Would anyone care to comment on the quality and English skills of their support?
We considered Hetzner, but were concerned about the potential pitfalls of doing low-level support with a language barrier.
European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#112I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious? Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't feel like doing business with them anymore. I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I alr…
TLDR: You do almost the same thing in the USA, only it is automated. We have the patriot act which requires collecting a lot of info-- the US has centralized databases (namely credit reports) that allow easy authentication of people. Outside the USA, they don't have the patriot act, but they have a lot of similar laws, and thus collecting a copy of your passport lets them know you're not an identity thief and lets them satisfy "know your customer" laws in their country. In the US the same thing can be authenticated by running a check thru a database, though in the US the law doesn't care whether you're an identity theif (which is why you don't need photographic proof) but whether you're on a terrorist list... the latter can be done just from the info you give.
They are the target of people who want to run torrent servers, criminal irc chat rooms, and stuff like that. These are not the customers they want. They also don't' want to incur the cost of setting up a dedicated server for someone whose just giving them stolen credit card info.
Since often stolen credit card info is distributed in text form, the theifs don't have access to the physical card. Showing you have access to the physical card and the physical passport does not prove that you didn't steal both from the rightful owner, but eliminates those people who just bought a list of credit card numbers.
While stolen cards are often cancelled relatively quickly, this can take anywhere from days to weeks to process thru, by which time they will have incurred the real labor costs (that they charge the 150 euro setup fee to cover) only to have those charges reversed because the card was stolen.
One thing that was illuminating for me as an american is the discovery that our banking system is set up very differently from many other countries. Thus things that are easy for us, are not as easy for them. (Taking a credit card is harder for a merchant outside the USA because the credit card system originated in the USA under the US legal structure. This is why shopping online is less common in, say, south america, than it is in north america.) Other things that are hard for us are easy for them-- if you want to give your friend $20, you just log into your bank and send him the money. The entire purpose of paypal was replaced outside the US as a simple feature on bank websites.
Asking for a photo of your passport and credit card is not really out of line. I understand why you would be hesitant to give these things up as an american-- when I first started doing business internationally, I was very hesitant as well. After awhile, though, you realize that trustworthy businesses are trustworthy. The data I'll be putting on hetzner servers is much more valuable than the image of my passport (Which every low paid border agent at a third world country I visit gets a copy of.)
If I can't trust them with my passport image, can I trust them with my data?
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#113Would anyone care to comment on the quality and English skills of their support? We considered Hetzner, but were concerned about the potential pitfalls of doing low-level support with a language barrier.
I haven't used their service yet so I can't comment from experience with them, but I will say this: In germany, you are taught english when you are growing up. We lived in Berlin for awhile and my german is very poor, but almost everyone we met knew enough english to get by. Hetzner is an international company, with a website in english, and I think the odds that they will have a real problem handling customer support requests due to language is very low. Much lower than support being overworked, or other potential issues.
In america, finding someone who knows a foreign language is rare. In germany, finding someone who knows at least some english is not uncommon- and in a company like this, I'm sure (but don't know for a fact) they hire english speaking support people.
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#114Hetzner is nirvana for pre-ramen profitable big data startups. You can build a cluster for a whole lot less than Amazon-- in many cases 1/10th the cost (depending on which resources are higher priority, for us.)
The question is-- can you host in germany and serve a customer base that is primarily in the USA? Our application isn't too latency intensive... but this is my primary concern.
Would it be stupid for an american startup to locate there?
I'd love to hear from anyone who has direct experience.
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could also just get a dedicated server with a good chunk of ram. Say, 32gb or the new 64gb one. Then install XEN or KVM on it and run your own VPS farm instead. It'll save you $800-1600 USD/month in the long-run once you fill up the whole box with VPSs. Another thing to note is that the new 64gb instance trucks a hexacore (6) core CPU and includes hyper-threading. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this…
What happens when the host box dies? If you build in redundancy, the costs start spiralling quite quickly...
Wouldn't the risk of that be exactly the same as the risk of a host box dying at for any VPS product anywhere? Specifically I'm sure Hetzner is running their VPS product on the same boxes, since one of their methods is to have a very standardized, custom designed box (like google does).
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more... (I don't understand those folks) The EX5 is the last one with the old-gen CPU and was kept because in the early days of the i7-2600 it was too expensive to offer high-ram servers like the 4S (which was introduced months later)
>> EX 5 has a lower setup fee. Some people want to save once and pay more... (I don't understand those folks) This seems prudent when going with a new vendor. Reduce financial risk until you gain trust.
ok :)
In this case I would buy the cheapest server from https://robot.your-server.de/order/market or a VPS/vserver to gain trust in the company+network.
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#117Compare with SoftLayer which has decided to charge through the nose for their RAM upgrades: going from 16 to 64GB RAM on their E5 servers is an additional $1200/month. They're far more expensive than e.g. Rackspace there for some reason.
I haven't looked at SoftLayer's offerings re: RAM but the most important thing to note with Hetzner is that only some of their dedicated machines have error-correcting code (ECC) memory. Hetzner's 16GB machine[1] (89 Euros/month) has ECC memory for example. Whilst this might not sound like an enormous issue, DRAM errors are surprisingly common in real deployments[2] and can result in scary things happening to your da…
I think it is a good idea to architect your system under the assumption that once a year, some theif is going to sneak into the data center and make off with an entire server. Just one, but the whole server will then die horribly in a fire after a shoot-out with the police.
Lots of things can happen, you should have a higher level of replication such that you can handle a whole server going poof, not just a single bit going poof.
The cost of ECC at Hetzner-- the cheapest provider out there- is about half an additional server. So, buy three servers without ECC for the price of two servers with ECC, and replicate your data three times (and triple your bandwidth, horsepower, etc.)
This is not hard with platforms like Riak which are distributed homogenous clusters of nodes.
And if your service isn't built like that, then really it should be. (IMNSHO, of course.)
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Sent passport scan to Hetzner" - Really?
I had to to the same for Linode (although I'm from an untrustworthy country :).
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#119I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious? Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't feel like doing business with them anymore. I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I alr…
TLDR: You do almost the same thing in the USA, only it is automated. We have the patriot act which requires collecting a lot of info-- the US has centralized databases (namely credit reports) that allow easy authentication of people. Outside the USA, they don't have the patriot act, but they have a lot of similar laws, and thus collecting a copy of your passport lets them know you're not an identity thief and lets th…
I mostly agree with what you say.
I was a bit angry because they didn't mention this at the time of signing up. It might be somewhere in the t&c but I think this kind of information should be explicitly told viz. we require your passport and credit card photo to sign you up with our service.
I didn't like the callousness with which they request the information. Another commenter mentioned he talked to them and they said only last 4 digits of the card would do for the photo. Now isn't this the kind of information they should be providing along with the request?
I understand I am giving them my card data for payments and the photo of my card contains less data than what is already there with them. But there are legal requirements for storing credit card info on which I can count. There are no such requirements for a photo of credit card exchanged over mail.
> The data I'll be putting on hetzner servers is much more valuable than the image of my passport
I was more concerned about credit card. I did find the passport request a bit weird, but then I had the same line of thought as you - a copy of my passport is with my employer, my landlord, custom offices and a bazillion other places. Identity theft is a possibility but an established business comes very low on the list of threats.
> I understand why you would be hesitant to give these things up as an american-- when I first started doing business internationally, I was very hesitant as well.
I am an Indian living in India. India as a nation is a late entry in online playgrounds, and as a result, most of us are skeptic when dealing online. As I detailed in my parent post, I mostly use my virtual credit card to make the payments with the limit set to the amount I am going to be charged to avoid being scammed(page says x, you charge me 100x). That is not a concern with established businesses though.
Re: European server provider Hetzner now offers a 64GB RAM box for 109€/mon
#120I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious? Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't feel like doing business with them anymore. I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I alr…
I am from India, have a server with them and was not asked for any documentation. May be it is a recent change. Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.
> Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.
I am still not fully convinced, but this post makes some good points.