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Comment by Hetzner_OL | Hacker News Reader

hi there, I am very sorry that we could not approve your account. We also do not publish a list of things that may or may not make your account accidentally appear fake. So I can't confirm whether or not it was the Protonmail or something else that may have triggered a review of your account. I am very sorry for the lack of transparency on this. I understand that it is frustrating and disappointing to be rejected as a customer. We are purposefully non-transparent about what triggers a review of new accounts. Why? If we published a list like this, it would very quickly become much easier for scammers and spammers to create realistic-looking accounts that they could use to abuse our products, and naturally, we don't want that. I glad that you have found another provider who could use to host your mail server. --Katie

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This level of account paranoia (which is infamous at this point; it's one of the primary things mentioned every time Hetzner comes up) is one of several reasons why Hetzner is doomed to be a second-rate provider. If you have a credit card, you can get an AWS account. I've never provided any kind of ID to any American hosting provider. They wait until after you've done something bad to ban you.

It's more expensive to provide AWS-type "assume you can be trusted" service at a low-cost provider - and Hetzner is one of the lowest-cost big providers.

Low-cost attracts more fraudulent customers, using stolen credit card numbers. Hosting is particularly bad for this compared with other low-cost services, because of the community of people who want to use rented servers for DDOS and such, ideally without paying or being tied to a real identity.

It also attracts people who will do a card chargeback if the server isn't what they wanted or after they've used it for some temporary event. Some people don't appreciate that chargebacks are expensive for the low-cost supplier, and some people don't care.

Low-cost also means the penalty cost of credit card chargebacks is a higher proportion of income, even if the number of them was the same. It might be so much higher that the business couldn't be profitable at the prices it offers if it didn't aggressively filter which customers it takes on.

Could some "insurance", paid extra, be a solution to this? As in saying to Hetzner, hey, I'm a legitimate consumer, willing to pay extra for, say, a year, so that you do some additional checks (EDIT: in advance) and/or switch me to a better tier of more relaxed "fraud detection", offering some hot line, like between Russian and American generals, to help avoid any accidental, hm, deletions?

Or would that just not scale?

Exactly! Ask me to prepurchase some amount of resources (say $20 upfront) + limit my capabilities early-on until first invoice.

I’m not sure if reading this response made me feel better or worse.

Clearly if you are rejecting legitimate customers for arbitrary reasons there’s still some work to do on your approval process.

I mean, I get that there are bad actors, and that it’s rationally better for Hetzner to have false positives than false negatives. But it just feels wrong. Legitimate customers shouldn’t be rejected until they prove they’re malicious.

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