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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"

#321

Post by nohillside »

vdfs wrote: post #312
RateMyPE wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we get some more information on the matter? Over the past years there have been numerous people online which have claimed that Hetzner closes accounts without giving a reason. I'm sure most of those claims intentionally omit some details to make it look like they didn't infringe the T&C. However as a Hetzner customer (a small one, to be fair), I'd still like to know that those complaints are baseless, and that…

This is the relevant part from their T&C: 2.7. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause.

The full part reads

Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate the contractual relationship without notice for good cause. Such good cause is deemed to exist, among other reasons, if the Customer fails to meet its payment obligations or violates other important customer obligations. A further important reason which may result in us locking or terminating the Customer’s services or account without notice is if the Customer uses content that impairs the regular operating behavior or the security of our infrastructure or our product, or violates paragraphs 8.1. - 8.3. of these Terms and Conditions.

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

#322

Post by SyrupThinker »

switch007 wrote: post #306

How much of this is Hetzner's fault really vs the EU and their Digital Services "think of the children" Act which presumably makes hosting providers act in ways I'm sure were largely predicted while it was being drafted?

Close to zero from the DSA given thats how several European cloud providers have acted for the last decade.

Theres certainly other (German) legislation in place that might be relevant, but whats the point of speculating if we can’t blame the EU for it.

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

#323

Post by KingOfCoders »

w8whut wrote: post #129
KingOfCoders wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

Have two backups, the most recent data and everything else. Archive data to different databases, e.g. only have the most recent 6 months in a production OLTP database.

"daily test restore is infeasible for anything but toy projects. "

It probably depends on what you call "toy" project. If you work for Google, yes I think everything is a toy project, and you're right. I only worked for ~$200M ARR/1M DAU businesses and restoring was no problem. From your point working for a FAANG business it's a toy project I can see that. But there are many more "toy projects" of this kind than FAANG companies.

"10+TB backup for example, and thats a _tiny_ backup size for a b2c product."

Sure.

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

#324

Post by throwaway2037 »

sertraline wrote: post #275
throwaway2037 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were going as far as requesting customer's ID and rejecting them on the basis of country of origin Wouldn't this be required for most cloud providers? Else, how do filter out buyers from Iran, Syria, or North Korea, who are probably banned from buying your EU-based services?

I've used OVH, Scaleway, Linode and Amazon in the past, right now I use a small provider that resells Serverius and Hetzner, none of them ever asked me for my ID and all of them allow usage of VPN to sign up for service. As to payment, at least Amazon used to allow usage of debit cards in the past. Hetzner was the only provider that asked me for an ID. I'm not from the banned countries either.

Wow, that is crazy to think about. It must be so easy for Iran and NK to rent a billion hours of GPU time to simulate nukes using stolen bitcoin. Hoi. Truly dystopian!

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

#325

Post by switch007 »

Marc_at_Kiwix wrote: post #309
Hetzner_OL wrote: post #301

Hi there, as some untrue news is making its way about this case: There was a notice of termination via email with a deadline in accordance with our T&C, on 30 October 2024. Our team has already been in contact with this customer several times and we also have the transmission protocol of the communication. You can all rest assured that we do not close accounts randomly. There is always a specific and legitimate reaso…

Hey Katie happy to hear from you. I'm glad you can finally document the communication (and not just when people start making noise on the internets). You should have our address but just in case it's been, uh, misplaced, please forward your email dated 30 October to contact @ kiwix.org This below is where we got started - the ref number should make it easy for you to sort: > Procedure: L0020649F > Person: [redacted]…

If you agree to let them publish the email, they could post it here? As they seem keen to engage with the public over the matter.

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

#326

Post by bambax »

SahAssar wrote: post #252
bambax wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a Civic fly when it has a wing bolted on it? Coz my setup serves pages alright.

Sure, but that is not what people will read when you say "I built my own data center". "I setup my own server" would be a lot less misleading.

I never said I built my own data center; I think you have me confused with the OP.

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

#327

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

matwood wrote: post #292
thephyber wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The secret is to tie the tech debt to something that business wants. If that can’t be done then you have wonder how important it really is to address the debt.

I'm not sure if its a secret but its certainly one of the most practical ways to address technical debt.

Unfortunately we're at stage they will outright ignore what they're told, and then blame engineers for not being able to do what they said they couldn't do from the start. They refuse to acknowledge their impact on creating the tech debt in the first place by poor planning and wishful but impractical timelines, so proving to them we need to tackle any part of it is a struggle without letting things degrade to the point a real customer with significant money on the line is upset enough by the state of things to tackle it.

Which ultimately means we're at the horribly dysfunctional stage of management/company growth, the question is does it continue to get worse or does the CEO eventually learn and seriously look at the effectiveness of the VP levels and make changes...

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

#328

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

movedx wrote: post #249
hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It was during the wave of "Moving costs from capex to opex give C levels more flexibility" movement after the initial 'cloud is better' wave. In retrospect it seems like another of their badly thought out reactions to a situation they caused by short term thinking, in this case the issues caused by trying to reduce headcount on teams supporting legacy and new physical locations while increasing the pace of new locations.

Those costs were moved and ended up higher than the capex costs were to begin with which everyone expected but the decision makers (they brushed it off every time they were asked in company Q&A's). Opex margins became a major issue and the company did performative layoffs and restructuring to appease the shareholders (then re-hired ~1/3 of the laid off staff within the next 8 months because they actually needed them)

The level of 'bad decision leading to bad decision' happening is somewhere between absurd and depressing at this point.

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

#329

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

movedx wrote: post #316
Gud wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And frankly, how easy it is.

Precisely. Operating systems aren’t hard. They’re so easy and well established it’s crazy not to use them directly, and even though I’m not the world’s biggest Docker fan, Compose is kind of awesome to be honest. Deploying software and maintaining and OS is simple in this day and age.

Having gone from managing several thousand physical to virtual/cloud instances, there are certainly major differences and the company has to structure its approach accordingly (IMO).

On premise in my opinion needs a dedicated team managing hardware and leverage solutions to provide that as VM's/Containers/etc to teams. Another team focused on OS level security and base image, then your dev teams can effectively focus on their app and leverage the automated tools provided by the hardware and OS teams.

Cloud gives you at least half of that, or all of it depending on your approach, for a cost. There are points where the cost makes sense and times when it doesn't, and typically that changes through the life of a company. Unfortunately there is a not insignificant overhead even with current tools to maintaining a truly substrate agnostic infrastructure that can be deployed on top of multiple clouds, on-premise etc... so companies are locked in even when economics change.

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