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also negative experiences here. if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down imme

also negative experiences here. if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down immediately and ask you to respond. obviously thats not a sane course of action and i cannot recommend using them for any kind of production systems. i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted.

anonzzzies 2y ago
We always get a warning.
hk__2 2y ago
> if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down immediately and ask you to respond That’s not my experience. We get these emails about once every 6 months, we act and respond, and they don’t take anything down.
theshrike79 2y ago
"Hetzner" isn't a monolith. I have a feeling these things depend on which country your servers are in. f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s
- diggan 2y ago
  > f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s Aren't you confusing Hetzner Cloud with Hetzner Robot (dedicated servers) here? AFAIK, Cloud has egress costs while Robot is usually unmetered.
trilbyglens 2y ago
Tbh this is the most German shit. Germany has borderline neurotic copyright laws, so likely they are doing this to cover their asses legally. Still insane that they don't even notify you!!
Risse 2y ago
Not my experience as well. They have previously given me 24 hours to respond, or they will remove the server.
- SirensOfTitan 2y ago
  That’s hardly any better.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  Yikes. That's just about as scary.
- ratg13 2y ago
  My experience was getting the "you have 24 hours" to respond e-mail, and contacting them within 20 minutes, only to be passed around a phone system to be finally told, sorry everything has been deleted. They offered to "recover" the account, which was basically just an account shell with my info. All of the assets and backups had been permanently erased.
janmo 2y ago
When they receive a DMCA they will contact you and give you 24hours to reply and fix it. If you do not comply they will turn off your IP. However this is more related to EU regulation rather than Hetzner itself. Hosting things within the EU has become really tough.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Hosting things within the EU has become really tough. I, as a European, using mostly dedicated servers within the EU (including Hetzner) haven't noticed this at all. What are you referring to specifically? Some "use cases" like building marketing profiles and alike certainly has gotten harder, but that's a feature so I'm guessing you're not referring to that. I don't think general "hosting things" has become any harder than before, assuming you're not trying to slurp up as much data as possible.
- jeltz 2y ago
  Which EU regulation? I don't know of any relevant to this. Only American law.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    It's German not EU level, the NetzDG act has a 24 hour turnaround time for taking down content that is "clearly" illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act Unfortunately the act is designed to block vague categories like "hate speech" and "misinformation" and has huge fines attached, so it's designed to ensure that very trigger-happy enforcement is the only workable strategy. It was written to whack Facebook and Google primarily but it's possible that the wording also captures Hetzner, or they're worried that it might. If they do feel they fall under it then they'd probably have to automate takedowns in response to abuse reports. As otherwise they'd need 24/7 on-call content reviewers, which goes against their low cost nature. So if this is the cause it's really an issue with German law being unfriendly to smaller/cheaper content hosters.
    - jkaplowitz 2y ago
throwaway290 2y ago
DMCA safe harbor means you don't get sued for posting copyrighted content. But in return it means you get a notice you gotta take things down. If you don't take it down then it goes down the infra. You can take down a post but your hoster can't. But they can take down your server. And they must or they get fines/jail. And so they will. Now we need to know the full story. Did you have a public DMCA takedown link and actually handle requests and the complainers just ignored that and went over your head to Herzner? or did you just wing it running a server with UGC thinking it's surely gonna be OK? I am not saying you were wrong but you only tell a small part of the story
diggan 2y ago
> i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted. Is it possible that maybe others had a different experience than you, and those experiences are as valid as your own? Besides, what was your website about? I've received notices I had to reply to within 24-hours, otherwise they delete the servers. But I've always replied and complied, so never had any servers deleted.
- bww 2y ago
  Interesting, and this kind of service seems fine to you? It doesn’t seem fine to me. Even if most people will have no problem with them, I’d say that knowing how a company handles edge cases like this is much more valuable than knowing how the handle things when everything is fine.
- tailspin2019 2y ago
  Your experience doesn’t sound a great deal better and also puts me off this provider. 24-hours is almost synonymous with no warning in my book. How many contact attempts can reasonably be made in that time? If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and not checking emails as frequently (given - I assume - that many of Hetzner’s customers are individuals) or any other number of reasonable situations, you’ve effectively had no warning before service termination and deletion of data. I don’t mind cloud providers acting on suspicious usage patterns or abuse reports but there has to be some kind of due process or it just ends up unnecessarily destroying goodwill in a brand/provider.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    >If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc. I know one company with a very good manager and I think they would have managed it with 5 people being in the group of people who would handle this kind of thing (keeping track of all services etc. Obviously only 1-2 person does this but redundancy so it falls back when they are on vacation), slightly over 30 people in company size altogether. If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.
CryptoBanker 2y ago
In my experience they usually give a 48 or 72 hour period for the customer to respond before they take action on something like that. They are exceptionally fast at detecting things like that though.

anonzzzies 2y ago

We always get a warning.

hk__2 2y ago

> if they get a copyright-violation request from someone, they won't contact you about it. they'll just take your server down immediately and ask you to respond That’s not my experience. We get these emails about once every 6 months, we act and respond, and they don’t take anything down.

theshrike79 2y ago

"Hetzner" isn't a monolith. I have a feeling these things depend on which country your servers are in. f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s

diggan 2y ago
> f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s Aren't you confusing Hetzner Cloud with Hetzner Robot (dedicated servers) here? AFAIK, Cloud has egress costs while Robot is usually unmetered.

trilbyglens 2y ago

Tbh this is the most German shit. Germany has borderline neurotic copyright laws, so likely they are doing this to cover their asses legally. Still insane that they don't even notify you!!

Risse 2y ago

Not my experience as well. They have previously given me 24 hours to respond, or they will remove the server.

SirensOfTitan 2y ago
That’s hardly any better.
JohnBooty 2y ago
Yikes. That's just about as scary.
ratg13 2y ago
My experience was getting the "you have 24 hours" to respond e-mail, and contacting them within 20 minutes, only to be passed around a phone system to be finally told, sorry everything has been deleted. They offered to "recover" the account, which was basically just an account shell with my info. All of the assets and backups had been permanently erased.

janmo 2y ago

When they receive a DMCA they will contact you and give you 24hours to reply and fix it. If you do not comply they will turn off your IP. However this is more related to EU regulation rather than Hetzner itself. Hosting things within the EU has become really tough.

diggan 2y ago
> Hosting things within the EU has become really tough. I, as a European, using mostly dedicated servers within the EU (including Hetzner) haven't noticed this at all. What are you referring to specifically? Some "use cases" like building marketing profiles and alike certainly has gotten harder, but that's a feature so I'm guessing you're not referring to that. I don't think general "hosting things" has become any harder than before, assuming you're not trying to slurp up as much data as possible.
jeltz 2y ago
Which EU regulation? I don't know of any relevant to this. Only American law.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It's German not EU level, the NetzDG act has a 24 hour turnaround time for taking down content that is "clearly" illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act Unfortunately the act is designed to block vague categories like "hate speech" and "misinformation" and has huge fines attached, so it's designed to ensure that very trigger-happy enforcement is the only workable strategy. It was written to whack Facebook and Google primarily but it's possible that the wording also captures Hetzner, or they're worried that it might. If they do feel they fall under it then they'd probably have to automate takedowns in response to abuse reports. As otherwise they'd need 24/7 on-call content reviewers, which goes against their low cost nature. So if this is the cause it's really an issue with German law being unfriendly to smaller/cheaper content hosters.
  - jkaplowitz 2y ago

throwaway290 2y ago

DMCA safe harbor means you don't get sued for posting copyrighted content. But in return it means you get a notice you gotta take things down. If you don't take it down then it goes down the infra. You can take down a post but your hoster can't. But they can take down your server. And they must or they get fines/jail. And so they will. Now we need to know the full story. Did you have a public DMCA takedown link and actually handle requests and the complainers just ignored that and went over your head to Herzner? or did you just wing it running a server with UGC thinking it's surely gonna be OK? I am not saying you were wrong but you only tell a small part of the story

diggan 2y ago

> i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted. Is it possible that maybe others had a different experience than you, and those experiences are as valid as your own? Besides, what was your website about? I've received notices I had to reply to within 24-hours, otherwise they delete the servers. But I've always replied and complied, so never had any servers deleted.

bww 2y ago
Interesting, and this kind of service seems fine to you? It doesn’t seem fine to me. Even if most people will have no problem with them, I’d say that knowing how a company handles edge cases like this is much more valuable than knowing how the handle things when everything is fine.
tailspin2019 2y ago
Your experience doesn’t sound a great deal better and also puts me off this provider. 24-hours is almost synonymous with no warning in my book. How many contact attempts can reasonably be made in that time? If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and not checking emails as frequently (given - I assume - that many of Hetzner’s customers are individuals) or any other number of reasonable situations, you’ve effectively had no warning before service termination and deletion of data. I don’t mind cloud providers acting on suspicious usage patterns or abuse reports but there has to be some kind of due process or it just ends up unnecessarily destroying goodwill in a brand/provider.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  >If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high. What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc. I know one company with a very good manager and I think they would have managed it with 5 people being in the group of people who would handle this kind of thing (keeping track of all services etc. Obviously only 1-2 person does this but redundancy so it falls back when they are on vacation), slightly over 30 people in company size altogether. If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.

CryptoBanker 2y ago

In my experience they usually give a 48 or 72 hour period for the customer to respond before they take action on something like that. They are exceptionally fast at detecting things like that though.