"Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers" • Hacker News Board

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#101

Post by snehk » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #76

raverbashing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU

>German companies are awful at customer service. True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany. Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you lo…

> [...] so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law

This is factually false.

> (some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.

Any examples here? The fact that contracts like these, if you forgot to cancel them, can only renew for one month is better than anything I've seen anywhere else. Also that you must be able to cancel anything online with the click of a button if the contract was made online. Add that to the fact that any clause is worthless if it includes something a reasonable person wouldn't expect. I don't know many countries that actually enforce this - Germany does all the time.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#102

Post by Cumpiler69 » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

snehk wrote: post #101

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>German companies are awful at customer service. True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany. Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you lo…

> [...] so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law This is factually false. > (some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do no…

>Add that to the fact that any clause is worthless if it includes something a reasonable person wouldn't expect.

The problem is you always need to sue to get justice for that which means paying for lawyers and consuming time and money plus stress.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#103

Post by sam_lowry_ » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

danjac wrote: post #92

SamWhited wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens literally all the time with Hetzner, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of this story (or seen it here on HN), but they're cheap, and most people aren't going to find the people complaining online about it even if they do actually try to find out more about the company, so I'm afraid it hasn't hurt them much.

They are great for throwaway hobbyist side projects where you don't want to worry about AWS billing horror stories or more expensive offerings like Digital Ocean or Linode. I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.

I would absolutely use Hetzner for a real money-on-the-table business. You just have to know what you are up to and do your cost-benefit analysis.

I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS.

At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work close to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.

And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.

I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.

P.S. Yes, that was before Hetzner Cloud became a thing )

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#104

Post by fabian2k » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #76

raverbashing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU

>German companies are awful at customer service. True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany. Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you lo…

There is a huge amount of protection for renters, a lot of things are simply illegal to put into the rental agreement and are automatically void. I really have no idea what you're talking about here.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#105

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:28 PM UTC

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #103

danjac wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are great for throwaway hobbyist side projects where you don't want to worry about AWS billing horror stories or more expensive offerings like Digital Ocean or Linode. I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.

I would absolutely use Hetzner for a real money-on-the-table business. You just have to know what you are up to and do your cost-benefit analysis. I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS. At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to…

[deleted]

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#106

Post by Cumpiler69 » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:28 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #104

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>German companies are awful at customer service. True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany. Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you lo…

There is a huge amount of protection for renters, a lot of things are simply illegal to put into the rental agreement and are automatically void. I really have no idea what you're talking about here.

>and are automatically void

And yet they're still put ion the rental agreement because the landlords know they can get away with it s it's a seller's market.

>I really have no idea what you're talking about here.

Google or look on reddit posts of foreigners getting screwed in Germany.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#107

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

snehk wrote: post #101

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>German companies are awful at customer service. True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany. Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you lo…

> [...] so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law This is factually false. > (some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do no…

> The fact that contracts like these, if you forgot to cancel them, can only renew for one month is better than anything I've seen anywhere else.

Do you have a source for this? (maybe it's a new thing) Because the subject of cancelling contracts is even a meme in the German (expat) community

(of course for your standard German you need to be able to plan your life years ahead)

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#108

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

Risse wrote: post #18

dinkblam wrote: post #5

also negative experiences here. if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down immediately and ask you to respond. obviously thats not a sane course of action and i cannot recommend using them for any kind of production systems. i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not prom…

Not my experience as well. They have previously given me 24 hours to respond, or they will remove the server.

Yikes. That's just about as scary.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#109

Post by benterix » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #75

KingOfCoders wrote: post #19

Whenever I ask a CTO if they have a backup (or plan-B) they say we're on AWS, we backup there and they will never go down as a company. And then I ask them what they do when their account gets shut (e.g. because they are selling something bad on Amazon and have the same phone number as the company account?) Or the instance some years ago where GCP closed because someone had wrongly classified image on their drive? Yo…

I agree about data backups but replicating your setup in another cloud provider is: 1) Expensive 2) Not straightforward, e.g. is there a 1:1 setup in another cloud for your system? 3) Likely to go untested and be useless when you need it most

Fully agree, that's why you need to think well first and come up with a compromise that you are willing to accept. Periodic testing of your DR procedures is non-negotiable but fortunately it's usually much simpler for smaller startups than for larger orgs.

Re: "Hetzner decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers"

#110

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #30

dinkblam wrote: post #5

also negative experiences here. if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down immediately and ask you to respond. obviously thats not a sane course of action and i cannot recommend using them for any kind of production systems. i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not prom…

> i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted. Is it possible that maybe others had a different experience than you, and those experiences are as valid as your own? Besides, what was your website about? I've received notices I had to reply to within 24-hours, otherwise they delete the servers. But I've always replied and complied, so never had…

"24 hours notice before server deletion" makes them a no-go for me, then.

I was considering them for a small project, but as this project will be nobody's fulltime job, I can't guarantee that I or anybody else would necessarily see that email within 24 hours.