What a nefarious move by Hetzner and Linode. How to trust them after this?
second pretty much _every_ country has laws which require carriers to help them wiretap in case of an investigation with appropriate court orders
thirdly even if it went through Hetzner/Linode instead of carriers it wasn't done "a move from them" but something they where legally binding ordered to silently tolerate
lastly if as unlikely as it seems it was not lawful interception of police or similar then they (or a carrier) would have been hacked, i.e. there is absolutely no chance that server providers will do such an attack on their own violation, especially Hetzner (they also don't have the legal means to get the necessary certificates)
I think jurisdiction games is all you have, because outside of that there's going to be _someone_ close to you network-wise who will fold when faced with a lawful intercept order.
but that's why running thing at home doesn't help that much, because it also applies to carriers, too
and when it comes to sizing data it tends to not make much difference whether they physically size disk at your home or in the data center, actually if legal order for a sizure like that is confirmed by a judge it's normally applied to all the computers such a person has, both at home and in datacenters