce cards in data centers, so they can only offer it in certain regions.

 

It doesn't make sense to discontinue a service because it is popular. If it was a power consumption issue then they could just raise prices to the point where it became financially sound for them, or throttled the cards to reduce power consumption. 

 

When I looked around I found posts about them banning all crypto, but the reason for that was because of Chia mining, not GPU mining. Chia was really taxing on their storage, and it's hard to limit how many IOPs each individual server can pull, since it's a shared resource unlike the GPUs. I couldn't find anything about specifically GPU mining being an issue and them removing it because of that.

 

 

Anyway, I don't think these news are that big of a deal. It probably sucks for a handful of people, but how many people are actually renting servers and putting their Plex library (which are of course just legally obtained movies and episodes, right?) on that?

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It doesn't make sense to discontinue a service because it is popular. If it was a power consumption issue then they could just raise prices to the point where it became financially sound for them, or throttled the cards to reduce power consumption. 

They could but the service offering and cost calculations would have been done on workload profile that is not 100% time unitization. They could raise the price but that would make it unattractive to gamers or other users. Another higher cost service to address that workload, crypto, wouldn't stop misuse of the cheaper service offering either.

 

Azure, Google and AWS addressed this issue by putting in detection of these applications and blocking them, or powering the instance off or even just outright closing the account. F@H and BOINC participants have had to fight against these during events.

[maplepants]

2 hours ago, Lurick said:

Hetzner already took away GPUs because people were mining on them back in the day too.

Hetzner ended up with their ASN and IPs having a bad reputation with Akamai, CloudFlare, Azure, basically every service. So they've really changed their policy. I work in IT security and when I report malicious traffic to Hetzner they don't mess around. 

 

Obviously we don't know that Hetzner reached out, but it would certainly fit in with their continued effort to improve their reputation as a non-scammy hosting provider. 

[LAwLz]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

They could but the service offering and cost calculations would have been done on workload profile that is not 100% time unitization. They could raise the price but that would make it unattractive to gamers or other users. Another higher cost service to address that workload, crypto, wouldn't stop misuse of the cheaper service offering either.

Yes, but it doesn't make sense for them to discontinue the service (which, again, they apparently didn't do) instead of raising the prices.

Having one customer pay a high fee is still more profitable than having zero customers pay anything. They already had the infrastructure in place. They had already made the investment to get it running, and it seems like they got the infrastructure up and running after mining had become a thing. I don't think they bought a bunch of graphics cards and then were surprised that people rented them to mine on.

 

 

But again, this assumes that the premise is even true which I haven't been able to find any evidence for. I would like to see some evidence for it one way or another because to me it sounds like it could be one of those "facts" that just gets repeated over and over because it sounds plausible.

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Having one customer pay a high fee is still more profitable than having zero customers pay anything.

No it's actually not, especially if it's prior investment in infrastructure calculated on a workload type and that's not the reality of the situation. If you raise the cost and you get too low subscription count then you'll never get an ROI and if you base the cost on 40% of the GPUs never being assigned to any customer at all when you were accounting for 80% then even doubling the service cost may not put the service in to positive ROI.

 

I wouldn't simplify it to "just raise prices" because it's actually not the simple. Hardware doesn't remain relevant forever.

 

19 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

(which, again, they apparently didn't do)

Where are you looking. The only GPU instances I can find are on the auction section of their website for existing, now legacy, server instances. Are there any new, not Intel 6th and 7th Gen, offerings? I can't find any. Admittedly not look for long but certainly not easy to find if they exist.

 

You can't even search for "GPU" for new instances

 

So I would say it is true, GPU instances were discontinued.

 

 

Edit:

Also if you have 1000 GPUs purchased at $500 USD and the open market is $900 currently and the service is in negative profitability selling off the GPUs is not a bad business move.

[LAwLz]

Just now, leadeater said:

No it's actually not, especially if it's prior investment in infrastructure calculated on a workload type and that's not the reality of the situation. If you raise the cost and you get too low subscription count then you'll never get an ROI and if you base the cost on 40% of the GPUs never being assigned to any customer at all when you were accounting for 80% then even doubling the service cost may not put the service in to positive ROI.

 

I wouldn't simplify it to "just raise prices" because it's actually not the simple. Hardware doesn't remain relevant forever.

That's a fair point, but again, they introduced this after crypto mining was already a thing, and it wasn't until Chia became a thing that they actually introduced the "no crypto mining" clause in their contracts.

 

That, coupled with the fact that I can't find any statement about them stopping to offer GPUs because of crypto makes me think this is an assumption presented as a fact, rather than an actual fact. It my or may not be true, but I would just like a source.

 

 

Just now, leadeater said:

Where are you looking. The only GPU instances I can find are on the auction section of their website for existing, now legacy, server instances. Are there any new, not Intel 6th and 7th Gen, offerings? I can't find any. Admittedly not look for long but certainly not easy to find if they exist.

No, I am referring to the same auctioned instances you found.

 

Just now, leadeater said:

Also if you have 1000 GPUs purchased at $500 USD and the open market is $900 currently and the service is in negative profitability selling off the GPUs is not a bad business move.

That would be a good move if that was the case, but it does not seem like they are doing that since they still offer those servers.

 

Just to be clear, I am not saying it did or didn't happen. I am just saying that I can't find any evidence for it being that way.

Anyway, the topic seems to have derailed a lot so I think it is best to leave all the "Hetzner stopped offering GPUs because of crypto miners" for some other topic, unless there is a link to someplace where they clearly say they stopped offering GPUS because of crypto miners.

[maplepants]

5 hours ago, secsudo said:

Many users who either don't have a fast enough internet connection or don't have the hardware at home to follow the Plex staff's recommendation and run the Plex server at home will have to look for alternatives like Jelly to continue enjoying their media library. This approach will probably only cost Plex more users and will have no real effect in the area of piracy. 

Plex staff have always recommended that users run their Plex server at home though. They're setup guides talk about accessing the server over localhost, or over the LAN IP. They're setup guide doesn't mention anything about SSL certs, firewall configuration, rate limits, or any of the other stuff you'd need in order to set up an internet facing service.

 

I would also imagine that the number of regular users hosting their library on Hetzner is tiny. I'm a Hetzner user myself and opening up my own admin console I can see that storage volumes are €52.36/mo per TB. That'd be ~€450/mo for me without even touching bandwidth costs.

 

I'm sure the "false positive rate" for a ban action like this would be pretty low.

[secsudo]

25 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Plex staff have always recommended that users run their Plex server at home though. They're setup guides talk about accessing the server over localhost, or over the LAN IP. They're setup guide doesn't mention anything about SSL certs, firewall configuration, rate limits, or any of the other stuff you'd need in order to set up an internet facing service.

You're right, Plex's recommendation has always been to run on the Local Network. However, as I also described, many countries/regions have very strong restrictions on upcloud for home connections. With 20-30Mbit/s bandwidth you don't need to try to stream high quality content.

 

If you read through the comments on Reddit and in the posts linked here, you can see that it's not so much that a legitimate Plex user is renting a server to install Plex, but rather already has a server for backups, private cloud (e.g. Nextcloud) and other services and is running Plex on that server.
 

26 minutes ago, maplepants said:

I would also imagine that the number of regular users hosting their library on Hetzner is tiny. I'm a Hetzner user myself and opening up my own admin console I can see that storage volumes are €52.36/mo per TB. That'd be ~€450/mo for me without even touching bandwidth costs.

As for the prices, the VPS prices are actually absolutely unprofitable. However, the server exchange offers servers with 14TB for 40-50 dollars per month. Bandwidth costs are included. If you have such a general purpose solution, it is understandably very affordable for many.

 

30 minutes ago, maplepants said:

I'm sure the "false positive rate" for a ban action like this would be pretty low.

I cannot estimate how many people are affected by these changes. However, according to users' comments, I would at least claim that it is many of their regular customers. Power users who are tech-savvy and don't like to use cloud services or pay subscriptions, because many people with a lifetime license also seem to complain.

[Fasterthannothing]

10 hours ago, secsudo said:

Summary

Already in the past, Plex GmbH has made some unpopular decisions in the further development of its self-hosting media library and streaming service. (As already shown in some videos on the LTT Youtube channel). Now they seem to want to crack down on piracy and the distribution of it through their products with little regard for long-time legal users.

 

Over the past few hours, Plex users running their server on a VPS or dedicated server at Hetzner have received an email stating that Plex will completely block access to these servers hosted at Hetzner as of October 12 in accordance with your terms of service.

 

In the official Plex forums, the incomprehension of the users towards this decision is already apparent a short time later. to completely block one of the largest cosumer hosting providers.

Especially users from countries like Germany, where upload rates for their private Internet connection are around 30 MBit/s according to Statista (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/416534/umfrage/durchschnittliche-internetgeschwindigkeit-in-deutschland/), operating with a cloud provider is often the best solution for watching high-resolution movies on the road or with the family.

 

Many posts from users also question whether this step is actually able to stop criminals from sharing copied movies, as they are likely to have switched to another cloud provider within a few hours.

 

Also the statements and explanations of the Plex employees do not make the users feel comfortable, because they seem very dismissive and little explanatory.

 

 

My thoughts

Making piracy and its distribution more difficult is an important step that even product manufacturers like Plex need to address. However, I doubt that this is the right approach. Many users who either don't have a fast enough internet connection or don't have the hardware at home to follow the Plex staff's recommendation and run the Plex server at home will have to look for alternatives like Jelly to continue enjoying their media library. This approach will probably only cost Plex more users and will have no real effect in the area of piracy. 

There is also the question of whether users of other hosting providers will face similar problems in the future if it is now the official company policy to block hosting providers.

 

Sources

https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-fireside-in-the-forums/851849/176

https://forums.plex.tv/t/not-allowed-to-use-hetzner/853570/15

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/416534/umfrage/durchschnittliche-internetgeschwindigkeit-in-deutschland/

https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/plex-blockt-zugriff-auf-hetzner-server/

See here is one small detail everyone is forgetting. It won't cost Plex a dime infact it will make them more valuable as a company! Why because everyone or almost everyone uses the lifetime membership. Meaning even if they switched to another software they still paid Plex for that lifetime membership and now Plex essentially gets the license back. Not to mention they have every right to block ip addresses that are abusing their terms of service much less the legal necessity to atleast attempt to show attempts to remove pirates from their services. 

[secsudo]

19 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

See here is one small detail everyone is forgetting. It won't cost Plex a dime infact it will make them more valuable as a company! Why because everyone or almost everyone uses the lifetime membership. Meaning even if they switched to another software they still paid Plex for that lifetime membership and now Plex essentially gets the license back. Not to mention they have every right to block ip addresses that are abusing their terms of service much less the legal necessity to atleast attempt to show attempts to remove pirates from their services. 

That is correct. The only problem is that they put all users who run their Plex server with a cloud provider under general suspicion. I have no problem with them cracking down on piracy. In fact, I see it as very important. But the approach is very questionable in my opinion. When moving servers, the thing that takes the longest is copying the video data. Criminals will probably not be stopped by the IP blocking.

Measures like limiting the sharing of the library to 10 accounts or making the sharing process more difficult would be simple and probably much more effective ways.

[Windows7ge]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

Without a way to detect it quickly and accurately putting it in the ToS is rather pointless to addressing the business cost issue it places on them.

I figured that. My thoughts are if you're leasing cloud hardware that the hosting company has some right to know what it's being used for. Perhaps not outright spying on your instances but monitoring network traffic and the like.

 

I'll admit I don't know how most crypto communicates with peers but one would think there'd be a pattern or signature a network firewall could use to say hey, this traffic is suspicious and/or going to XYZ which are red flags. Are the GPUs at 100%? Yes. Investigate further.

 

But I guess if that's easier said than done just outright dropping a big percentage of your business is the better of the two.

[HenrySalayne]

13 hours ago, secsudo said:

In the official Plex forums, the incomprehension of the users towards this decision is already apparent a short time later. to completely block one of the largest cosumer hosting providers.

Especially users from countries like Germany, where upload rates for their private Internet connection are around 30 MBit/s according to Statista (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/416534/umfrage/durchschnittliche-internetgeschwindigkeit-in-deutschland/), operating with a cloud provider is often the best solution for watching high-resolution movies on the road or with the family.

Not only do upload speeds suck in Germany, most private internet connections have been switched to DS lite (dual stack lite), which means a lot of services - especially DynDNS - stop working.

For the price of a business contract with a fixed IP address (or the price of a fixed IP address for your private contract), you can easily afford a dedicated server.

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, secsudo said:

When moving servers, the thing that takes the longest is copying the video data. Criminals will probably not be stopped by the IP blocking.

If you are sailing the high seas then the most likely migration path is delete everything, or backup config only, and redownload everything. Doesn't actually make any sense to migrate the data when you can actually get it all back very quickly.

[Mark Kaine]

19 hours ago, strajk- said:

Use Emby instead.

just get a Walkman instead.  what is with all this modern crap that needs to connect to the internet??

 

if u wanna watch movies, get laserdisc  = )

 

 

 

 

 

[maplepants]

On 9/15/2023 at 5:35 PM, secsudo said:

You're right, Plex's recommendation has always been to run on the Local Network. However, as I also described, many countries/regions have very strong restrictions on upcloud for home connections. With 20-30Mbit/s bandwidth you don't need to try to stream high quality content.

Those markets definitely exist. Germany, where I live, being one of them. But, I don't think the existence of these markets means that Plex has to offer a robust solution for streaming media over the internet.

 

They've chose to focus on use cases where the server and client are almost always on the same LAN. 

 

On 9/15/2023 at 5:35 PM, secsudo said:

If you read through the comments on Reddit and in the posts linked here, you can see that it's not so much that a legitimate Plex user is renting a server to install Plex, but rather already has a server for backups, private cloud (e.g. Nextcloud) and other services and is running Plex on that server.

No question the users hosting their media on one of these providers is a loud segment of Plex users. But I still would be surprised if it was a large one.

 

On 9/15/2023 at 5:35 PM, secsudo said:

As for the prices, the VPS prices are actually absolutely unprofitable. However, the server exchange offers servers with 14TB for 40-50 dollars per month. Bandwidth costs are included. If you have such a general purpose solution, it is understandably very affordable for many.

That's a good point. I had forgotten about the server exchange market. Right now they've got a 16TB machine with 64GB of RAM and an i7-7700 for €71 a month. That's not at all unreasonable. Unity Media (the bastards) used to offer just 5mbps up on some plans. If I were stuck with them I'd probably be looking at Hetzner's server auction daily.

 

On 9/15/2023 at 5:35 PM, secsudo said:

I cannot estimate how many people are affected by these changes. However, according to users' comments, I would at least claim that it is many of their regular customers. Power users who are tech-savvy and don't like to use cloud services or pay subscriptions, because many people with a lifetime license also seem to complain.

Maybe, but only Plex have the analytics to say so. But as for the liftem licensees, I'm a lifetime license holder myself. We're kind of Plex's worst customers. I gave them ~€120 a few years ago and nothing since. Yet I expect them to make sure their server and client keep up with every OS update for a wide variety of devices.

 

A lifetime Plex Pass holder who is selling their Hetzner hosted library is just about worst customer for Plex I could imagine.

[secsudo]

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

A lifetime Plex Pass holder who is selling their Hetzner hosted library is just about worst customer for Plex I could imagine.

absolutely

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

Is this related to recent law cases? Copyright law is wired. So without knowing anything I would blame Sony, Warner brothers, etc. for this.

 

Recently they tried to make a DNS liable for copyright violations. Imagine suing the phonebook company because they printed a business address to a scamming used car seller.

[jagdtigger]

15 hours ago, maplepants said:

Those markets definitely exist. Germany, where I live, being one of them. But, I don't think the existence of these markets means that Plex has to offer a robust solution for streaming media over the internet.

Yes they dont have to, but that doesnt mean they have to flat out block that use-case....

[Arokhantos]

Wake me up when they remove all the original plex functionally so i can ask for a refund of the lifetime plex pass.

[thewelshbrummie]

I'm not saying at all that I agree with what Plex are doing - but I can see it from their side, as I've covered below. Though the 20% off lifetime Plex Pass offer that runs this week does seem conveniently timed, though pretty tempting for my intended use case of local streaming (which I thought was the main point of their offer).

On 9/15/2023 at 4:30 AM, secsudo said:

However, I doubt that this is the right approach. Many users who either don't have a fast enough internet connection or don't have the hardware at home to follow the Plex staff's recommendation and run the Plex server at home will have to look for alternatives like Jelly to continue enjoying their media library. This approach will probably only cost Plex more users and will have no real effect in the area of piracy.

Not Plex's problem if you're internet has terrible upload speeds. I think my sympathy is somewhat limited as I always remember Plex stating that it was designed to be self-hosted on a local device, not for using an externally-hosted ISP or hosting from outside. It's been at least 8 years since I last tried Plex and the reason I didn't bother was because external streaming just wasn't possible on the Internet connection I had at the time (1MBps DOWN, let alone up!) and I didn't need it for local streaming since I didn't share my library. But I never thought about setting it up remotely even when the speed improved ten-fold.

 

That said the homepage has change massively since I last looked at their website, with it basically advertising itself as a streaming service and mentions of it being used for self-hosted media being bumped to half way down the homepage. They're clearly repositioning themselves as an app to manage multiple streaming services with the original self-hosted media app being an afterthought.

On 9/15/2023 at 4:30 AM, secsudo said:

This approach will probably only cost Plex more users and will have no real effect in the area of piracy. 

Except it makes it someone else's problem. not Plex's. Which is probably the intention. I wouldn't be surprised if Plex is attempting to avoid legal action with this move. Being a German based ISP I wouldn't be surprised if they've had a "do this and we won't take it further but if you don't we'll drop some legal action" kind of contact and they've decided it's the best play (had it been a US ISP, I'm sure the lawyers wouldn't have gone the nicely nicely approach).

 

Also, a Plex customer who's purchase a lifetime Plex Pass doesn't generate any new revenue if they're only streaming their own media, so it's makes zero difference cheaper for Plex if that customer abandons the service or not.

 

--

 

Having read some of the comments on the linked thread show part of the problem. There's one user who posted the following:

Quote

I am not violating the ToS. I share my Plex with my sister on the east coast and me and another Plex user (in Japan) have been sharing with each other since 2014. That’s the sum total of folks who have access to my server other than me.

I'd be amazed if that isn't a ToS violation. If the person I've quoted used their Plex account to access their own media from anywhere in the world that would be fine. But sharing it, even with a family member and especially one who lives elsewhere, probably crosses the line. I'm sure that US media companies would consider sharing content from a remote Plex server piracy and no better than torrenting (even though the software is in both examples, legal).

 

I'm assuming that someone has pushed Plex into this decision. But having read the comments on the Plex forum there are clearly people who don't seem to realise that they're breaking the ToS - the above quote is just one example of several that I found where they claim to not be violating the ToS but the use-case they've described would certainly fit the definition of piracy.

 

The most telling thing for me is the Reddit thread on it - where people seem to have few problems with this change. And when Reddit threads take a seemingly sensible view on a subject...