[Fornax96]

So, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this announcement has extremely suspicious timing.

You see, I host a cloud storage service on Hetzner. I have 12 PETABYTES of user data stored there. The data is spread over 120 of their SX type storage servers. Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason. I have repeatedly been asking about the reason of this sudden closure, but they won't tell me. Meanwhile I have a huge problem, because I need to move 12 PB to a different hosting provider, and they only gave me until the end of November. That's an almost impossible deadline for setting up such a large storage cluster. Especially considering that Hetzner's 1 Gbps port speed makes it impossible to transfer the data in less than three weeks.

Don't trust Hetzner, guys. They screwed me over real bad here, and it seems like they will be taking the hardware that I have been renting there for 10 years for themselves now. This is incredibly scummy behaviour.

[the_biot]

> extremely suspicious timing.

I've been wondering for well over a decade why Hetzner didn't get its ass in gear and start offering AWS-like services. Instead all they've offered for years is remote control of VMs. Even now, this new S3 offering is very little, very late -- 18 years after Amazon first offered it and took off like a rocket.

The only odd thing about the timing here is what was keeping them.

[hobofan]

> I've been wondering for well over a decade why Hetzner didn't get its ass in gear and start offering AWS-like services.

Because unlike the hyperscalers, they are not natively a software company but a sysadmin company.

[ac29]

> Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason.

Frankly, your service looks a bit suspicious (free and cheap file sharing). You seem to be aware of the potential for abuse - your DMCA/abuse page even says there are a "large number of abuse reports pixeldrain receives every day".

It sucks that Hetzner is closing your account. But, they are known to be pretty conservative and your users have almost certainly violated their T&C many times even if you are making a good faith effort to prevent and respond to abuse.

[Fornax96]

I have not used Hetzner to serve user facing traffic for many years. Users never connect directly to the storage servers, it's all going through custom caching nodes hosted by a different provider. That shields the hetzner servers from all abuse and also reduces traffic by about 75%. There is no risk for hetzner here.

I concede that my service has been abused a lot. I am working very hard to clean up my act. I have been implementing better content moderation, content scanning and streamlining my dmca handling process. If hetzner has a problem with any of that they should have just contacted me instead of pulling the plug like this. Very unreliable company.

[lossolo]

You must have done something really wrong if they don’t even want to resolve this with you. Normally, you would receive an abuse notice from them — we did many times with one of the services I worked on. I guess your service is somehow connected to other Hetzner servers (not storage), or you are somehow leaking Hetzner IPs. Your servers were probably used to host CSAM or similar content, which is likely why they don’t want to communicate with you. Someone must have reported this to them.

[tempaccount420]

Maybe his servers were causing paranormal activities in the Hetzner office. Probably, right

[coolspot]

I suspect that what is happening here is that Hetzner received a lot of orders for storage node snapshots and/or evidence preservation from law enforcement (you probably won’t even be notified).

[ahofmann]

So you're paying them between €15,000 (€124 * 120 servers, hetzners cheapest sx server) and over €30,000 per month, and you really believe they sit in their little office trying to find servers of already paying customers, just to snatch them and host their own S3 service? This doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory to me; it sounds more like a serious case of megalomania.

That they don't communicate well with you really sucks, and I will read your blog post. But please stay on the sane side of reasoning.

[Fornax96]

My monthly Hetzner bill is around €15000. I have been a customer at Hetzner for nearly 10 years. In the beginning I served traffic directly from Hetzner servers, but 4 years ago I switched to a caching system hosted at a different provider. Since then I have not received any copyright claims through Hetzner.

I can't think of a reason to cancel my account except that they want to free up resources for their own storage service. I am using a lot of disks and bandwidth. They might have been looking for a reason to kick me out and the launch of their own storage service could have been the final straw.

Keep in mind that the account cancellation mail arrived almost exactly one week before this announcement. They are keeping their lips tight about the reason of my account cancellation so I can only speculate.

[V__]

Have you tried calling them? Could it be linked to pixeldrain and some illegal files which were uploaded and they simply don't want to take the risk?

[Fornax96]

I'm currently on vacation with bad cell reception. I tried calling but it didn't come through. Will try again when I get back.

Hetzner does not host user facing servers for me. It's all behind caching nodes which are hosted by a different company. Hetzner would not know what is hosted on pixeldrain.

[V__]

Hope you get it sorted and would be interested in a follow up. Double check your contract regarding cancelation periods and maybe get a lawyer if nothing else works to get an extension on your period.

[Jamie9912]

>Hetzner's 1 Gbps port speed makes it impossible to transfer the data in less than three weeks

But don't you have that spread over 120 servers?

[Fornax96]

Each server has a 1 Gbps connection. Some servers are storing more than average, some have 160 TB. That's already 2 weeks at full line rate. But I also need to keep serving user traffic. I can't take the site offline for a month for a data migration, that would completely kill my business.

[PaywallBuster]

I'm guessing you're banned because you have such amounts of data/servers and push a substantial amount of bandwidth under the free "1gbps" card for each (even if the cache layer handles most requests directly)

perharps if you moved all servers to 10G and payed for the egress over 20Tb they would reconsider your account?

They still unreliable pulling stuff like this but difficult to find these hardware options off the shelf, ready for order, at this rpice

[Fornax96]

> perharps if you moved all servers to 10G and payed for the egress over 20Tb they would reconsider your account?

I considered that and even suggested it to them, but they ignore all my remarks and keep repeating that I have two months to leave.

[slig]

That's terrible. Please consider documenting everything and blogging about this later on.

[Fornax96]

I will, and when it's done it will definitely appear on this forum. But in the meantime I have to focus on cleaning this mess up.

[Moru]

Thanks for the warning, was just about to start moving there.

[rrauch]

As someone who has used Hetzner in one form or another for close to two decades, I frankly find this behaviour shocking.

Besides the normal support channels, try reaching out on their subreddit and also post in the customer forum - to make this more public.

If they don't want your business, fine. But giving you only a couple of weeks to move 12 PB is unreasonable.

[phantompeace]

Holy shit, you wrote pixeldrain? FYI (and I’m sure you’re very much aware), every single time I’ve come across your site, it’s always been via DDL/warez sites. I feel like you’re in a tough spot with this but I wish you all the best! I would love to read any write ups if you’ve published any!