Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

Personally I don't trust anything that I don't self-host. With Hetzner I chose full-metal instead of VPS. I pay €40 for 4 TB (2x4 TB mirrored to be precise) shared among a large number of services, including Minecraft servers for kids. The load is very low and the maintenance is a pleasure. Plus I love tinkering with and learning new things, so this part of mine is fully satisfied. I learned with Hetzner that every 3 years or so a hard drive dies but they replace it within half an hour so I just let the RAID rebuild itself and that's all.

View on HN

Hetzner is cool unless you are in the US. Latency sucks across the Atlantic.

Depends on what you’re using it for. I set up a Matrix homeserver on a hetzner box in Finland for primarily North American users. Latency hasn’t been a perceptible problem for that.

Even in Europe their network isn't particularly good, but I guess you get what you pay for.

Thanks. Some nice options. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver

Do you worry about the data being on Hetzner servers?

It is a multi-faceted issue. In general, for really sensitive content, like nude photos, keys etc., I'm very strict they should always be stored in an encrypted form and never ever decrypted on a remote machine.

Other content, private but not sensitive, like holidays photos, can be stored and decrypted remotely and it's a good practice to use encrypted partitions by default. I don't believe Hetzner would do any of the grey things that Google, Facebook and now Apple are doing (i.e. actively scanning your data for advertising and other purposes), but there is a practical problem of broken hard drives - it doesn't matter if it breaks in your place or at a hosting provider, you have a hard drive that is broken but you can't remove your data from easily, but someone else might. I estimate the probability is extremely low, but there is very little downside and effort required to encrypt data partitions nowadays, so I don't see why I shouldn't do that.

As for the interception of data in transit, nowadays everybody is using TLS for everything, so I don't think it's an issue.

Why? It's a perfectly respectable company.

They are subject to the same laws as everyone else.

In the US, privacy means in your home. It cannot have a third party custodian.

Was looking to do the same. What software do you use to replace things like dropbox/photos etc?

Previously I was using various projects for these things like Coquelicot as a WeTransfer alternative but practically speaking Nextcloud is so easy to use (and relatively stable now) that I use it for most things that need to be shared with others:

* it's intuitive to use, so people who haven't seen it can quickly download what you send them without having to log in, being tracked and so on.

* password protection and expiry date for shared links come in handy

* superfast search is a boon for me as I have so many files it's probably the most important aspect

* the photos app in Next/ownCloud is underperforming if you have a large number of photos in a folder - the thumbnails seem to be generated each time I open the folder, it's probably a bug.

* when you need to collaborate, it's supereasy to add users and they intuitively know how to do things as they're used to Dropbox etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com