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Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning? That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially f

• 71bw 2y ago
  >Both for Hetzner’s reputation For what now?
• nevi-me 2y ago
  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).
• SamWhited 2y ago
  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.
  • Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >but they're cheap Maybe they're cheap for a reason.
    • SamWhited 2y ago
      Indeed; no one ever seems to consider that before defaulting to them though :(
      • ratg13 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          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)
          • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
            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.
          • kopirgan 2y ago
            Guess Mr. Phuc dat Bich from Hanoi needn't bother applying. Wonder what's the algorithm they use to know a "real name"
            • cutemonster 2y ago
              Maybe if it does not sound funny in German, it's a real name?
              • 2y ago
    • ffsm8 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 2y ago
        Ok, but please post informative comments rather than putting others down. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      Yes, and you have to put that in your cost-benefit analysis.
  • danjac 2y ago
    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.
    • sam_lowry_ 2y ago
      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 )
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • benterix 2y ago
      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.
      • 2y ago
  • Antitoxic6185 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
        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).
  • the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    > 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.
• sznio 2y ago
  Only reputation Hetzner has is "cheap".
  • daneel_w 2y ago
    They're working hard on "volatile", too.
• raverbashing 2y ago
  Honestly as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU
  • Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >German companies are awful at customer service. 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.
• adriand 2y ago
  > Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning? That’s what the post said. But of course we have no idea if it’s true or not. No evidence was provided, and we are only hearing one side of the story.
  • jeromegv 2y ago
    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.
    • adriand 2y ago
      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?
• dilyevsky 2y ago
  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.