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One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you

One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner. Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc. Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too. Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.

tuetuopay 11mo ago
> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card > That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner. In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer. You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable. So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel. As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
  Fascinating stuff, I really appreciate the high quality comment you have sent to me which I really appreciate I just wanted to inquire about something which wasn't related to my account itself per se. So I think that one of the things which can be done by hetzner in this context is atleast having a community where people can talk to them (similar to scaleway's slack) I am kind of involving myself in such a community so I have a lot of questions to ask and just having acquaintances involved in such industry. Is there any way that I can be able to contact you if I have more queries about this industry in general?
  - everfrustrated 11mo ago
    In the EU a ton of laws, legal complexity and costs kick in if you start having a forum (social media). Having a closed forum helps a lot to avoid this.
    - Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
      Fascinating, I didn't know that, thank you! Basically I dread the wall of email support sometimes because its too exhausting, assumes I am a company myself, assumes I must have a website, assumes I have a role at said supposed company. Also I do not know in how many hours they might respond, Have they even read my message etc. having something like telegram,matrix etc. can help but also at that point, I wonder if they all use email, can something like delta.chat be used to provide an instant experience to the email experience? What are your thoughts on this, I am genuinely curious if delta.chat can provide a meaningful improvement over email because I dread having to open all of these things and then fear getting ghosted or fear that I would be able to explain myself only in a few messages worth of time maybe answering them to their questions,asking them questions etc. (I hope it may make sense)
      - tuetuopay 11mo ago
        You can get ghosted on IM too. Just ask anyone on tinder lol. The downside of IM like Telegram or Matrix or Slack is that it's a broadcast bottle-in-the-sea way of communication. It's everyone's job to answer there, thus it's no one's job to answer there. OTOH contact mail boxes are often direct at people whose job is to read it.
Hetzner_OL 11mo ago
Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this. We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms. The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions. The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location. There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
  Very interesting, thank you for your response Katie. I might do the support-form request but since you are here, I think I am comfortable enough asking it in the public too and I don't mind it as this might be the best way But imagine if a PAAS (platform as a service, well technically its still just an idea which can take a long time to work but just a theory but yes), wants to build on top of hetzner, I am extremely worried that since hetzner has a very strict abuse policy, they might not understand PAAS use case which can include some abuse from downstream lets say and might block my account impacting all the other PAAS solutions. I wish if there was a way that some time could be given lets say 24-48 hours for the product lets say to work with abuse as I am just a single guy but I haven't coded the implementation mostly, quite frankly wanting to building upon hetzner but worried that It can fail due to any misunderstanding etc. What are hetzner's opinion on platform as a service basically, I see some people using hetzner as providers but can hetzner understand the thing which I am saying basically and can it still be the right tool for the job essentially?

tuetuopay 11mo ago

> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card > That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner. In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer. You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable. So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel. As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
Fascinating stuff, I really appreciate the high quality comment you have sent to me which I really appreciate I just wanted to inquire about something which wasn't related to my account itself per se. So I think that one of the things which can be done by hetzner in this context is atleast having a community where people can talk to them (similar to scaleway's slack) I am kind of involving myself in such a community so I have a lot of questions to ask and just having acquaintances involved in such industry. Is there any way that I can be able to contact you if I have more queries about this industry in general?
- everfrustrated 11mo ago
  In the EU a ton of laws, legal complexity and costs kick in if you start having a forum (social media). Having a closed forum helps a lot to avoid this.
  - Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
    Fascinating, I didn't know that, thank you! Basically I dread the wall of email support sometimes because its too exhausting, assumes I am a company myself, assumes I must have a website, assumes I have a role at said supposed company. Also I do not know in how many hours they might respond, Have they even read my message etc. having something like telegram,matrix etc. can help but also at that point, I wonder if they all use email, can something like delta.chat be used to provide an instant experience to the email experience? What are your thoughts on this, I am genuinely curious if delta.chat can provide a meaningful improvement over email because I dread having to open all of these things and then fear getting ghosted or fear that I would be able to explain myself only in a few messages worth of time maybe answering them to their questions,asking them questions etc. (I hope it may make sense)
    - tuetuopay 11mo ago
      You can get ghosted on IM too. Just ask anyone on tinder lol. The downside of IM like Telegram or Matrix or Slack is that it's a broadcast bottle-in-the-sea way of communication. It's everyone's job to answer there, thus it's no one's job to answer there. OTOH contact mail boxes are often direct at people whose job is to read it.

Hetzner_OL 11mo ago

Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this. We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms. The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions. The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location. There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
Very interesting, thank you for your response Katie. I might do the support-form request but since you are here, I think I am comfortable enough asking it in the public too and I don't mind it as this might be the best way But imagine if a PAAS (platform as a service, well technically its still just an idea which can take a long time to work but just a theory but yes), wants to build on top of hetzner, I am extremely worried that since hetzner has a very strict abuse policy, they might not understand PAAS use case which can include some abuse from downstream lets say and might block my account impacting all the other PAAS solutions. I wish if there was a way that some time could be given lets say 24-48 hours for the product lets say to work with abuse as I am just a single guy but I haven't coded the implementation mostly, quite frankly wanting to building upon hetzner but worried that It can fail due to any misunderstanding etc. What are hetzner's opinion on platform as a service basically, I see some people using hetzner as providers but can hetzner understand the thing which I am saying basically and can it still be the right tool for the job essentially?