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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to hear that. For a rock solid alternative, I use Hetzner with Coolify (https://coolify.io) installed, it's an open source Heroku alternative that uses Docker. I deploy all my apps on a 10 dollar Hetzner VPS that can handle millions of hits, and that 10 dollars gets you a much beefier machine than anything you'd get on other paid services like Render, Railway, Fly etc. They just aren't worth using in my experience when something like Coolify does the job for a fraction of the price.

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Hetzner is really awful with admissions of new accounts.

I tried to register twice but got denied before I even got the chance to complete registration.

`After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.`

No support, no details whatsoever, I'm not sure if they don't want to serve customers outside EU or something else at play, since I didn't even get the chance to finish registering.

I've read similar stories on Reddit, where you needed to deposit $20, but I didn't even get to that step. They seem too strict.

I might have better luck getting hired there than open an account with them.

Same experience here. I registered as business account from EU country. In couple of days they suspended my account and asked for a proof. I submitted company incorporation documents, publicly available from our country registry. They denied to enable it back again. When I asked on what ground, they denied any information, citing that other people will exploit that information. I was bummed and opened an account in their competitor (OVH). No issues so far with OVH.

Can confirm. I wanted to switch to Hetzner, but they denied my account.

For context, I live in the EU and send them a copy of my passport when they requested it. Still got denied. I asked them what else they would need, but they said their decision was final. Oh well.

I just went with OVH instead. No hassle, and I haven't had a single issue with them.

Interesting, I haven't had issues, but I'm in the US as well, not the EU. Even still, you could use DigitalOcean and other VPS rather than paying a premium from Render et al.

Yeah I already have a couple droplets at DigitalOcean. I just wanted to give Hetzner a try.

No, just don't.

I get the same instaban on DigitalOcean, from residential ip even.

Then something is wrong on your end, not their ends. Where do you live? Just wondering if there are restricted countries that are higher risk.

Not a restricted country, the Netherlands.

Perhaps your IP is on some kind of blacklist (due to past activities of the previously assigned owner of that IP)?

Might be worth investigating.

Doesn't seem to be blacklisted, but I'm not sure what is a preferred tool to check that. I do run firefox with aggressive privacy settings, so my bet is on that.

> Hetzner is really awful with admissions of new accounts.

> I tried to register twice but got denied before I even got the chance to complete registration.

Am in EU, had the same happen to me.

Tried creating an account when I was in university, they just suspended it for no reason, even before the process was fully completed. I even sent them copies of my documents to verify my identity, yet they chose not to do any business with me.

A few years later creating an account succeeded and I've been a customer of theirs since - no idea what changed, but I'm not going to move over all of my stuff to them after that experience, or at least keep all of my backups (that I need to restore my sites on any hosting provider) local to my homelab with rsync or something like that.

Then again, maybe being stringent like that works well for them, for whatever reason. That said, their prices are better than pretty much every other platform out there, at least for basic VPSes. Maybe Contabo can compete with them directly, though.

Happened to me as well, they made me send them a picture of my ID and still denied me access, the only company where I have ever had something like that happen.

Hetzner support is garbage in my experience, which shouldn’t be surprising given their pricing.

It’s funny, if someone posts a Hetzner horror story here, of which there are plenty, I’m sure someone will recommend Render in the comments. Lots of services are cool until they decide to hit you.

I had the totally opposite experience. I have been paying ~60€/month to them for nearly 10 years for a root server and storage boxes and I never waited more than an hour on any kind of support email. And this includes a bunch of times where I need someone to physically walk to the server and manually do something.

This has been my experience as well. Though I want to make it clear that Hetzner does not provide managed services on these root servers. They will reboot your server, attach a kvm switch, and replace failed hardware. Maybe when parent says support they mean they need something else.

I love Coolify for personal projects, but it's not ready for production/business projects yet. You can't really compare it with Render, Railway or Fly.

Some reasons why I wouldn't use it for critical infrastructure:

- It doesn't have high availability options (if a server goes goes down, your service goes down)

- It doesn't handle backups

It is great for excellent for anything non critical though

That's true, I don't run very important apps on there but even still, I can create backups myself and create multiple Coolify instances behind a reverse proxy if needed. It would be useful to have everything in one service though.

Hetzner is quickly positioning itself to be the Azure/AWS replacement for a lot of shops here in the EU.

Also for privacy reasons.

Do they even offer managed database services ?

If you don't even have rudimentary stuff like message broker/database you're not an AWS/Azure alternative.

Doesn't really matter when using AWS, Azure and GCP is not an option. They only have to compete and compare with other "EU native" solutions, not the US cloud giants.

They don’t. But I’ve explored launching a EU-based business that focuses on large businesses and Hetzner was one of the logical players. Good managed services without US exposure are really rare.

I run some smaller stuff on Hetzner. Have for the last 5-10 years and never had any issues. If Hetzner added managed Postgres, something like Cloud Run, and maybe PubSub I’d be moving over a bunch more stuff.

In my experience in non-SWE related enterprise this isn't really an issue. To put it as bluntly as possible, most EU organisations don't have enough work to staff an team for their IT operations. Maybe you could have one or two people on staff, but that is realistically too few people to run reliable operations, even in Azure or AWS. So what happens is that we outsource all the parts that aren't directly related to development or IT support and operations to 3rd party companies.

Most of those 3rd party companies will happily sell you managed database service that are run on Hetzner. So this part of it is sort of a non-issue for a lot of organisations if the cost are low enough.

Heck, even if you have your own inhouse operations department going for you, why wouldn't you be able to run your own stuff on Hetzner? That's what people did in the transition from having your iron in the basement and buying it from Microsoft/Amazon. The only reason we left the "own cloud" options was cost, and if Azure exceeds the alternative. Or the EU makes it too cumbersome to use Azure, then there won't be much of a reason to stay.

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