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

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

#111

Post by benterix »

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 only use them for money-making projetcs. Based on my own experience and what I read online, you need to be careful with:

* crypto mining (I used it when it wasn't causing much trouble but I noticed my nodes were constantly attacked at a ratio I newer saw for other servers); IIRC Hetzner's current ToS forbid crypto mining

* things in legally grey area which might be legal in some places but not so in others, especially in the EU

* protect your servers well; if you become a victim of an attack and your servers will start attacking other, Hetzner will isolate them and notify you so that you can solve the problem

Other than that, the only problems I had in the last 15 or so years are failing bare-metal components that they promptly replaced, that's all.

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

#112

Post by JohnBooty »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #87
tailspin2019 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience doesn’t sound a great deal better and also puts me off this provider. 24-hours is almost synonymous with no warning in my book. How many contact attempts can reasonably be made in that time? If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and…

>If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc. I know one company with a…

   If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.
Yeah, I was considering them for my part time projects and some small PaaS-ish stuff. Not now.

Realistically to have 24/365 email coverage you'd need like, full-time founders or at least a couple of paid employees.

For what I was considering, I will be a "founder" but I'll still be working my day job. So effectively that is > 16 hours per day (work + sleep) I need to dedicate to the day job. While I will generally be able to respond within 24 hours, I can't 100% guarantee it.

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

#113

Post by ratg13 »

SamWhited wrote: post #62
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but they're cheap Maybe they're cheap for a reason.

Indeed; no one ever seems to consider that before defaulting to them though :(

I didn't default to them, but did start a new project on their infrastructure.

They deleted all of my data a month in due to not beleiving my name was real, and without even bothering to contact me to verify anything. They deleted my backups as well because I was dumb enough to keep them under the same account.

I learned a valuable lesson the hard way and have improved my methods as a result, but sad that it cost me an entire month's work due to carelessness and recklessness on their part.

Sure, it's "cheap for a reason", but let's not pretend like this type of expectation is advertised, especially as many on HN tout them as a drop-in replacement for competitors.

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

#114

Post by ratg13 »

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.

My experience was getting the "you have 24 hours" to respond e-mail, and contacting them within 20 minutes, only to be passed around a phone system to be finally told, sorry everything has been deleted.

They offered to "recover" the account, which was basically just an account shell with my info. All of the assets and backups had been permanently erased.

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

#115

Post by KingOfCoders »

diggan wrote: post #22
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…

Another great question is "When did you last try to restore from a backup?" which usually is answered with "It's the built-in tooling, why would we assume it's broken?" or similar. Then fast-forward some months/years, and they try to restore from backups only to realize the backups never actually backed up what they cared about.

Agreed, if you haven't tested your backups recently (daily, automatic best), you don't have backups. Several of my clients (CTO Coaching) had problems in the past because they restored backups and where finding they were not complete (for various reasons).

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

#116

Post by JohnBooty »

SuperShibe wrote: post #91
JohnBooty wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images Wait, what? Yikes. I'm planning a project like that. Do you have a link to more information?

https://woem.men/notes/9r86xd69cu89052m Also shoutout to Cloudflare for showing off what a diverse company they are in this one /s

Damn, thank you thank you thank you. That is ultra messed up.

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

#117

Post by KingOfCoders »

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

I do think (1.) depends on your company size, and business model. For most, it's cheap, e.g.

https://rsync.net/pricing.html

That said I was once a CTO for a company with 10 photo studios and we had a large amount of new (raw, DSLR) photos per minute, so cost was an issue and also upload speed for offsite backups.

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

#118

Post by crtasm »

SuperShibe wrote: post #91
JohnBooty wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images Wait, what? Yikes. I'm planning a project like that. Do you have a link to more information?

https://woem.men/notes/9r86xd69cu89052m Also shoutout to Cloudflare for showing off what a diverse company they are in this one /s

I don't understand - Cloudflare forwarded the report on as usual, what would you want them to do instead?

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

#119

Post by crote »

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

The best part of cloud providers is that short-term VMs are relatively cheap to deploy. You don't need a full active-active failover setup, you just need to design your infrastructure in a cloud-agnostic way and test the deployment scripts a few times a year.

The most expensive part is going to be maintaining an up-to-date offsite data backup. Running a few VMs for a handful of hours is basically free.

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

#120

Post by amyames »

For anyone else who needs to hear this,

Hi,

I don’t have a mastodon to reply directly to you.

But i have had some issues with content being taken down by VPS providers as well.

What I’ve found works well is to use a VPS provider that the public is unaware of. And for some time I had used OVH based on the unlimited bandwidth and the reasoning that Wikipedia and Julian assange (who have far more enemies than I ever will) were using OVH.

I don’t know if that’s true any more because I subsequently moved my content to ENS and IPFS.

Anyway regardless of where your content is actually hosted or lives,

What I had done was turn my “real” servers into content origins , which were concealed form the rest of the world and lock it down in the firewall so it could only be reached by disposable squid proxy servers with a 10-liner config file

Then I pointed DNS , cloud flare etc at the squid nodes

And couldn’t care less if they were taken down.

Because I could deploy new ones in minutes elsewhere.

I didn’t have “bad content”, just ruthless business competition that kept coming at me like Tonya Harding.

And I’m sharing because your content didn’t seem too offensive either.

In the front end VPS nodes you’d just put the real address of your content as the remote origin.

And then nobody but you will ever know where it is.

Then generally your hosting company shouldn’t be aware of what it is either unless they’re snooping around in your files, and if they are, hell with them too.

You’re welcome to pass this along as a remark on avoiding censorship, or keep it to yourslelf as proprietary information I don’t mind. Let me know if you want or need an example squid conf. It’s seriously 10 lines at most and many examples found on google.

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