Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenickdude | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner deleted my dedicated server a couple of days after signup, and banned my account. A friend had the same experience. At least I didn't get charged anything for it (IIRC billing happens at the end-of-month).

I even went through their live-video face verification and passport scan and they didn't budge on this.

View on HN

They didn't even let my finish my signup. I also did the whole passport scan thing, but they just plain refused it without any further explanation. I would've happily pre-paid for a year if that would've solved the fraud risk, but I guess they just don't want customers?

If you had prepaid, you may have been into a nasty surprise (see my post below).

And yet in spite of this the majority of abusive traffic we receive is from Hetzner.

What’s the point of these draconian identity measures if criminals are abusing others through your service anyway?

I hope this is sarcastic, it's causal. They have identity checks because people use it for abuse.

The less strict they make their identity checks - would abuse increase, decrease or stay the same do you think?

They might be preventing new malicious actors from signing up. Maybe. Catching a lot (anecdotally, from this thread) of legit users along the way.

Meanwhile, what have they done to catch and ban malicious actors who passed verification long ago and have been abusing other services on the internet from the safety of Hetzner's network for months or years?

From what I've experienced in the few years using them is that they're pretty strict on abuse, new account or not. I think initially they would null route all ips for the server when getting copyright reports but the past few times they would just email me the report and I had to reply with the fix or else they would null route (or maybe suspend) the server after a day or so of silence.

While I do run a mail server with them I've never had any reports so I can't say anything on that but I'd assume theyre equally or even more strict with email abuse reports they get.

We are, of course, tacitly assuming that all the users on this thread were in fact doing legit things from Hetzner’s perspective when they were caught up (and, given the ID verification, that they have unremarkable pasts from a risk perspective).

Although I’d be sore too if I were turned away in the signup process, I’d just as soon learn early that they don’t want my business, before I invest more time and effort getting moved in.

Was there any explanation/reason given for the ban?

Hetzner first made it impossible for us to pay, then implied we were fraudulent for not paying, then as a special "grace" fixed the payment problem and "allowed" us to keep our newly created account.

By then, it felt very shaky to depend on such a company, so we switched server to Digitalocean.

Hetzner are cheap though.

Edit: we did also pay, but they never acknowledged that first payment. Then we somehow had an ”unpaid” invoice which we couldn’t find a way to pay for.

Oh, I see.

I prepaid some invoices, they didn't activate the service because of a technical bug (if you change the bank card, services get cancelled, and not renewed even if you have prepayment, it just goes as unpaid).

They said that as a "goodwill gesture", they are willing to activate my access, and keep all the prepaid money as compensation.

Well, that's my guess, because actually they just replied with 3 dots "..." when I said it was not normal.

Btw, if you are Ukrainian, you can have the "privilege" to prepay for your services instead of getting banned.

https://de.linkedin.com/posts/dennydo_product-overview-activ...

And they are "nice", they are "not planning any sanctions against Ukraine" for now.

Fair. I'm not "planning any sanctions against Germany" for now, despite Hetzner.

Sounds like classic German customer service. You are wrong or have somehow used the service incorrectly until proven otherwise.

Nope:

>We recently did some routine reviews of our customer accounts. We noticed some suspicious information in your account.

>We have some concerns regarding this information and we have decided to close your account.

>We do not share details about why certain accounts appear suspicious. Publishing this information would make it easier for people to create fake accounts and abuse our services.

>We apologize for the inconvenience.

Did you mine CHIA on their servers?

No lol, I installed Proxmox on there because I needed a server with AVX2 support for software testing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com