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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

It appears (from reddit that):

1. People rent Hetzner servers to load-up with movies

2. They sell access to those servers to multiple users (sometimes dozens).

3. The opinion is also that Hetzner is a cesspool of the Internet:

>> Hetzner seems to be a cesspit of internet, outside of russia. They're more than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught.

>> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner

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> 3. The opinion is also that Hetzner is a cesspool of the Internet: > > >> Hetzner seems to be a cesspit of internet, outside of russia. They're more > than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught. > > >> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner

That is just a direct consequence of their popularity while being among the cheapest of the big popular ones.

Hetzner also have a reputation for taking the bare minimum action possible about abuse reports.

Personally I'm entirely happy with taking the risk of services blocking Hetzner in return for everything else about their service, but it isn't -just- a consequence of their popularity.

I still don't get it.

The pirate hosters could just stay at Hetzner, deploy a lightweight proxy somewhere else and Plex'd none the wiser. And/or just move their servers elsewhere.

"I am sorry ma'am, I see you drove here in a Dodge. We are prohibiting entry for all Dodge drivers because Dodge drivers are overrepresented in criminal incidents"

---

Quote from the Plex forum thread:

> I hope everyone is paying very close attention to the message that Plex is communicating here because it is contrary to their previous stance regarding hosting Plex Media Server in the ‘cloud’.

> > But our personal media server was always designed and intended for users to host themselves at home for personal user, not in a shared hosting environment

> Great. Plex Inc. is now on record stating that the intended use of Plex Media Server is to be hosted at home. The writing is on the wall for anyone else hosting Plex via a hosting provider, such as OVH. Do not be surprised if they follow through with their statement to blanket-ban any ISP that harbors individuals that violate their Terms of Service. It no longer matters if your individual use case is legitimate or not – it can and will be disturbed if the company deems it necessary.

The hypothesized future pivot of Plex to start competing with Netflix and try to shed their cannibalizing self-hosting side fits in.

It sounds like AWS dodged such an accusation by making their services extremely and unfairly expensive. Otherwise I'd bet it would become: "whenever we have an attack at work, 99 out of 100 times its coming from AWS".

Abusers are smart enough to design their architecture to avoid vendor lock-in, so they head to whoever provides cheapest traffic.

Egress costs probably.

Should providers scan the contents of their customers and filter what can and cannot be hosted?

From what I've gathered about Hetzner for the last 20 years, they take down illegal content when the law is involved.

Hetzner is also one of, if not THE, biggest provider in Europe - of course they will have abusing users.

Hetzner is just the leader in price performance. If someone else dropped their prices you would see traffic move to there.

It seems like their real problem is with cheap hosting. Hetzner is just the most popular one. Calling it the cespool of the internet makes it sound like one of the Eastern European hosts that don't take services down unless really forced, which isn't the case with hetzner.

Cheap hosting isn't a "problem". It's a "good".

The problem is problematic behavior of individuals. Blaming the hardware, Plex, or the sky is quixotically misguided.

> They're more than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught.

Are they, though? Has something changed? Because I remember that when I made a Hetzner account, I had to verify my ID and everything. It's actually been the same with some other companies like Contabo, despite me always having been an EU citizen and all that.

> whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner

Wasn't DigitalOcean pretty much the "leader" in this regard a while back? Maybe something has indeed changed, who knows!

Hetzner do scan their networks for open proxies, spam mailing etc. They are supper aggressive on copyright too, as in you can just email them claiming an ip hosts copy right material and they will by default firewall that ip until the server owner responds.

I know this because I used to host a paste bin with them and they would constantly block my ip because people would post links to other sites that had copyright material. I didn't host anything illegal all you could post was 1mb of text. Hetzner would show me the copy right claim and it was always from some random hotmail address, the urls of the infringing material don't resolve to my ip and very clearly had nothing to do with me. Hetzner didn't care they blocked all of my servers until I had resolved the dmca request.

I had to stop using Hetzner because their blocking was too aggressive and I wasn't doing anything illegal anyway. Maybe this is self fulfilling as I would never use them for anything important after that experience, I can't risk them taking down production simply because some one with a hotmail account asked them too.

The reality is hetzner is super jumpy with any kind of abuse but they are so cheap that it’s like trying to hold the tide with a broom

> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner

I suspect this is a lot more of the motivation than people using hetzner to host pirated Plex libraries. Plex is pretty pirate-friendly.

I’ve certainly experienced the waves of malicious bot traffic coming from hetzner IPs, where blocking hetzner is a convenient and easy solution. If my customers were using hetzner, I’d have to find a better and more difficult solution. I understand why Plex would want to get their legitimate users to stop using the IP ranges they want to block at the firewall level.

>pirate-friendly.

What does it mean for a provider to be pirate-friendly? Not to act on takedown requests?

They do act on takedown requests.

They forward them to the customer and ask you to deal with it.

If you dont, you will be fired as customer.

i mean their whole platform is built to suit the needs of people who pirate movies and TV. it's a system purpose-built for watching pirated content. they might pretend it isn't to attract investors and avoid drawing the ire of authorities, but we all know what it is.

That's so bullshit though. CloudFlare facilitates the same sort of crap and almost certainly a lot more of it, and they get a free pass?

One is VC funded darling from US. Other is more than 20 yo german infrastructure company that doesnt do marketing and starts to slowly eat from the AWS pie because they are cheap.

Hetzner does marketing. A German tech youtuber I follow does in-video spots for them.

Yes, a few years back there was another german youtuber who also had some promo ad for hetzner. Though the amount of ads is pretty limited compared to others like Linode.

Probably not true that they let anything run given that they shut down all proof of stake blockchain nodes because they were bitcoin miners (or at least that's how their reasoning went).

Hetzner is a garbage company when trying to host there as a legitimate SaaS creator. Stay far, far away from them. They disabled access to my server for running tailscale.

Elaborate?

tailscale runs a continuous netcheck to an unroutable IP (203.0.113.1:12345:UDP) [1] for whatever reason. This triggered Hetzner's ghetto-ass DDOS protection, thinking my server was compromised or I was netscanning the world. They sent me an email saying my server was compromised and I had 24hrs to remedy it.

I responded to the email and filled out this attestation form declaring that my server was not under attack, it was a false positive, and explained what they were seeing (not to mention it's an unroutable IP). They still null routed my server and refused to turn it back on, and their arrogant support told me there was no way I was in control of this server etc. They took my box offline during a peak user day, so I migrated to AWS and never looked back.

Don't do anything of importance on Hetzner. No wonder they only get people running pirated plex boxes.

[1] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/94304819263b0553...

ok.

I mean it’s an old adage but I guess you get what you pay for.

For a simple, low-stakes personal website, Hetzner is probably hard to beat on price.

My first action would be to use up tables to block these requests.

Then get more understanding why this happening and then send the details to the support.

Contrary to this i run lots of stuff on Hetzner no problem. Even with Tailscale. Running solid VPSes in this day and age is not rocket science as AWS wants everyone to think.

got a lot of boxes running tailscale at Hetzner never had this issue

Maybe they've added a fix to their detection system since? I quite literally have a netscan abuse report from them filled with the above UDP IP and port.

Why migrate to AWS and not something more like-for-like, perhaps OVH or similar?

I'm most familiar with AWS so I went back to a trusted (and far more expensive) platform where I didn't have to deal with amateurs literally turning off a paid service.

I may explore OVH in the future, nothing against them at all.

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