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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"

#81

Post by blenderob »

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #63
nottorp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With these kinds of things on the rise, I'm sure "not driven by AI" is going to be a unique selling point, soon enough. Right? Or is this just wishful thinking?

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

#82

Post by diggan »

weinzierl wrote: post #69
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.

That's an interesting perspective for sure, thanks for sharing that.

On one hand you have these comments in this submission, saying Hetzner is too trigger-happy and takes down things too quickly. On the other hand, you have people like you using the process from the other side who feel like nothing is being done and it takes forever to get through them when needed.

I feel like it's very hard to have a balanced perspective unless you have experience of both sides of the process, which unfortunately I'm guessing most people are missing. I certainly am, as I've never tried to get someone else's servers taken down on Hetzner, so I have no idea how that process works, I've only ever been on the receiving side.

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

#83

Post by InsideOutSanta »

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.

It might be more related to German regulation than to EU regulation. Germany has some pretty strict laws related to speech, for example. My understanding is that Kiwix mirrored Wikipedia data on Hetzner's servers, and I'm almost 100% sure that Wikipedia contains things that are completely fine in the US, but technically illegal in Germany.

I have no idea if that was the reason, though.

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

#84

Post by ivan_gammel »

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.

Did you try to send them 20€ and request refund of excessive amount?

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

#85

Post by diggan »

theshrike79 wrote: post #15
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…

"Hetzner" isn't a monolith. I have a feeling these things depend on which country your servers are in. f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s

> f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s

Aren't you confusing Hetzner Cloud with Hetzner Robot (dedicated servers) here? AFAIK, Cloud has egress costs while Robot is usually unmetered.

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

#86

Post by diggan »

maccard wrote: post #73
diggan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it's 13:00 on a Monday in Berlin, customer support/PR department just got started and are working through the weekend backlog, haven't had time yet to respond in any reasonable way.

If you terminate accounts on/over a weekend, you should have support staff over the weekend.

I didn't mean to imply there is no customer support on weekends, but usually you have a weekend crew that is a lot smaller than the typical work-week crew, so there are still things to catch up on after a weekend, even with crew working weekends.

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

#87

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #65
diggan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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.

What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc.

I know one company with a very good manager and I think they would have managed it with 5 people being in the group of people who would handle this kind of thing (keeping track of all services etc. Obviously only 1-2 person does this but redundancy so it falls back when they are on vacation), slightly over 30 people in company size altogether.

If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.

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

#88

Post by JohnBooty »

SamWhited wrote: post #51
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…

"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…

    Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, 
    because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images
Wait, what? Yikes. I'm planning a project like that. Do you have a link to more information?

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

#89

Post by digital_voodoo »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #84
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.

Did you try to send them 20€ and request refund of excessive amount?

A customer shouldn't be the one going through such hops in order to "satisfy" a provider who can't bother to accept a widely used mean of payment

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

#90

Post by OutOfHere »

I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone wrt Hetzner. Users have repeatedly warned that Hetzner terminates accounts of clients that they do not like. Hetzner does this without warning, even having the audacity to send you a bill thereafter.

As an example, you run any crypto related operation, even if it's a mere 5% of your workload, you will have this happen to you. You don't even have to be hosting anything at all.

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