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.
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.
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.
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.
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? :)
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.
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 )
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
No evidence was provided also because they did not send any email or offer any kind of statement,, pdf, anything, to explain what they did. It was a purely silent delete.
And in that hackernews thread we have dozens of people relating similar stories.
But the thread says, “When reached, they could not explain the reason for the cancellation:
Them: - We sent you an email.
Us : -We did not receive it, can you please resend?
Them: - We can't”
Was that on a phone call? Because if not, surely there is some record?
I'm going to review my backup strategy these holidays, and look at how much downtime my services would incur if Hetzner shuts me down.
The reality that they have this power, and that they'd delete data irretrievably, scares me.
Last year I had a misconfigured port on a Docker service, and someone was able to exploit it and run a port scanner.
It was during a period that I was away from home, so if I hadn't seen their service abuse emails in time, I could have returned home after a few days to find all my data wiped out (or uptime monitors complaining).
True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany.
Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you loose once, but if 80 of the 100 customers you scammed don't sue you or don't win, then you're still at a net positive and therefore it's profitable to keep doing that.
Also that Germany doesn't have common law, so lawsuits aren't arbitrated based on precedent, so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law that minimizes their risk of loosing by slam dunk every time. Also, some German judges art just tech illiterate boomers who will throw out a case they don't even understand unless you're Axel Springer.
(some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.
Secondly, Germans aren't used to being very demanding and lighting a brand on fire on social media the way Americans/Anglophones do on Twitter when they don't like something, partly because of cultural reasons where making a fuss in public is discouraged/shamed, partly because of legal reasons where a company can sue your or at least send you scary legal letters for libel if you damage their brand online like that in Germany. Or at lest, the company can simply demand the social media platform take down the offending posts, and by German law they have to comply which the likes of Google/Meta will comply automatically without any arbitration.
Also, culturally, the conservative Germans seem to have have gaslit themselves into believing everything "Made in Germany" is perfect without fault, while everything made abroad is of poor quality or at least worthy of scrutiny, so they just default to using German products without looking across the fence to check out the foreign competition. This way of thinking is more typical of manufactured goods but not sure how much it applies to SW products and services.
Couple these with the difficulty of starting and scaling a business in Germany as a small entrepreneur and with the legal and bureaucratic hoops designed to keep foreign competitors out, mean that German companies operating in Germany who became established players, have litte incentive to improve beyond the bare minimum, so they can keep providing poor quality services while still staying in business. It's classic of an economy of well connected dinosaurs sitting on old money.
> [...] so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law
This is factually false.
> (some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.
Any examples here? The fact that contracts like these, if you forgot to cancel them, can only renew for one month is better than anything I've seen anywhere else. Also that you must be able to cancel anything online with the click of a button if the contract was made online. Add that to the fact that any clause is worthless if it includes something a reasonable person wouldn't expect. I don't know many countries that actually enforce this - Germany does all the time.
That's true in probably every jurisdiction, though? At least in Germany you can often get free legal advice for many things (Verbraucherschutz, Mietrechtsberatung etc.) and there's insurance you can buy that covers your legal fees in case you lose. And legal fees in Germany are typically not exorbitant.
(Also in some cases, it's the other way around. If your landlord wants to increase the rent it's on them to sue you if they have a valid case.)
Legal advice and reality in Germany are 2 different things. The truth is that dealing with any kind of legal situation in Germany is a huge headache and all you get in the end is to prove you are right and get what should be yours anyway, without any additional compensation for your trouble. And many companies use this to abuse the system. The landlord can steal a small part of your deposit, you can only sue. But nobody's going to go through this hell for, say, €100, so the landlord gets to keep €100. Of course you can sue, but it will cost you a lot more than 100€ (even with insurance there is usually a deductible of 300€+) and it will take at least a year. And pretty much everything works this way.
In theory. But if the landlord is hiding (or, more accurately, if the bailiffs don't do their job), you end up paying for everything. But good news! The court order is valid for 30 years, so you might get it all back in the end (probably not).
Initial contract terms can be longer (up to 24 months) and as the site points out, the new rules only apply to new contracts, others can be up to annual.
Thanks for the link, and as I suspected, it is a very recent thing
> Regulations for fairer consumer contracts are on the 1. March 2022 came into force and ensure that you can terminate automatic contract renewals for contracts for regular goods deliveries and services (such as streaming services or magazine subscriptions) more quickly.
> In addition, the 1st was founded. July 2022 a termination button duty introduced to simplify termination processes.
> partly because of legal reasons where a company can sue your or at least send you scary legal letters for libel if you damage their brand online like that in Germany. Or at lest, the company can simply demand the social media platform take down the offending posts, and by German law they have to comply which the likes of Google/Meta will comply automatically without any arbitration.
I had Google take down my (negative but factual) review of a restaurant because of apparent "libel". There was basically no recourse (except "you can file a complaint but we'll probably ignore it"). I guess that explains why there are so many bad top rated restaurants.
> Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax
I have the opposite perception. Most of the customer-screwing business practices I constantly see in other countries don't exist in Germany, because nobody even dares trying them.
There is a huge amount of protection for renters, a lot of things are simply illegal to put into the rental agreement and are automatically void. I really have no idea what you're talking about here.
Oh, and there are SCHUFA and debt collectors. Let's say a clause is invalid, but they gave you a bill with a due date. You can't ignore it or you'll get a bad SCHUFA or someone from a debt collection agency will knock on your door. This happened to a friend of mine recently ;( Then it's again your problem to prove that you are right. And it's once again a bureaucratic hell.
What if it's money you've already paid that someone won't give you back (while free or paid legal advisers tell you you're right)? It all ends with "you have to go to court". Yes, there is a chance that the other side will settle out of court. But usually they don't because going to court is a very expensive and long process and they don't think you'll do it (and most don't). And then it's just endless bureaucratic hell.
And if it's about the apartment, you've probably paid a deposit. And if you ignore some of the clauses, they will probably try to get back at you and punish you by not returning the deposit (or part of it). From here - GOTO 1 ;(
In which country is any of this different? Yes, if somebody is trying to scam you you may have to be prepared to go to court. I don't understand how else you're expecting a legal system to work.
But you keep insisting that there are rules to protect you. That's not true at all. Yes, there are rules, but you always have to prove that you are right/not guilty. In Germany the system is that you are guilty until proven innocent. You always have to prove that there's a regulation that proves you're right/not guilty, not the other way around. And you can't just ignore some clauses just because you think (or some legal advice tells you) you're right. You'll just end up with a lot of problems.
I've already given you many examples of how the system doesn't work in your favour by default, all the things that have happened to me or people I know in recent years. But if you want to believe in a "great" German system - that's your choice.
> Or simply because the alternative is being homeless?
As I already mentioned, you can simply sign a contract and then proceed to ignore all the illegal clauses. They're not binding.
> And why should the default for foreigners be getting screwed?
People getting screwed because of them not knowing their rights is basically something that can happen in every legal system, and if people come from other countries without certain legal protections, they're more likely to not know about them. That's just a reality of life.
Yep, this is common with Hetzner and has been the case since forever. Unfortunately all the comments even suggesting that Hetzner is not good for running serious scaled businesses for this reason and many others usually get downvoted to oblivion and remain hidden.
That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially for their customer.