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Comment by mkagenius | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but mostly they won't accept you if you are from a developing country trying to break in to the tech world. Its a catch 22 situation - they offer cheaper prices only to those who can afford expensive servers.

I know it's because of spam - but it is what it is.

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Unfortunately, hetzner really seems to have trouble with piracy and spam. Given Plex is going as far as blocking hetzner servers completely, it seems like abuse is pretty widespread.

It’s really annoying that this kind of behavior is ruining the reputation of an otherwise great Hoster and making their products inaccessible for large parts of the worlds population.

Really wish the could implement measure to make their products accessible to users from these countries that are heavily restricted

Is there an arb opportunity? Something as simple as someone in the US runs Kubernetes on Hetzner, then rents out the pods for anyone in the world to run their workloads on. They could restrict the workloads, e.g. firewall the outbound requests to a pre agreed list.

Yes I used to do this for US customers when Hetzner and OVH would only take EU customers.

The problem is that the customers interested in that price point are trash customers that only wan't to do all the dodgey stuff hetzner doesn't want them to do. Hetzner will detected it and will firewall the whole server all sites will go down the bad and the good and all of your customers will want refunds even if they where the cause of the problems.

Bad business not worth it.

There are hosting providers offering webhosting and virtual servers that just run their operations on Hetzner dedicated servers. The virtual servers are just KVM to split the dedicated server into multiple, with a bit of management interface and some firewall rules.

That...just sounds like a VPS? Or Amazon EC2, but a lot more clunky

Or I guess if it's just random servers running random workloads, AWS Fargate

I think there is room for a clunky but cheaper VPS. There is room for competitors. For side projects I used Digital Ocean over AWS because of the DX, abstraction level (close enough to the metal but not too close) and not going to worry about getting a $1m bill. This arb would probably make something cheaper that digital ocean, maybe with the UX of vast.ai (very basic web interface and SSH for the rest of what you need)

I’m from India and have workloads at Hetzner.

Also, you can always pay the £20 fee; especially so if you’re running a company.

> Also, you can always pay the £20 fee;

Can you elaborate more on this, does the fee help you get accepted?

When I signed up for Hetzner they asked for a national ID/passport OR pay a non-refundable €20 fee which gets you accepted immediately. I’m not sure what their risk assessment process looks like now.

During registration you may get the opportunity to pay 20€ instead of uploading your ID card. The 20€ counts as account balance BTW.

Whereas you have Oracle Cloud (and its highly generous free tier) which seems to apply the inverse policy

They are terrible company though. And those free tier options all get their servers deleted unless you switch to paid.

Paid tenancy is just a matter of providing a working debit/credit card. You don't need to actually spend anything to keep using the free tiers with resource protection.

I've been using the same x86 server for 3 or 4 years at this point, plus another arm64 one since they introduced them (so two years?). Never had them deleting anything, haven't paid a dime.

No they only turn them off if they detect 0 load for a few months

I’m from Brazil and I’m a Hetzner client. Have several dedicated servers and several cloud instances with them.

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