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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"

#331

Post by antonvs »

hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #329
movedx wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Exactly. At which point, you’re essentially reinventing a cloud, usually not very well. If you have access to really good people you can pull this off, and that’s why you see so many people on HN doing the “who needs cloud” flex.

But the reality is that for most companies, managing non-trivial amounts of hardware is not a core competency, and they regularly shoot themselves in the foot by trying it.

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

#332

Post by diggan »

kstrauser wrote: post #202
diggan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've avoided that in various shops by making backups/restores part of regular maintenance processes. How do we upgrade the database? By stopping it, backing it up, restoring that to the new server, pointing all code at the new DB, then turning off the old server. As with code deployment, it's not so scary when it's something you do so frequently that it's just a little script you run.

> it's not so scary when it's something you do so frequently

Yeah, I've found this to be the trick for ongoing hassle-free maintenance too. Make tearing stuff down and up frequent enough and you'll feel confident and safe when you're required to do so to recover from something.

Scariest are applications/services/servers that has been running for years but never restarted nor ever restored. Those scare me.

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

#333

Post by Hetzner_OL »

Hi again everyone, our teams who review such cases do so on a case-by-case basis. We do not use AI or automated systems for these situations, but review them manually. As a general rule of thumb, we try to avoid commenting about these cases publicly. We do that so we can protect the affected customers' personal data. But this doesn't mean that we're not in contact with the customer, which we are in this case. --Katie, Hetzner Online

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

#334

Post by quectophoton »

evoke4908 wrote: post #268
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…

My CEO has been letting the AWS bill go unpaid, apparently not understanding that our entire business and all of our IP will simply vanish if our S3 bucket gets deleted. Zero backups of any kind I manually pulled a backup of everything but jeez, not good.

Hopefully your warnings to them are in writing, and you have enough to CYA just in case.

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

#335

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

antonvs wrote: post #331
hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. Exactly. At which point, you’re essentially reinventing a cloud, usually not very well. If you…

Absolutely.

My issue is really on the other end of that scale, where getting C-suites to recognize when owning that core competency is actually beneficial to the company even if its not the focus of the company.

I grew up around companies leveraging vertical integration at the right scales to improve costs, seeing companies go the opposite direction trading all those advantages for often never-materializing benefits is... frustrating.

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

#336

Post by EgoIncarnate »

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.

I think Section 8 "Use of the services / content" is likely more relevant in this case.

Given one of their goals on their homepage is "access to internet ... [due to] ... outright censorship" (which is legally required in some countries), likely they are in violation of

"8.1. The Customer is obligated to check and comply with the legal provisions arising from the use of the contractually agreed services"

and

"8.4. If we become aware of illegal activities, we are obligated under Art. 6 Abs. 1 DSA (Digital Services Act) to request that the Customer immediately removes the offending content and we are entitled to lock the Customer’s access to their Hetzner services or account."

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

#337

Post by EgoIncarnate »

I think Section 8 "Use of the services / content" is likely relevant in this case.

Given one of kiwix.org's goals on their homepage is "access to internet ... [due to] ... outright censorship" (which is legally required in some countries), likely they are in violation of T&C in

"8.1. The Customer is obligated to check and comply with the legal provisions arising from the use of the contractually agreed services"

and

"8.4. If we become aware of illegal activities, we are obligated under Art. 6 Abs. 1 DSA (Digital Services Act) to request that the Customer immediately removes the offending content and we are entitled to lock the Customer’s access to their Hetzner services or account."

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

#338

Post by kstrauser »

diggan wrote: post #332
kstrauser wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've avoided that in various shops by making backups/restores part of regular maintenance processes. How do we upgrade the database? By stopping it, backing it up, restoring that to the new server, pointing all code at the new DB, then turning off the old server. As with code deployment, it's not so scary when it's something you do so frequently that it's just a little script you run.

> it's not so scary when it's something you do so frequently Yeah, I've found this to be the trick for ongoing hassle-free maintenance too. Make tearing stuff down and up frequent enough and you'll feel confident and safe when you're required to do so to recover from something. Scariest are applications/services/servers that has been running for years but never restarted nor ever restored. Those scare me.

Cattle, not kittens. My favorite thing about deploying containerized apps? They’re completely fungible and I never have to care about an individual instance. Oh, it hung due to some weird network interaction? Spawn a new one, then come back to see what went wrong with this one before you kill it.

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

#339

Post by attendant3446 »

kassner wrote: post #283
Antitoxic6185 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people suck up to them, they seem to require formal ID proof to authorize your account outside EU and they can deny you without any reason whatsoever. If you look up online about similar things happening to others, the standard response you would see is "If you don't like them, take your business elsewhere". I would rather pay more with digital ocean than to be treated like untouchable with hetzner.

> ID proof to authorize your account outside EU They do that even within EU, and even when your credit card passes 3D secure validation.

And not just ID, but additional documents proving your address (like a utility bill, but only in some specific formats). I tried to open an account there a couple of times, but they discriminated against me based on the documents I had).

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

#340

Post by unixhero »

goatking wrote: post #177
unixhero wrote: post #67

Hetzner froze my account because I owed them 0.02 EURO's. It was not possible to pay it with a VISA credit or VISA debit, nor Amex card. They required me to wire transfer the money. However my bank does not allow the wiring of a 0.02 EURO amount, as the amount is too low. Out of pure spite I built my own data center.

How did you build your own data center? Is it in your house, or renting a place somewhere? How much did it cost? I would be curious about any details you can share.

Os: Proxmox

Hardware: 4x Old decommed 19" dells on Ebay with plenty of DDR4 memory, HP Proliant G10+ are also good

Ups Eaton Pro

Gigabit Fiber Internet, which is more than enough. 10-50mbit can suffice for compute nodes too.

Bought ssds and m2 storage plus some spinning ols rust drives

Temp and humidity monitoring

Google Nest Protect smoke detector

TP link 16amp smart plugs on all, to have a control plane to turn it all off remotely

Workloads:

Most are LXC

Some Docker

KVM virtual machines

Zero trust: Some Cloudflare

Tailscale

Proxmox backup server to back it all up, lots of retention

Monitoring:

Deployed remote uptime monitoring on fly.io

Read and experiment a lot Hang out on /r/homelab /r/homedatacenter and /r/selfhosted for learning, community and inspiration

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