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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"

#241

Post by belter »

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.

"Amateurs backup. Professionals restore."

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

#242

Post by thephyber »

conductr wrote: post #205
thephyber wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager it’s not uncommon. But also, the execs are the ones making the business risk decisions. Just make sure they have the correct info to make those decisions, the. Your responsibility is done.

I doubt responsibility is a concern, GP just doesn’t enjoy being a part of the shit show

And my core point is that most companies are shit shows. Employees know what bullet points they should have to minimize downside risk, but struggle with how to get those done while also minimizing upside risk.

In a world of scarcity, just keep communicating the tech debt. Maybe occasionally propose a project to address it.

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

#243

Post by rodgerd »

usrnm wrote: post #233
rodgerd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I have spent most of my career in newspaper publishing and banking.

A newspaper that doesn't publish for a few days might recover. A bank that drops off the Swift network for days isn't a bank any more.

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

#244

Post by CryptoBanker »

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…

In my experience they usually give a 48 or 72 hour period for the customer to respond before they take action on something like that.

They are exceptionally fast at detecting things like that though.

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

#245

Post by indigodaddy »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #180
amyames wrote: post #120

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 wil…

This is really great advice not just for this situation but in general really. For the proxies/what goes in front, I recommend cloudflare workers.

Doesn't CF have a service to accomplish this anyways that doesn't involve spinning up your own Worker application?

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

#246

Post by GianFabien »

ryandrake wrote: post #238
unethical_ban wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

...but the salesperson promised it would be easy, fast and low-cost!

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

#247

Post by fastily »

rexreed wrote: post #239
norwest wrote: post #192

[flagged]

Which VPS are you using and recommend?

Not OP but I use OVH which is better value and more reliable. OVH VPS’s also include unlimited bandwidth, by comparison hetzner imposes data caps and will nickel and dime you on just about everything. I run a few bandwidth heavy applications that do 10-20tb of traffic a month. If I was using hetzner I’d effectively be flushing cash down the drain

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

#248

Post by SahAssar »

amyames wrote: post #120

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 wil…

But then you need twice the bandwidth (one for egress from your "real" server, once for egress from your "front-end" server), you have a lot more latency, you've created additional points of failure, you need to sync the IPs of your "front-end" to your "real" server to allow it access. Besides that you now need to find reliable hosting from two providers, one for your "real" hosting and one for your "front-end" (using the same provider would just lead to the same issue as in the original post).

Great if it works for you, congrats. But I don't think this solves issues for many people, I doubt it solves an actual issue for you and it's basically the same as using cloudflare/akamai/similar but with a manually setup proxy on a VPS.

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

#249

Post by movedx »

hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #178
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…

They've gone the route of multiple AWS accounts in my company to avoid the issue they introduced with horrible planning. First they wanted us out of on-premise, and told us costs wouldn't matter. Then they wanted us to be 'cloud agnostic', but when given deadlines changed to 'get it working in AWS ASAP, doesn't matter the tech debt' Now they're freaking out about AWS costs, and we're back to juggling 'cloud agnostic'…

The biggest issue I see here is the misguided assumption that Cloud is just automatically and unilaterally better than on-premise or professionally managed, hosted hardware. This isn't true in most cases.

There are so many providers, and therefore examples, of physical tin being accessible in under a minute with cost:hardware ratios that blow Cloud out if the sky (pun! ha!) OVH have a server for USD $95/month (with no commitments) that can be brought up and made available 120 _seconds_ that has six 3.8GHz cores, 32GB of RAM, 2x960GB NVMe SSDs, and 1Gbit/s of UNMETERED, guaranteed bandwidth... that's absolutely insane, and that's fully managed from the hardware down, so arguments like, "bUT yoU haVe to MAintAin hardWARE!" are just not true _at all_.

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

#250

Post by movedx »

doublerabbit wrote: post #200
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 are simply not a stable foundation to build on. They're a budget host, you should always proceed with caution and never rely on for production. It's the same as buying a second hand eBay server to host users upon. I learnt that the hard way. > Hetzner, the ball is in your court. Not really. If you read the T&C, you'll find that they can do anything with the server. From their T&C: 2.7. Furthermore, we reserve…

> for good cause

Did you miss this part?

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