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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

1 month to migrate is pretty dire.

I would hope that they at least offer some kind of "pay for a year up front" kind of deal so that you can actually plan a migration.

Quiet reminder that the actions of politicians and the actions of businesses/people - while not mutually exclusive - are usually quite disparate.

I do feel for the citizens and business that do not endorse Russian aggression who: by accident of birth, find themselves on the wrong side of history.

I also feel for any ops who may have to do a painful migration over Christmas due to this.

That notion of course does not to take anything away from the victims of the Russian invasion; which is many orders of magnitude worse of course.

EDIT: Downvoted because why?

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Whatever legal change happened says they can’t do business with Russians. I doubt there’s a get out clause saying “unless you got a year up front out of them” in that law.

Yeah, I would speculate the same.

However it could also be "Just easier" or that Hetzner doesn't want to deal with Russians anyway.

Normally the way these financial sanctions go is that you are permitted to give service if it has already been paid for but you cannot take new service. Annual contracts are a normal thing but I don't see the option in Hetzner right now, so it could easily be an oversight.

It could easily be that they take monthly billing only (normally) and have no desire to introduce this to bypass the "russians cannot purchase services" style sanction.

OFAC(Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions are clear-cut and they can issue very large fines for non-compliance. These sanctions have been in place for a while now. It sounds like someone flagged this to their legal department, who then advised to go nuclear, given the threat of large fines.

You can go to jail for this, it doesn't just stop at fines.

Hetzner is a EU business which only recently started the US expansion.

I am pretty sure Martin Hetzner lives in Germany.

This makes the jail option very unlikely.

As I linked elsewhere in this thread: German business people have already gone to jail over breaking sanctions, it is mostly up to interpretation of the (German) authorities whether or not what Hetzner does qualifies as breaking the sanctions. If I were an exec in this position I'd play it very, very safe.

OFAC seems like a US thing, correct me if I am wrong.

Yes, you are right, but they also serve the US market.

LOCATION. We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany) and in Helsinki (Finland). In Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon (USA), we also provide AMD-based cloud servers and cloud features.

It's two years and 6 weeks (almost 7), not 1 month.

> It will take effect from 31 January 2024

that's under 6 (working) weeks from today.

I'm trying to read where you got 2 years from, but I can't find it.

Was there an additional warning from before? or are you suggesting that when the Russian military invaded Ukraine that every Russian business and citizen should have pulled out of using European services?

There was a massive thread on HN at the time and the general consensus was that if you are a Russian entity relying on Western infrastructure that you should probably activate your contingency plans. The writing has been on the wall for all that time and with authorities coming down harder and harder on companies that are still doing business with Russia it is in a way surprising it took Hetzner this long to act.

ok, so you're saying there was an implied warning, not that there actually was one.

Which is what I suspected. A formal warning is the only one that matters in terms of actual notice.

No, there actually was a warning: plenty of countries have (in the meantime) put official sanctions in place but it has taken a while (and longer than expected) for that to ramp up to the point where actual legal action was taken against those busting the sanctions. More and more companies are figuring out that what they are doing may very well be interpreted as sanction busting and obviously the first to be addressed are the ones that are in the weapons and dual use trades. Where hosting falls on that scale I couldn't tell you but I do know that I'm risk averse enough not to want to figure out whether I know more than the authorities on where that line lies.

Likely some of the more recent arrests in Germany have woken up Hetzner to the possibility that what they are doing may well be interpreted as illegal even if it wasn't spelled out to them in a way that they heard it, or maybe they figured the war would be over before it was their turn. Who is to know? The fact that they turn around now is possibly reflective of direct pressure on them or it may be their own reasoning, someone downthread suggests that Hetzner may well have lost its usefulness in terms of being an intercept. The possibilities are endless and it is all just speculation, I'd take the letter at face value and leave it at that.

>are you suggesting that when the Russian military invaded Ukraine that every Russian business and citizen should have pulled out of using European services?

A ton of Western companies started pulling out of Russia in short order. It should have been obvious to anyone that even if their particular Western supplier continued to provide services for the time being that was at high risk of termination at any time--even absent a specific public statement. So, yes, the rational plan would have been to pull out of using European services or at least have a contingency plan to rapidly do so.

I think one of the reasons people might be harping on you is because the "Special military operation" started on 2022 February 24, which is 652 days < 1.8 years ago. In particular, even after you add 6 weeks to it, it's still less than 2 years.

I assume you mean T + 6 weeks, where T is the time since the invasion and T is approximately 2 years, even though T + 6 weeks is still less than 2 years?

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