[inigyou]

Yeah I've noticed that while America takes the approach of trying to keep your personal information secret, Europe takes the approach of requiring it to be shared around, but also protecting it with harsh laws for misuse. Things that are anonymous sign-up in America are KYC in Europe.

[ThePhysicist]

DigitalOcean simply does this at a later stage and will then just cut you off, Hetzner is doing it from the start. Their obligations aren't so different, they just approach this differently. It's the same thing with Stripe, it's cool that they just let you sign up and process transactions but at some point they will look at your business and if they don't like it they will just cut you off.

Also Hetzner really doesn't care much about individuals as far as I know, they mostly do business with other businesses and that's where the money is, their business is not designed to handle millions of individual users, DigitalOcean might also simply have a different strategy there.

[inigyou]

Hetzner is totally fine with individuals, they're probably sad to get less money but they don't care. Remember that in Germany a GmbH company costs $25,000, and if you're not a GmbH you're (in most cases) an individual sole trader.

They're also a bit picky with who they allow to sign up and they discriminate by country of origin. I had no problem being from a first world country with a passport, but I've heard the horror stories. If you're from Asia or Africa you may have an issue - if you have a registered business (even a sole tradership) in Europe, that would probably help convince them.