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Comment by hipadev23 | Hacker News Reader

I made the unfortunate mistake of having the backend for my game on Hetzner and on launch day the abrupt spike in traffic made their abuse detection go haywire. No amount of explaining that everything was under control would satisfy their support team, and they null-routed my server.

Never again with these discount hosts.

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This is my primary concern. I want to use Hetzner so badly for important workloads, but just can't stomach the risk (even if it's a small one) of being null-routed.

Which hosting provider would you use today?

Hetzner is so good, but so bad at the same time.

Even when it's working their peering to half the world is absolute shite.

Can you recommend a hosting provider that's better than Hetzner but not as pricey as AWS?

I have had little to complain about Linode, but they did get eaten by Akamai.

If I had to move, I'd look at BuyVM or Incognet, but I don't really look around until I feel the need.

Multiple ones, eliminate your single point of failures.

What is the host that guarantees not to do this? Azure took out our entire prod subscription once due to a shared IP that they allocated to us being used by another customer in an attack.

It's possible that I've simply not hit the corresponding circuit breakers but no issues with AWS for similar launches and spikes in traffic. It's expensive though, and my experiment with Hetzner was a misguided effort to reduce costs.

I had an AWS account get shut down because Netcraft straight up lied to them that there was some ongoing and active criminal activity and the server needed to be shut down immediately. Obviously no criminal activity, or even simulated criminal activity. It was hosting a web frontend for a common security tool, and they just happened to see the banner while scanning the internet.

I confronted Netcraft about it and they just told me that they didn't actually detect anything like criminal activity, but they need to say that or else Amazon won't take their reports seriously. Pretty fucked IMO.

> it's expensive

yeah, because their business model is to hope you have very expensive spikes. legitimate or not

I reckon their business model is for the architecture astronaut who set up Wingman[0] to leave the company and then everyone is too afraid to shut down it’s 1000 node k8s cluster.

[0] - parody microservice in famous skit.

AWS will not do this. I've heard of Azure doing this more than once. GCP I have no idea but if something does happen on GCP good luck talking to a human, better luck them not just telling you that you did something wrong.

Reminds me of how US-based twitch streamers now need to call their local police department to inform them that there is a risk of Swatting.

I guess we need to give advance notice to traffic spikes if that is an abnormal historical occurrence for our accounts.

That is actually best practice for cloud-hosted services. Traffic spikes can in general cause auto-threat-detection to panic. The only difference for the big service providers is their thresholds are higher.

(The maddening thing is that some of the circuit breakers are undocumented).

I get this feeling that Hetzner has too many customers, they don't want any new ones (onboarding is intentionally annoying) and that they are trying to lose customers so that they don't have to deal with them

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