[SamWhited]

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.

[danjac]

They are great for throwaway hobbyist side projects where you don't want to worry about AWS billing horror stories or more expensive offerings like Digital Ocean or Linode.

I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.

[benterix]

I only use them for money-making projetcs. Based on my own experience and what I read online, you need to be careful with:

* crypto mining (I used it when it wasn't causing much trouble but I noticed my nodes were constantly attacked at a ratio I newer saw for other servers); IIRC Hetzner's current ToS forbid crypto mining

* things in legally grey area which might be legal in some places but not so in others, especially in the EU

* protect your servers well; if you become a victim of an attack and your servers will start attacking other, Hetzner will isolate them and notify you so that you can solve the problem

Other than that, the only problems I had in the last 15 or so years are failing bare-metal components that they promptly replaced, that's all.

[egorfine]

Their ToS forbids not just the crypto mining (that was extremely reasonable to ban ten years ago, but it's moot today) but also some arbitrary financial technologies they don't like.

So beware of their ToS.

[gosub100]

> but it's moot today

I disagree. It's not just the nuisance of wasted clock cycles. It also makes the network a juicy target for hackers. To anyone about to reply "you don't think people hack them now?", how do you think the correlation of attack sophistication and frequency looks for a network with/without a bunch of FREE MONEY inside? :)

[egorfine]

It's moot because it makes no sense to mine on CPU or even on an entry level GPU that Hetzner did provide at one point. You will make a couple of $/m.

Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.

So moot.

[spookie]

Is it really moot today given the current geopolitical landscape? I would assume not given they're based in Germany.

[egorfine]

It's moot because it makes no sense to mine on CPU or even on an entry level GPU that Hetzner did provide at one point. You will make a couple of $/m.

Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.

[cutemonster]

What's in place instead of mining, nowadays? Proof of stake or sth like that?

[throwaway2037]

    > also some arbitrary financial technologies they don't like

Such as?

[egorfine]

Such as storing, uploading, downloading and serving transactions in a specific particular way called blockchain or distributed ledger. They have also explicitly forbidden storing blockchain data on their servers and having anything auxiliary related to it.

It is obviously a hostile language created by lawyers who did not spend much time researching the subject.

Of course it's unenforceable in practice and that is why a hefty chunk of Ethereum nodes are hosted on Hetzner for years and years with no problems.

[movedx]

I've had the same experience with them and OVH. I've yet to try the other players in the market like Scaleway.

[sam_lowry_]

I would absolutely use Hetzner for a real money-on-the-table business. You just have to know what you are up to and do your cost-benefit analysis.

I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS.

At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work close to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.

And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.

I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.

P.S. Yes, that was before Hetzner Cloud became a thing )

[Cumpiler69]

>but they're cheap

Maybe they're cheap for a reason.

[marcosdumay]

Yes, and you have to put that in your cost-benefit analysis.

[SamWhited]

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

[ratg13]

I didn't default to them, but did start a new project on their infrastructure.

They deleted all of my data a month in due to not beleiving my name was real, and without even bothering to contact me to verify anything. They deleted my backups as well because I was dumb enough to keep them under the same account.

I learned a valuable lesson the hard way and have improved my methods as a result, but sad that it cost me an entire month's work due to carelessness and recklessness on their part.

Sure, it's "cheap for a reason", but let's not pretend like this type of expectation is advertised, especially as many on HN tout them as a drop-in replacement for competitors.

[SamWhited]

I had actually forgotten about this, I had a friend who had the exact same thing happen (dropped because "you have to use real names" or whatever, but they did use their real name, and it wasn't even anything suspicious or weird [not that that should matter], they just have a vaguely common for Eastern Europe sounding name :S)

[kopirgan]

Guess Mr. Phuc dat Bich from Hanoi needn't bother applying.

Wonder what's the algorithm they use to know a "real name"

[cutemonster]

Maybe if it does not sound funny in German, it's a real name?

[0cf8612b2e1e]

That feels like a preposterous automated policy. How would you design rules for what is a real name? At least, raise it for human review and some kind of manual validation before nuking an account.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> This happens literally all the time with Hetzner

[citation needed]. Even when they shut down Russian customers they gave advance warning. This is the first time I have heard of service being shut off (and data deleted) without any warning.

[Antitoxic6185]

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.

[kassner]

> ID proof to authorize your account outside EU

They do that even within EU, and even when your credit card passes 3D secure validation.

[attendant3446]

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).