Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.
Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware.
On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.
Single machines die (and can't be started again for a few minutes to hours) every few months, but that's acceptable for me, and we also similar things happen at AWS.
I do. I just rent 2 computers from Hetzner. One is main another is failover. If main dies failover kicks in while main is restored on another computer. Still way way cheaper than AWS which I would not touch with wooden pole unless required by client.
They were hosting a StackOverflow copy, which is OK because of Creative Commons. All my answers were still under my name as it should be.
The only difference to the original was my profile picture, which was an explicit porn image.
For several weeks everyone searching for my name or my StackOverflow answers saw that. I'm glad that I was not looking for a job at the time.
I exhausted all possibilities on all channels to rectify this situation short of using a lawyer.
I put a lot of effort into getting things in order and seriously considered going the legal route but ultimately decided against it mainly because courts are hit and miss here when it comes to reputation damage of regular individuals as opposed to companies or celebrities.
EDIT: I should have answered your question how this is Hetzner's fault more directly. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed.
Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.
Hi there, would you mind giving me the abuse ID for this case. (When someone creates an abuse report with us, our confirmation email includes an abuse ID in the subject line.) If you still have that, and you would like me to ask a colleague about this case, please let me know.
--Katie, Hetzner Online