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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

FYI do not run blockchain related software on Hetzner nodes, even their dedicated bare metal. They are likely to shut the host down.

I was running a Solana Testnet Proof of Stake validator for work and they decided to shut the host down at the network layer and refused to give us access to the host. After my employer's legal threatened them, they offered to give us access back, but to be a pain in the butt, they only gave us console login access. Luckily, it was just our Testnet validator, and we keep the keys in cold storage which we were able to recover from.

Their nodes are cheap, but beware of Hetzner. Something that they didn't mind hosting for almost 4 years they suddenly changed their minds on and shut the host down.

See: https://www.theblock.co/post/182283/1000-solana-validators-g...

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Your fault for not reading their ToS:

https://www.hetzner.com/de/legal/terms-and-conditions/ number 8.1 in the German version, number 4 in the English one: "Furthermore, the operation of applications for mining cryptocurrencies is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, mining, farming and plotting of cryptocurrencies. In the case of non-compliance, we are entitled to lock your access to the Service and/or to your account."

Lots of hosters and cloud providers have this and similar exclusions, to keep out the typically shady cryptocurrency crowd, their excessive resource usage, high payment risk and reputation damage.

E.g. Google Cloud also doesn't allow cryptocurrency stuff without prior approval, 3.3 iv: https://cloud.google.com/terms , same for AWS, 1.25: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ So I hope you got your written approval first, otherwise AWS might be equally nasty to you.

Their ToS did not reference blockchain at the time. This is why our lawyers got involved. This was updated after they caused an outage unannounced for a service running almost four years.

Google actually offers blockchain rpc. Fwiw, Solana nodes run poorly in the cloud and generally only make sense on bare metal. As far as slow distributed databases go (aka blockchains), it’s 1000x+ faster than the ethereum style blockchains.

Ah, if that is new, then you are right, that's probably a breach of contract on their side.

Cloud doesn't necessarily mean virtual machines with scheduling and sharing problems. You can get non-shared machines with almost all popular cloud platforms, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/compute-optimized-mach... Of course those aren't cheap.

Thanks for writing about this. Makes me like Hetzner even more.

I was just about to write that. No crypto scam nonsense in the same datacenter sounds like a plus to me.

(On a more serious note, I imagine the reason Hetzner does not want crypto-related stuff is for the same reasons most hosting companies are not very fond of porn-related sites: High rates of fraud, charge-backs and other potential legal liability).

They did officially stated on reddit [1] that they are not supporting crypto related hosting. Just wonder why? Is the GPU/CPU/Network related over use? Or legality related?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/comment/ilf...

Wild guess: They use significantly more electricity than the average customer that does just about anything else with their hardware. The GPU can easily run at hundreds of watts, and when you add in the required cooling you're probably at 1.5-2x that in total power usage.

This is not a proof of work (bitcoin or pre merge ethereum) node and it does not use more electricity. They singled out solana seemingly and I’m unsure why. We moved about 300 services off of dedicated higher end Hetzner nodes within a week.

What implication does this have for AI workloads - the computation intensity would be similar? (Assuming a popular service saturating the machines)

I see some other comments mentioning ssd wear which I don't think would apply to AI stuff, but the utilisation/power consumption certainly would.

They stated that AFTER they just cut the network access to the hosts. It isn’t as though we were doing anything ethically or legally wrong. We were running rpc nodes for legit applications and a validator to secure the network.

For me, who’s worked in 50,000+ bare metal Linux environments before, it was just so surprising how sudden and violent it was. Their customer support was amazing until it wasn’t.

Just let it be a lesson, they will arbitrarily change their mind and put your nodes running your business at risk. Even if you’ve broken no laws and are operating in good faith. We were not running and proof of work nonsense that breaks the hardware or uses excess electricity.

> It isn’t as though we were doing anything ethically or legally wrong.

Legally? Well, they probably have a "if we think you do something we don't like we can kick you off" clause. Ethically? Eh .. Crypto. Ethical. Opinions differ.

I am not a big fan of crypto either, but don’t understand why crypto (the technology itself) would be unethical.

Could you explain?

I don't know any working thing using crypto in a way that it acutally make sense and couldn't be already be done easier and similiar safe.

Even in big companies you always see examples which break the technology like creating something on the blockchain which has a connection to the real world.

Try to send some big amount of money internationally and you will see why crypto is the future. With regular banks it takes days, weeks and many times months due to intermediate banks, AML questions, reviews, etc and have very high costs associated for simple transfers of money hardly earned.

With cryptocurrencies it takes seconds or minutes and no questions asked with very low fees

Energy use that doesn't deliver concrete value to the world. Mostly just speculators and gambling, but uses a a couple hundred TWh of electricity worldwide.

Yes yes I know, some applications are lower energy usage but parent comment is asking about the ethics of crypto in general.

> Energy use that doesn't deliver concrete value to the world

How is that any different from fast trading computers producing 'wealth' by juggling inflated derivatives and 'generating' water vapor value from hot air...

I don't think these are ethical either.

Wait until you find out what we do with all the water.

> Mostly just speculators and gambling, but uses a a couple hundred TWh of electricity worldwide.

Parent asked about ethics of crypto, the technology, in general. This comment isn't about the technology, but the applications, and doesn't answer their question.

I don't necessarily think we should separate applications from theory, but to be more crisp, I would probably say the facilitation of money laundering and funding of terrorist groups is something unethical.

> I don't necessarily think we should separate applications from theory

Sure, not in general, but shaism was specifically asking for theory, and you replied to them without actually answering their question. And you still haven't.

> the facilitation of money laundering and funding of terrorist groups

...and this isn't unique to crypto, either, so it's unclear that it's relevant.

Would you be shocked to know that US dollars are used more for both money laundering and funding terrorism than cryptocurrencies? Should we outlaw US dollars due to facilitating unethical uses?

I dont think so because of the centralized oversight. Crypto is designed to avoid that oversight (but even fails at that much of the time).

You're angry in the wrong direction. It is not their fault that you, or someone in your company, didn't read their TOS. Hetzners service is cheap, this attracts bad actors. In their eyes you are a bad actor and according to their TOS they're right. I, as a customer of Hetzner, are happy about how they deal with people abusing their services.

We read their ToS. Our lawyers read their ToS. It has a vague “we can kick you off if we choose to” part, but removing service with no recourse was not ok. So we told them we would sue them if they didn’t give us access to shred sensitive data and they relented.

This is the sentence, in Hetzners ToS, that you're referring to: "In the case of non-compliance, we are entitled to lock your access to the Service and/or to your account." Source: https://www.hetzner.com/de/legal/terms-and-conditions/#16

If your lawyers thought that this line means something different than "don't use crypto, mining, etc. we will lock you out", you should change/sue your lawyers. This is a clear as it gets, I see zero fault on Hetzners side.

Honestly hetzner was never the 'high end / high quality' cloud provider for me.

They have decend hardware and infra but no encryption on rest and everything else a real business requires (certifications etc.).

But i'm so dismissive about all shitty crypto because no one ever showed me a good use case, as others said, i think its great that hetzner has this tos.

-So what do you actually do?- forget about it, finance got it...

My guess is it's a huge liability if keys are stolen, and it puts a huge target on their back from people around the world who want to steal crypto keys or DDoS crypto systems.

Most of the Hetzner DdoS come from gaming fyi. They’re pretty good at handling them but we’d get paged every few months due to this.

Our uptime is better since we left hetzner. We went with a host that’s more commonly used for electronic trading firms, Teraswitch. They’re great.

Thanks for recommendation, we are looking to move our servers off Hetzner for precisely the same reasons.

Many hosters banned all kind of crypto after advent of file coins, which wear out ssds too quicky.

Indeed. Some bad actors (which is most of the industry) ruin it for those of us who just want to build cool tech. Very annoying.

You know what they say, a bunch of bad apples spoils the few.

AFAIK it's the high disk IO causing wear on the SSDs, since they specifically mention Solana nodes

Likely. We put the accounts db in memory (on a tmpfs) to mitigate this and were paying them for a beefcake node with 1T of memory.

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