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Comment by ssd532 | Hacker News Reader

> don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed

Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date. My credit card failed the payment for some reason. I didn’t notice this because I was ill with Covid. They sent me one email (or at least, I received only one email) as a warning. I only realized the server was gone when my services stopped working. I’m not sure if such a short warning time is common practice among hosting companies, or if it’s unique to Hetzner.

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I've had the exact same experience with them. After 10 years using that server, one payment failed, about ten days and they nuked the machine. German efficiency I suppose.

I has an almost identical experience with https://virmach.com/. I will never recommend them.

After 5 years, they deleted everything 2 weeks after the first payment failure.

Sure it was the cheapest VPS. But still, you don't just delete your customers' data.

I was away from emails and the service during those two weeks. As far as I can tell it might have been some race condition in their payement processing system. They couldn't figure it out. They had no backup. They refused to reinstate the service anew to restore my own backup.

It doesn't look too far fetched from their point of view, they saw a payment failure and they may have assumed that you decided to stop paying and didn't bother to send a cancellation request.

It looks like you had your own backup, which is always a good idea, hopefully you were able to restore your data elsewhere.

I've been 3 weeks late for a Hetzner payment (also for medical reasons) more than once, and my servers are still running. They sent several emails, one was a reminder to pay and another was a warning about what date they would shut down service. So I guess their notice system isn't as straightforward as one week for everyone.

Perhaps it's because I pay for several bare metal servers, or because I have a business account with them. Perhaps it's because I pay their invoices by bank transfer manually instead of by credit card. Who knows! You have made me wary of changing to a credit card now, because those do fail from time to time!

What worries me more is Hetzner's reputation for suddenly dropping customers with no warning and no way to retrieve data from the servers. That's always on the back of my mind.

> Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date.

Strange. I've been at least eight days late with a VPS payment at Hetzner (3 euro) and the server is still up.

Some companies dont mark you as a debtor if you are under a certain threshold (say 10 dollars), because the cost of processing this unpaid amount is not worth their time.

Also it is smart to have the threshold set to at least 1 cent, because this way you dont ask someone to pay you is supposed to pay you a fraction of a cent due to some rounding error. There are those stories where a company sends you a registered mail, where they ask you to repay a fraction of a cent - what is impossible. Also the cost of the letter (snail mail) made it not worth it. Even if you get an email that is "free" you cant pay 0.0001 cent. I mean you can pay a whole one and then ask to get 0.999 back - the time required by the bookkeeper to process it, then pay it (probably with a fee) is not worth it.

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