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Comment by gpjanik | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.

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"all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM."

Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years, since their cloud offering via API/cli.

Hetzner requested a copy of my UK passport though.

An image of a passport proves nothing btw, especially since Hetzner is not a UK Govt Agency, that I am aware of, and has zero methods of authenticating such 'evidence' of ID.

I've not needed to verify identity to spin up VPS or order storage boxes. For what reason did you have to verify yourself?

I assumed because I was not an EU citizen?

No, they ask for EU citizens also.

Hetzner: Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying with a credit card of an elderly french lady, could you please send us some id? After that we will gladly spin up your 100 VPS Mail-Servers.

> Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying with a credit card of an elderly french lady, could you please send us some id?

Amazon's cool with it. I guess they don't care as much? I do wonder where the fraud prevention requirements come from. It's an interesting question if they are even for fraud prevention.

I am not an EU citizen, but Hetzner didn't ask me for any ID.

How long ago was that?

"Well, there goes the Privacy - Hetzner Hosting" https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/b5qp08/well...

Okay, looks like it was just before that.

Plenty providers have verification only when something seems "off" in some way. Amazon has both lots of experience and data for payment verification and the margin to absorb fraud costs that do go through, smaller providers not so much.

I just signed up over the weekend for a simple storage box. Today I realized after contacting their support that order was paused pending identity verification, they use something calles idenfy.

I opened two accounts (different emails, credit cards, billing address) in the span over two years from Colombia. First one worked perfectly fine, but for the second one they wanted me to provide id before spinning up anything. So not sure if this was introduced recently or if they have some system that flags accounts under certain conditions to provide additional info that I tripped the second time.

The usefulness depends on whether it's an external or an internal requirement. For something Hetzner need themselves it's quite useless. If there's an external requirement to verify the identity of the customer (say to shield them in case of people renting servers for criminal purposes or whatever) then an image of your passport proves that Hetzner tried to verify your identity and that you forged a government document to trick them.

Of course today we have better methods, but Hetzner was founded in the dot.com bubble and since then focused their innovation on providing cheap and reliable servers, not on changing business processes that work (or making pretty interfaces).

generally when I've been asked for my passport details from a Iaas / PaaS / SaaS provider it has been for AML /KYC purposes; so it is like you say, they don't need to know the details per se, just that they've forwarded it on to an external body / company and that it has been checked.

> An image of a passport proves nothing btw

It may prove a fraudster have basic Web searching skills. [1]

If someone is willing to do something wrong, why these companies imagine they wouldn't provide a fake document ID?

Imagine one is spinning up a Hertzner VM to hack and steal something or run a DDoS attack. The minute they see: "upload your passport ID", who thinks they'll go "oh no, we're busted, let's work honestly instead".

It's almost childish how ridiculous online KYC (know your customer) processes are.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=example+of+british+passport+...

It's not "just" a passport photo, it's a photo of a passport with a name that matches the payment method.

how are they going to know that the name matches the credit card?

idk, how do you compare strings?

Assuming you're being genuine here, OCR on the passport photo plus a string comparison on the card details provided. This is why the criteria for ID scans is so strict, and also why these verifications can take "up to 24 hours".

Hetzner aren't aiming to prove your identity. They're most likely aiming to reduce their fraud risk by requiring you to have a relatively-hard-to-fake document which matches your payment details.

In my case they just wanted a copy of my company registration certificate.

I assume it happened while the UK was in the EU. You can verify a passport electronically via the identifiers via the EU border control network, AFAIK.

So, it's enough of a verification.

I tried to sign up for a private account with Hetzner some 4 or 5 years ago, and they requested a scanned copy of my ID card or passport to proceed. I can understand it as they get legally entangled in any eventual abuse that may occur on their systems, but also, I can't understand it. Additionally, scanning and digitally sharing personal identification documents is illegal in some European countries under anti-forgery laws concerning important documents and banknotes etc.

Hetzner had me wait one billing cycle (as a new account) before they allowed me to request restriction to port 25, or vm, load balancers, etc limits to be lifted.

I recommended Hetzner to a client as I always heard good things on HN about it, but the experience was pretty bad, their (managed) platform is outdated, they are slow to respond to support tickets and respond like they didn't even read it and they are pretty strict and not willing to enable specific features on your dedicated machine.

I still think their performance/pricing is good, but sales/customer experience was really poor.

It was a hyperbole - surely some of those companies let you work with them in a more convenient way than using FAX, but they all have very limited offering and bizarre onboarding processes.

Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.

Some even use Telegram

German Newspaper (2018):

"...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..."

https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-...

Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.

The second part of the comment yes. The first was about how pervasive the use of fax was within German business. But in Japan it's worst:

"Japan’s reliance on fax machines lambasted by coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja...

"Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...

86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm not why we would expect them to use online collaboration tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic?

Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as a quicker alternative to mail with established legal standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic signature schemes. You can still live and work without a fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider though (despite using several of them)

1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/...

When switching cell phone number away from Vodafone de I was required to send a fax. A data point rather than proof.

We've used Hetzner for years. We never called or faxed them. Great service, by the way.

This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.

Still, this site has no prices, only “contact us”.

I think, the long-run is much more important than whatever the specific feature set it rn. (Also, actually talking to people might be more of a feature than a bug, after all?)

No, talking to people is stressful and it's unreliable.

There is a "Prices" link at the top?

Only “from...” prices - I can not compare their prices to AWS with the same resources.

Had to send documents to substantiate the business location on account creation, but nothing asynchronous after that.

This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.

Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies. It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.

Not sure how they plan to offer competitive prices.

"Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally" (2021):

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...

Just like anyone else having datacenters in Germany. AWS and Hetzner come to mind. Even though end customer electricity prices are among the highest not just globally but especially within Europe electricity prices for businesses with high demand are generally much lower and even ignoring that electricity prices won't have much of an effect on product prices.

It's because of heavy taxation, but the industries pay a lot less since they get taxed less.

What percentage of cloud service costs as paid for by customers is electricity cost?

BTW what you're showing here is small consumer electricity rates. Large consumers of electricity in Germany have significant fee exemptions. It's one of the reasons why small consumers have it more expensive: in Germany, lots of the costs are offloaded away from the industrial users.

One important percentage. Solutions development and other overhead's also count naturally.

"Data Center Power Costs":

"...In a data center, typically 20-40 % of the operating cost is related to data center power costs..."

https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/

Also in the article above there this bar chart: https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-...

were once more Germany costs for electricity are so much higher than anybody else.

"How Much Does it Cost to Power One Rack in a Data Center?":

https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-on...

"...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year, depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100 cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and efficiently managing capacity..."

I was not talking about costs to the data center operator. I was talking about what the cloud customers pay. If you're insinuating that 40% of cloud service pricing is electricity, surely that must be a cloud service operating at a major loss because only a small fraction of a cloud service cost is the data center cost.

I am not insinuating that. I am arguing that a major part of a data center costs is electricity, and that an important percentage of what cloud customers pay comes from that data center cost. My comment was clear that was not the only cost for cloud providers.

The thing is, price tags for cloud services are so much higher than what data center costs would be for hosting an equivalent service yourself that I doubt that the electricity rate difference would make a cloud service in Germany outright uncompetitive. What is 40% in data center cost may very well be <10% in cloud service pricing.

I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless.

And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.

While the bureaucracy certainly applies to German government, companies here are no better and no worse than anywhere in the world.

If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax, please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)

Does Health Care counts?

"German health care: Tackling COVID with paper, pen and a fax machine": https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...

No, Health care is a government institution, not a private company.

not to dispute the point in light of the question, but:

german health-care is thoroughly privatized, thou heavily regulated by the government.

That's true. But Covid tracking in Germany is done by the Gesundheitsamt (health office), which is the government institution (like everything ending with -amt).

Hetzner has entered the chat.

(They rock)

> Wasn't sure if April fools or not.

Wasn't sure if you were paying attention or not? [0]

What is wrong with having competition?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069

There are also PaaS providers in Germany, such as Fortrabbit for PHP, which do a great job. Competes with some parts of AWS.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the prices look bad for what is offered. Why would you use them over say a managed server, for example from Hetzner [0] or Netcup [1]?

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server [1] https://www.netcup.eu/professional/managed-server/managed-pr...

I think Fortrabbit allows you to scale easily to have a fault tolerant infrastructure without needing know-how. Kind of Like Heroku in some regards.

A dedicated server is nice but if it fails and you have no redundancy, your service goes offline.

Tried to use IBM Cloud, they wanted my passport for verification. Big nope.

can you name a few rivals?

i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)

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