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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"

#231

Post by registeredcorn »

Three possibilities come to mind:

1) There is some fundamental data aspect Kiwix hasn't mentioned (or is entirely unaware of). I.e. CP or some other super illegal stuff.

2) Hetzner is profoundly incompetent, deleted production servers by accident, and the "But we sent you an email!" thing is a lie to cover up the mistake.

3) There is some kind of interaction that happened prior to this that we aren't privy to. Perhaps a series of late bills, legal threats, or some other inter-personal issue.

Predicted outcome:

I either expect Kiwix to get a knock by federal/national authorities. Or the more likely outcome in my opinion: some frustratingly vague statement by Hetzner PR about its customers being "mistaken" in regards as to why data-go-poof.

I mean seriously, let us assume it's something illegal: Sure, fine, whatever. Wouldn't it make more sense for that material to not be deleted, so whoever the guilty party is would be arrested for/prosecuted by it? Deleting the servers would be like police being informed about a murder weapon and asking the tipster to destroy the weapon before an arrest is even made. It doesn't make any sense to me. Surely if some bad thing were discovered, there would be some method to encrypt/restrict illicit material without destroying it.

Either bad blood, or unpaid bills, or simple incompetence seems like the most likely culprits to me.

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

#232

Post by mike_hearn »

Tomte wrote: post #97
mike_hearn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's German not EU level, the NetzDG act has a 24 hour turnaround time for taking down content that is "clearly" illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act Unfortunately the act is designed to block vague categories like "hate speech" and "misinformation" and has huge fines attached, so it's designed to ensure that very trigger-happy enforcement is the only workable strategy. It was written to wha…

The NetzDG only applies to platforms, and only to ones above 2 million users.

Yes but what is a "platform"? And if you define a user as someone who connects to your servers, Hetzner certainly has more than 2M.

The questions here are rhetorical. It doesn't matter what we think the answers are. The penalties are so huge that if there's even a tiny chance of a judge disagreeing with you, then you have to take measures to avoid the risk.

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

#233

Post by usrnm »

rodgerd wrote: post #208
w8whut wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

daily test restore is infeasible for anything but toy projects. You should periodically test your restore procedures, but its incredibly costly and time consuming for sizeable platforms. Its just not that easy to restore a 10+TB backup for example, and thats a _tiny_ backup size for a b2c product. they can easily go into the hundreds of TB, depending on your platform. and i might add: i vividly remember gitlabs artic…

> but its incredibly costly and time consuming for sizeable platforms. If your restores are too time consuming to test regularly, they sure as shit aren't going to be useful in a disaster.

Why is that? Hours or even days of downtime are still better than just losing all data. It's a simple cost-benefit analysis, and it's ok to pick different trade-offs depending on your use case

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

#234

Post by ChocolateGod »

gurchik wrote: post #134
Redoubts wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://woem.men/notes/9r5bwnci8x2204it “Actually, they’re 1000 years old”

Careful, sharing that link is illegal in some jurisdictions

The alt description doesn't do it any favours either.

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

#235

Post by Tomte »

mike_hearn wrote: post #232
Tomte wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NetzDG only applies to platforms, and only to ones above 2 million users.

Yes but what is a "platform"? And if you define a user as someone who connects to your servers, Hetzner certainly has more than 2M. The questions here are rhetorical. It doesn't matter what we think the answers are. The penalties are so huge that if there's even a tiny chance of a judge disagreeing with you, then you have to take measures to avoid the risk.

That's preposterous.

But sure, maybe eating a broccoli will be construed as murder in the future, so best not eat anything at all.

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

#236

Post by ChocolateGod »

tmikaeld wrote: post #125

Would be good to have a fall-back solution, is there something similar in dedicated server price in the EU as Hetzner? Or does no on else come close?

Scaleway/Dedibox/Online.net but the hardware is quite a bit older for the price.

There's also Webtropia I have used in the past, also German, without issues.

OVH would be the safest bet but their support is worst than Hetzner.

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

#237

Post by andrewmcwatters »

jimjimwii wrote: post #169

Backups are irrelevent here (yes, backups are important). if hetzner really deleted production data without warning or providing a grace period for their customer to migrate their data, then they are simply not a stable foundation to build on. I have never been a customer of google cloud for this reason and i sure as hell wont deploy new servers on hetzner until they provide a clear statement on what went wrong and w…

They're all this way.

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

#238

Post by ryandrake »

unethical_ban wrote: post #195
sevensor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d ask, “have we worked together?” since this is a spot on description of my former employer, except it’s probably a spot on description of thousands of mid sized companies.

Same! Some execs get excited about reducing capital expenses for a data center and the teams that manage it. Some CTO gets excited about the flexibility and some legitimate benefits of cloud. But it ends up costing a shitton of money to switch paradigms completely, and they don't switch paradigms completely for a number of years: If you're just migrating servers to ec2/vpc, you're doing cloud wrong. Of course, there…

At many places I've worked, there are essentially zero checks-and-balances between "Exec gets randomly excited about X" and "X becomes a mandate, with staffing, budget, and deadline." No technical vetting, feedback loop, sometimes no apparent coordination with other execs (and their random ideas). It's just: "Mike is excited about Cloud. -> We are now doing Cloud." Later, Mike gets excited about something else, and the entire team moves over to something else. "Mike is excited about AI. -> We are now doing AI."
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