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Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

> I’m living in Germany, so the obvious choice was to spin up my instances in Vultr‘s* data center in Frankfurt, as ping is the lowest to that center for me.

The author is probably aware of this, but just in case they aren't: Hetzner is an amazing company with two or three datacenters in Germany. I don't remember if any of them are in Frankfurt, but given they offer VPSs and beefy dedicated machines, I'd be fine trading a couple milliseconds for this flexibility (and overall better pricing, even if Vultr's isn't that expensive as well).

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I'm running a few bare-metal Hetzner servers (Falkenstein and Helsinki). Can recommend. Reliable, comparatively cheap and tickets are usually responded to within 24 hours. One time I even got through to the guy swapping defective hard drives on one of the servers in the data center by phone, since there was some other issue.

I would say that hosting in a German datacenter owned by a German company is the worst way to get complete exposure to the ham-handed and completely out-of-control German intelligence apparatus. Maybe being a German citizen protects you slightly from the BND, in the same way that the NSA technically doesn't spy on Americans, but I doubt it.

It does seem like a "Hetzner Storage Box" would provide a lot more storage for the money: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

I don't know what qualifies as "amazing company" in your eyes (they're certainly cheap for what you get), but my experience was certainly very bad:

I rented a VPS from them experimentally for a month, then left to go on vacation thinking I had cancelled it, but I had not. They left it running for another month that I hadn't paid for, and then sent the bill for the extra month to collections, so that's presumably affecting my credit score now.

Sending a bill for a recurring service to collections rather than just canceling the service is trash-tier company behavior, IMO. I strongly recommend against using Hetzner.

I can see why that's a bad experience for you, but IMO Hetzner did the right thing here.

What if I forget to pay my AWS bill for a week and, because of that, all my resources get deleted? IIRC AWS will inactivate your account after 3 months without payment, so the same thing would've happened there. 3 months is a nice trade off between "forgot to pay my bills" and "no longer use the service".

ETA: for sure it sucks they sent the bill to collection. Uncalled for, they could've attempted to settle directly with you first.

Agreed. Hetzner is very strict about not leaving a penny of theirs wasted/delayed without compensation. I know a couple friends here in Turkey who were contacted by a local collection agency for late settlement and were brought up with legal proceeding if they're not settling it soon. Aware of this, I started to never ever /forget/ about paying any of my bills on time.

I think that’s what the process is training all of us to do, right?

You had a contract with them. Just by simply not paying the fee does not mean canceling the contract usually. Which I am grateful.

I had a more positive experience with Hetzner, and would recommend them. They do indeed default to Frankfurt DC.

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