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Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

hetzner.com

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Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#111

Post by thrwawy9801437 »

Hetzner_OL wrote: post #79
alexandrerond wrote: post #71

I run some machines on Hetzner with 10x disks sw-RAIDed in a very hands off fashion. From time to time I look how they're doing. Usually a few disks have blown up, or are erroring or have smart errors. I then need to open 1 ticket per disk to get it fixed. They get replaced with really old disks (25k+ hours) which suffer same failures soon after. At one point support complained that I was making too many requests to…

Hi there, I am sorry that you've had so many negative experience with us when it comes to technical support for hardware-related issues. And I am especially sorry that you feel our support treated you like an idiot. That's clearly not our intention. As the company's in-house English teacher, I am curious about incidents like this. Perhaps if you have a ticket number where that happened, you can share it with me. Plea…

I'm also a customer of yours who experienced something similar: the three separate hetzner websites needed to manage my servers and account were unintuitive to me when I first started using your services (compared to other hosting providers), so I tried reaching out to your support staff. I was very surprised when they responded to my questions in a notably condescending tone.

I still use your services today, but that interaction left a lingering taste in my mouth, so much so that I haven't bought any new services from your company since that incident.

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#112

Post by true_religion »

0xbkt wrote: post #95
StevePerkins wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which adult website is this?

What the fuck? They don't even allow hosting of adult content[0]. [0] 8.2. of https://www.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf

They prohibit illegal pornography and pornographic sites which essentially share copyrighted videos.

They won’t stop you from hosting your own private onlyfans site though.

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#113

Post by dx034 »

mindslight wrote: post #82
dx034 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the account is in your name you're responsible for payment. But you can probably sue your manager for doing that. I don't see Hetzner's fault, they'll have to assume that you opened the account if it's in your name and was likely used by you.

No, having someone fraudulently use your name for a contract does not oblige you to pay for it and then go after the fraudster yourself.

But that's for you to pursue (to sue the fraudster would be a first step). Without a court decision, the counterparty has no reason to go after another person than the one on the contract.

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#114

Post by Hetzner_OL »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #87
Hetzner_OL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, I am very sorry that you had this negative experience back in 2018. If memory serves correctly, when we launched Hetzner Cloud during this time, there was a large surge in the number of fake accounts new customers tried to make. So I could imagine our teams being overly careful about new accounts, and especially if names didn't quite match up. Usually, we are able to restore data from locked servers/account…

Thank you for the response. Your head of sales [name redacted] was the one that reinstated my account and called me "unprofessional" for using a shortened version of my last name. He told me that it is not worth contacting people like me (his words), and suggested there was nothing wrong with their internal procedures and that they had no intention to do anything differently. I understand that mistakes happen, and I…

Hi again, I am sorry that he called you unprofessional. That shouldn't have happened. So I am sorry. His frustration may have been based on a cultural misunderstanding.

In Germany, whenever you sign up for a product or a service where there is likely to be an ID check or a validity check, people here know that they need to use their full legal name, even if it is a really long name, or if they have middle name(s) that are part of their legal name. It they are using a credit card, that name needs to match, too. For a German sysadmin, it would be unprofessional to not use the same name as is on their legal ID/payment information.

I know that some cultures may abbreviate parts of their middle/last names, so it's understandable that customers from these countries may not be aware of how important it is in Germany for names to match exactly.

I know that this issue isn't just an issue in Germany. I used to work in a retail store, and my store was very serious about preventing credit card fraud. We regularly did NOT let people buy things if their name on their ID didn't match the name on their credit card. I also had several Brazilian friends in the USA who had similar issues, and they learned to always use the version of their names on their passports for everything.

We will likely still be strict about customers' information matching their IDs/payment information. He's right that we will likely not change this any time soon. However, I am sorry that his answer came off as abrasive and impolite. -Katie

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#115

Post by Hetzner_OL »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #92
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you write a blog post or have any screenshots of emails to them? Anecdotes like these are enough to tarnish a brand forever in the minds of potential customers.

Here is basically the core of the communications. https://imgur.com/a/y1dMhd2

Hi again, I see. Before I respond, could I ask you to please re-post that image without my colleague's name in it? And could you also edit your above comment so that my colleague's name is no longer in it. Unfortunately, some of our coworkers have been harassed in the past after their names were published online. So we try to prevent this from happening. Thanks in advance for doing that. I really appreciate it.

Okay my response - Again, I think there is a bit of a cultural misunderstanding going on here. I would say most Germans understand that they are responsible for verifying their identity and using their legal name when making important purchases or doing something else official. Here, names that do not match are often a sign that the account is fake. We find hundreds of fake accounts every week. Fake accounts are very closely linked with criminal behavior, people who otherwise abuse our products, and people who do not follow our ToS. Clearly, we do not want to attract customers with fake accounts to our company. So if we find an account that seems fake, it does not make sense for us to expend extra time and energy to write to that customer and ask them if they made a mistake when they entered their name on their customer account. That would dramatically increase the likelihood that spammers and scammers would get accounts and abuse our services. It would not only hurt our customers (because it would hurt our the trustworthiness of our IPs, etc.), but it would also lead to a massive increase in abuse and to victims affected by that abuse. So, I agree that the tone from my colleague could be better here. And I will talk to him about that. And, again, for that, we are sorry. But the basic content of what he wrote is sound in my opinion. --Katie

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#116

Post by Hetzner_OL »

thrwawy9801437 wrote: post #111
Hetzner_OL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, I am sorry that you've had so many negative experience with us when it comes to technical support for hardware-related issues. And I am especially sorry that you feel our support treated you like an idiot. That's clearly not our intention. As the company's in-house English teacher, I am curious about incidents like this. Perhaps if you have a ticket number where that happened, you can share it with me. Plea…

I'm also a customer of yours who experienced something similar: the three separate hetzner websites needed to manage my servers and account were unintuitive to me when I first started using your services (compared to other hosting providers), so I tried reaching out to your support staff. I was very surprised when they responded to my questions in a notably condescending tone. I still use your services today, but tha…

I am sorry that we made such a bad impression on you. Yes, the three different user interfaces (konsoleH, Robot, and Cloud Console), can take some time to get used to, and can be quite unintuitive at first glance. [Robot is for unmanaged dedicated root servers and products related to these servers; konsoleH is for managed products and exotic domains that usually require more support for registrations; and Cloud Console is for our cloud servers and related products.] Our company has been working on trying to slowly integrate these to make it easier for customers to use them. We're making progress step by step. Unfortunately, technicians who are familiar with our systems sometimes forget how confusing they can be for new (and existing) customer. In my English classes to improve customer service, I really emphasize the importance of trying to see things from the customers point of view. And I will continue to push my colleagues to do that. --Katie

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#117

Post by Hetzner_OL »

sireat wrote: post #109

Hilariously I just got an invoice for $0.06 from Hetzner because I signed up for a service on 31st of October. Guys, I love you but couldn't you just give me a way to pay forward or roll it in the next one?

Hi there - Some customers in this situation who plan on using us in the future will pay via bank transfer, and they purposefully make their payment much large, like €10 or €20. This then gets entered on your account in credit and you're invoices will be deducted from it. If you choose to do this, please make sure to note your customer number in your bank/wire transfer. If you later decide to cancel your account, we'll refund you for any credit still left on your account. --Katie

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#118

Post by mindslight »

dx034 wrote: post #113
mindslight wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, having someone fraudulently use your name for a contract does not oblige you to pay for it and then go after the fraudster yourself.

But that's for you to pursue (to sue the fraudster would be a first step). Without a court decision, the counterparty has no reason to go after another person than the one on the contract.

Obviously this is going to vary per jurisdiction, but in the US this is plainly wrong. The burden is on the party asserting a debt to prove that the debt is legitimate. If Hetzner wished to enforce the debt, they would have to go to court and substantiate that their contract was really entered into with OP.

Instead they're just extrajudicially screwing with him, likely due to organizational incompetence - nobody was empowered to evaluate the situation with human judgement. Legally they can do this, as they can choose to not do business with anyone they'd like. But potential customers are free to judge the poor handling of this situation as a real risk, and avoid relying on Hetzner too much.

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#119

Post by dang »

StevePerkins wrote: post #105
0xbkt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck? They don't even allow hosting of adult content[0]. [0] 8.2. of https://www.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf

The human term is "sarcasm", Lt. Commander Data. There are only a certain number of business domains that deal with multi-petabyte monthly data transfer. So it's an amusing leap to presume the oldest profession on that list. Thanks for researching a footnote cite to the TOS document. But it's not literal . Whoosh.

Please don't be a jerk on HN, regardless of whether someone misread your comment. We're trying for something different here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sarcasm doesn't always communicate itself, particularly in very short comments.

Re: Hetzner cloud servers are now available in Ashburn USA

#120

Post by dang »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #87
Hetzner_OL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, I am very sorry that you had this negative experience back in 2018. If memory serves correctly, when we launched Hetzner Cloud during this time, there was a large surge in the number of fake accounts new customers tried to make. So I could imagine our teams being overly careful about new accounts, and especially if names didn't quite match up. Usually, we are able to restore data from locked servers/account…

Thank you for the response. Your head of sales [name redacted] was the one that reinstated my account and called me "unprofessional" for using a shortened version of my last name. He told me that it is not worth contacting people like me (his words), and suggested there was nothing wrong with their internal procedures and that they had no intention to do anything differently. I understand that mistakes happen, and I…

(I've redacted the name in the parent - we sometimes do that, especially when there's a risk of doxxing or other sort of personal consequences.)
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