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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"

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When should one start doing this though, in a companies life cycle? What is the most reasonable point that meets the criteria of 'as soon as possible'? Because I imagine out of the gate doing this could be a net negative, not a net positive. On the other hand, I'm not sufficiently well versed enough on the absolute latest devops techniques that may make this whole thing trivial, but I thought all the major cloud prov…

You should have tested backups by the time you have something running in production. It's very easy to do if you don't do the absolute latest devops techniques.

Really thinking about testing the whole “we could migrate to any cloud on a moments notice” idea

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true in probably every jurisdiction, though? At least in Germany you can often get free legal advice for many things (Verbraucherschutz, Mietrechtsberatung etc.) and there's insurance you can buy that covers your legal fees in case you lose. And legal fees in Germany are typically not exorbitant. (Also in some cases, it's the other way around. If your landlord wants to increase the rent it's on them to sue you…

Legal advice and reality in Germany are 2 different things. The truth is that dealing with any kind of legal situation in Germany is a huge headache and all you get in the end is to prove you are right and get what should be yours anyway, without any additional compensation for your trouble. And many companies use this to abuse the system. The landlord can steal a small part of your deposit, you can only sue. But nob…

If you win the case, the landlord would have to cover your legal fees.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge amount of protection for renters, a lot of things are simply illegal to put into the rental agreement and are automatically void. I really have no idea what you're talking about here.

Yes, there are laws that nullify certain clauses in tenancy agreements, but enforcing them is another story.

There's nothing to enforce. If a clause is invalid, you can ignore it.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OVH also subject to the Digital Services Act...

As well they should be

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that contracts like these, if you forgot to cancel them, can only renew for one month is better than anything I've seen anywhere else. Do you have a source for this? (maybe it's a new thing) Because the subject of cancelling contracts is even a meme in the German (expat) community (of course for your standard German you need to be able to plan your life years ahead)

https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat... Initial contract terms can be longer (up to 24 months) and as the site points out, the new rules only apply to new contracts, others can be up to annual.

Thanks for the link, and as I suspected, it is a very recent thing

> Regulations for fairer consumer contracts are on the 1. March 2022 came into force and ensure that you can terminate automatic contract renewals for contracts for regular goods deliveries and services (such as streaming services or magazine subscriptions) more quickly.

> In addition, the 1st was founded. July 2022 a termination button duty introduced to simplify termination processes.

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

#356

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.

Some people actually want to spend their time contributing to something meaningful. It also sounds like OP is worried executive incompetence might affect his job security.

Yeah, I inferred that from their post.

My point is that even “something meaningful” comes with tech debt. It’s like that at my current place.

Too many people get “grass is greener” syndrome and think that there is some magical company somewhere which gives everyone plenty of time to refactor everything and fix all of the tech debt and execs make fantastic business risk decisions which always benefit the employee. In a world of scarcity, that practically never happens.

Just weigh your options in the market. If it’s worth staying where you are, just realize that the employee is not responsible for making business risk decisions, only responsible for sufficiently informing those who do of the facts.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people actually want to spend their time contributing to something meaningful. It also sounds like OP is worried executive incompetence might affect his job security.

Yeah, I inferred that from their post. My point is that even “something meaningful” comes with tech debt. It’s like that at my current place. Too many people get “grass is greener” syndrome and think that there is some magical company somewhere which gives everyone plenty of time to refactor everything and fix all of the tech debt and execs make fantastic business risk decisions which always benefit the employee. In…

You're still assuming that OP, or anyone else, has the same values as you. As I said, some people want to work on something meaningful, or see the writing on the wall and want to increase their job security. It's not about the grass being greener. And sometimes, it is greener, and the only way you find out is by trying something new.

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

#358
post #349

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. You're assuming that "On premise" equates to "inside our building, in racks we've installed, using power and networking we have to manage." You're correct if that's the case for your business, but my argument is based around the idea that you can use _managed_ hosting providers o…

That's a good point, and at small and medium scales those are very cost effective alternatives to cloud or fully managed. Not many managed providers can provide a full equivalent to an on-premise team, and it quickly becomes cheaper to run it yourself once you scale into large dedicated instances and high network traffic. Before then though its often better than the cloud for many situations.

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

#359
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't believe a lot of this is required. OS level security? So, "apt update && apt upgrade", then? I mean, what else are you doing, writing patches for the kernel? Checking every line of code that runs? Are you aware of how effective SELinux and systemd containers are? Just a simple firewall at the OS level? Maybe even just using Tailscale (or the open source Headscale) to introduce zero trust access capabilities.…

>"apt update && apt upgrade",

Across 10k-100k+ servers, all running services and needing to orchestrate restarting across the whole fleet, while providing 0 downtime or impact to thousands of clients with terabytes of data being processed and analyzed at any given time.

Sure whats so hard about changing a tire? Well try to do it on an 18-wheeler while its driving down the highway without any impact to its speed.

> Are you aware of how effective SELinux and systemd containers are? Just a simple firewall at the OS level?

Part of a layered and in-depth system but one that introduces complexity.

>Maybe even just using Tailscale (or the open source Headscale) to introduce zero trust access capabilities.

Tailscale in an enterprise production environment? Not going to pass any sort of security audit and probably violates a number of certifications customer require at the enterprise level for network access controls, visibility and auditing.

Just managing the git/jenkins/spinnaker/terraform infrastructure in dozens of locations deploying to and maintaining tens of thousands of servers/pods requires a 24x7 team on top of the hundreds of teams and tens of thousands of devs using it.

If you're small enough that doesn't make sense, then you might be small enough one Ops person can handle the load (One is never enough if you're smart but...), but you are dealing with a very small amount of infrastructure and services at this point.

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

#360
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning? That’s what the post said. But of course we have no idea if it’s true or not. No evidence was provided, and we are only hearing one side of the story.

No evidence was provided also because they did not send any email or offer any kind of statement,, pdf, anything, to explain what they did. It was a purely silent delete. And in that hackernews thread we have dozens of people relating similar stories.

But the thread says, “When reached, they could not explain the reason for the cancellation: Them: - We sent you an email. Us : -We did not receive it, can you please resend? Them: - We can't”

Was that on a phone call? Because if not, surely there is some record?

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