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Comment by samfriedman | Hacker News Reader

I'm always hearing good things about Hetzner and especially the value on their auction servers.

Tried buying one on the auction once, went through a whole rigamarole to confirm my identity, send them ID pics, etc. In the end they decided to cancel the order due to "suspicious activity". I was baffled by that as we hadn't had any conversation besides sending them the order info & credentials. I assumed it was a weird false positive... wonder if I should try again sometime.

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I don't remember providing them with ID but I've been a customer for a long time, maybe it's a recent requirement. It's worth opening a dialog with them if you're having issues - you'll be conversing with a real person and they can probably be persuaded.

about 5 years ago had to give them a scan of my passport

A couple of months ago I purchased a VPS from them. They also required ID (passport) to verify identity, but what was surprising that they suggested using their gpg keys to encrypt the image before sending.

Their argument is, that requiring an ID has solved most of the fraud problems.

They lost my business when they required a passport. Like hell I'm showing you that. If they wanna see my face they can look up my name on social media.

They don't want to see your face they want to see official papers proving you to be a unique person.

I don't see any advantage over using SSL (especially if they serve the public key on the same website)

Basically you only need to go through their ID hassle once when you submit the first order on an account, at least that's been my experience. After that it's generally entirely painless to order further servers.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Went through the passport routine, got approved, started mucking about. At one point, as part of experimenting, I deleted a VPS which happened to be the last one remaining. And bang! Account closed for lack of active instances. So I went elsewhere, and have been the ever since.

Elsewhere highly recommended, by the way:

https://lunanode.com/

They deactivate accounts after a couple of months without activity but can be easily reactivated (I went through this earlier this year after having been inactive for multiple years)

Weird. I got a server some months ago and I didn't do anything to confirm my identity. Maybe it was because I was getting a cheapo bidding server, which is only 25 euros a month.

They requested me in an email to confirm my identity, i sent them requested IDs and never heard back from them.

Is this ID verification some European/German regulation?

No.

I assumed it was a security measure to prevent spammers, botnetters, etc. from buying server time via fraudulent means.

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