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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"

#61

Post by tucnak »

People don't like hearing this, but Hetzner support is horrible. In the two years we'd had an account with them having used numerous auctioned boxes, we had to reach out to support a handful of times, and every single time they'd started the conversation by telling us it's not their business to help us. They supposedly only help if something's broken, however when we DID run into technical issues, like NVMe's slowing down to a halt, or transient networking issues, they would go out of their way to tell us they don't give a shit.

We cancelled our account last month because of that.

I cannot imagine the world of hurt that we'd be ushered in, had they actually dropped our data wholesale like they did for OP.

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

#62

Post by SamWhited »

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #57
SamWhited wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens literally all the time with Hetzner, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of this story (or seen it here on HN), but they're cheap, and most people aren't going to find the people complaining online about it even if they do actually try to find out more about the company, so I'm afraid it hasn't hurt them much.

>but they're cheap Maybe they're cheap for a reason.

Indeed; no one ever seems to consider that before defaulting to them though :(

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

#63

Post by Cumpiler69 »

nottorp wrote: post #55
SamWhited wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hosting content going against their ToC or similar" Or hosting content that Hetzner misclassified as against their ToC. Or that they decided was because of a string in a random file name. Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images and decided that was risky (nevermind that this is common and they have moderation and a strategy for if someone tries to hos…

Employee? I'm sure it's an "AI" script to reduce costs.

To the end user getting screwed it doesn't matter if your usage gets misclassified by an AI bot or a clueless human bot in an Asian bodyshop. Your account is still banned by that corporation either way, it doesn't matter to you why and who at the provider did it.

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

#64

Post by raverbashing »

aurareturn wrote: post #4

Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning? That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially for their customer.

Honestly

as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service

German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU

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

#65

Post by tailspin2019 »

diggan wrote: post #30
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…

> i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted. Is it possible that maybe others had a different experience than you, and those experiences are as valid as your own? Besides, what was your website about? I've received notices I had to reply to within 24-hours, otherwise they delete the servers. But I've always replied and complied, so never had…

Your experience doesn’t sound a great deal better and also puts me off this provider. 24-hours is almost synonymous with no warning in my book. How many contact attempts can reasonably be made in that time?

If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high.

If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and not checking emails as frequently (given - I assume - that many of Hetzner’s customers are individuals) or any other number of reasonable situations, you’ve effectively had no warning before service termination and deletion of data.

I don’t mind cloud providers acting on suspicious usage patterns or abuse reports but there has to be some kind of due process or it just ends up unnecessarily destroying goodwill in a brand/provider.

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

#66

Post by dinkblam »

janmo wrote: post #25
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…

When they receive a DMCA they will contact you and give you 24hours to reply and fix it. If you do not comply they will turn off your IP. However this is more related to EU regulation rather than Hetzner itself. Hosting things within the EU has become really tough.

> When they receive a DMCA they will contact you and give you 24hours to reply and fix it. If you do not comply they will turn off your IP.

they did NOT give any 24 hours.

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

#67

Post by unixhero »

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.

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

#68

Post by indigo945 »

rvz wrote: post #35

Unsuprising. The crypto validators in the past were the canaries in the coal mine for Hetzner and almost no-one cared when they were cancelled off of Hetzner. Now they terminated your servers and the same has happened to them. After all, Hetzner is now priotizing shareholder value and is removing smaller customers wasting their compute resources.

How do smaller customers "waste" Hetzner's compute resources? If anything, from Hetzner's point of view, smaller customers make more efficient use of those resources than bigger customers do -- because they pay more money for the same service!

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

#69

Post by weinzierl »

diggan wrote: post #14

Most of the times you hear people complaining about Hetzner shutting down someone's servers, it's because they were hosting content going against their ToC or similar. But this seems to be about Kiwix (which in short is "offline Wikipedia" in various ways) and doesn't seem to be about questionable content in any way. Eventually I guess we'll get Hetzner's perspective on this, as they tend to start writing publicly ab…

My experience is the opposite. They are completely deaf when it comes to reports about ToC violations. You need a lawyer to get them to take anything illegal down.

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

#70

Post by adriand »

aurareturn wrote: post #4

Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning? That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially for their customer.

> 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.

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