I emailed support, and they bluntly told me to create a new account and this time use real information... Needless to say, I bought compute elsewhere.
I don't know how they're still in business.
In some places companies are happy doing their own thing, don't need every customer, don't need to be everything to every customer, and won't fight for business in the same way. Does that limit them? Maybe? But I suspect not enough to be a problem most of the time.
Not being an absolute insane jerk off is a good expectation of people.
If you're used to American customer service, you may find European customer service to be blunt or curt, and many people would perceive that as rude even though it is not intended that way. Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this isn't really a problem.
If the answer is actually "no", then the customer service person will tell you it's "a little difficult". You're supposed to understand that that means "no, we can't do it". Of course, many foreigners don't get this, so then they'll change gears and just say "it's impossible".
>If you're used to American customer service, you may find European customer service to be blunt or curt
I don't see accusing your customer of fraud as simple bluntness or curtness.
>Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this isn't really a problem.
If they don't want to expand their business outside of Europe, I guess that approach is OK.
In my experience a lot of German businesses are like that, they'll woosh you away for any slight (perceived or real). So it is definitely a cultural thing. Of course my small sample doesn't mean anything in regards to german culture, but at the very least it proves that this corporate culture is indeed a thing.
have you met the internet yet
If this is exactly what they said it was probably either language barrier, like mis translation of "try again, making sure it's all spelt correctly" OR just that you really did use fake information, in which case here, folks will just say that. You can get told off for not saying please when ordering coffee, I like it but can understand how anyone conditioned to american customer service would be horrified.
Aside from knowing their sh*t and being available at short notice, you'll get along very well after you learn how to communicate with them. By being concise, precise, and blunt of course...
It's just German bureaucracy. When I wanted to register domains with Hetzner few years back, they asked me to print multiple pages of forms and contract, fill out, sign and... fax it back.
It’s definitely a culture shock for people from these cultures to encounter businesses who reject their business, whether it’s deemed risky or not worthwhile.
It was eye opening to me to spend time working with cultures where I had to convince businesses to deal with me rather than the other way around. Some people get extremely offended when businesses don’t bend over backward for them, but that’s not going to work when you encounter cultures who operate differently.
Last month I tried to create an Instagram account, I kept being instabanned on 5 different devices with different IPs. No recourse possible. HN is full of horror stories like this.
It's like, imagine a magic wand that, if waved, would make life a little better for 99% of society, but much worse for 1%. Would it be moral to wave that wand?
I think that alone kinda nullifies the threat of an algorithm. The entire reason why they're such a massive problem is because Google et al. refuse to operate proper support hotlines to help people and even if they do have a support line (Facebook infamously doesn't have one and wants you to go through the courts to contact them), the support staff aren't actually equipped to help people beyond regurgitating canned support page links. You can't solve a malfunctioning algorithm with another algorithm or by forcing a human to behave like an algorithm.
It's not a big secret that the best way to get yourself in front of actual support if GAFAM screws you over is to complain about it on HN because this is where SREs lurk that can actually punt your requests through to people that can look into it.
Hetzner at least gave a direct answer to explain the reason.
Just by having a third option, most of the downsides of doing the evaluation incorrectly could be mitigated. Of course, that's generally much more expensive (and often uneconomical) than saying no, so it's usually not done.
I've been on the 1% side of things quite a few times due to having new credit and (presumably) various data brokers not knowing every detail about me yet, and the experience really, really sucks.
I’d rather have $10 permanently lost for a month of VPS than being banned after 5 days setting it up because I’m traveling and my IP is “suspicious”. Which has happened to me.
I know a few people who use Hetzner, smaller EU registered companies, zero issues. Also extending limits is just one click and gets approved after a few minutes.
And I totally get why they have to be strict. Blocked IPs are becoming an epidemic, I stopped using Digital Ocean, because I always got bad IPs, that were blocked everywhere. Also Hetzner is suffering from that. People are renting servers for little money and do bad things with the 20 TB traffic they get.
They are bizarre.
Hetzner is a German company. Credit cards may be common in the USA, but they're not anywhere else.
When I pay for something, now the other party has the money, that's how money works. If I trust them that little, I should probably be using escrow but this costs extra and so it imo doesn't make sense to pay that fee for every transaction - as one does with this chargeback guarantee thing. Probabilistic societies where you're excluded based on bad odds or credit scores is what you get with that system (I've been on the losing end of that, not because I've ever had any debt (too little money) but precisely because they had no positive data because I never needed a loan, and so you can't pay for stuff in certain countries because they require a credit card)
I can only speak for Norway, but this doesn't normally mean reversing the charge. It's assumed that, if you bought an X, you wanted an X. So the seller is required to get you an X of good enough quality to actually do the job, and if that isn't what they were trying to sell... well, then they won't be in business for long.
Normally this means repairs or replacement, of course on the seller's bill.
The US seems much more geared to seeing every interaction as... I want to say 'combative'.
They look like "card tasting" payments which fraudsters do to check if a card is valid.
I’ve also had no problems using them in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Korea…
They certainly are very common in much of Europe. Buying stuff on credit might be not that common but plenty of people have credit cards themselves (even of they are effectively used the same way as debit cards)
To be fair not sure if you comment is just sarcasm.. but I’ve never had any issues using a credit card on Hetzner or pretty much any other European company
Perhaps they could implement some way to do a 1-cent bank transfer from an account with a name which isn't on their fraud list, but as a simple step it seems pretty normal to use your regular internet connection (that ties the IP+timestamp combination to a real-world subscriber) and not some anonymity service
Although it would be nice if we could be anonymous on the web, when abuse traffic is involved (more than posting a comment on some forum as an anonymous source or something), I don't know how that'd be possible to reconcile
I don't want any business critical infra managed by a company willing to be that aggressive in blocking accounts, while also having slow customer service to resolve access issues.
This isn't particularly common, but it's not uncommon either.
Then it worked, and I've had no problems since. I'm concerned about them failing to charge my virtual debit card some month in the future and losing data, but it hasn't happened yet.
If there was anything else nearly as cheap, or if it wasn't for personal use, I probably would have given up and used another service.
The big question is, were you using real information or did you put in fake info?
They're still in business because they're cheap and pretty reliable. But being cheap means there are things you can't get with them but can with others. For example, you can't pre-pay for the entire year ahead of time.
“If you make advance payments by bank transfer to our bank account, the amount will be posted as a credit on your account. We will automatically deduct this credit on your account when we process future invoices.”
Many people didn't even get to the point where they can log in.
In fact I don't feel like a hosting service should need to do this at all. If you pay your bills and aren't on the Stasi blacklist you should be good to go. I don't want or expect the likes of Hetzner to be responsible for policing.
It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.
My home DNS server blocks all requests to .ru and .cn, but I can't do IP-address-block blocking because shady Chinese companies or individuals just need to rent some computing on AWS or DigitalOcean in order to become indistinguishable from American companies. And specially DigitalOcean seems to be the favorite platform for doing scams.
We're OK with having license plates attached to our cars, but not to be forced to expose our nationality to infrastructure providers? There's really no privacy-sensitive stuff which needs to be protected in that case.
I think that having a blacklist with some ID (bank account, national ID, CA cert) that's hard to replace is a good compromise.
You could try giving people moral purity tests before you let them in (doesn't some of the tildeverse work like that?) but I think it's a dark road.
It feels like it's a check to get a general feeling if things sound plausible. Like no Russian accent for a German name, some knowledge of the surroundings, a valid phone number.
Seems like a really weird choice of question. Thinking of germans, a bakery seems more likely something they'd know of; perhaps a supermarket works more internationally (I'm sure there's exceptions to that as well). Maybe the distance in driving, cycling, or public transport minutes to surrounding cities could be a universal question to ask
I never understood why people think so highly of Hetzner.
Drivers licence as a personal ID is not really a thing in Europe. It's accepted at some places, but either passport or your state provided ID-card is much preferred.
Maybe they just don't want to sell to Americans, which is always allowed I guess, but setting up an American VPS provider and not accepting the standard American KYC verification methods would be a rather incompetent way of doing business. It'd be no different from doing business in Europe and only accepting drivers licenses and not accepting passports/ID cards for identity verification.
And we are talking about 300M people here, which is about 4 times the population for Germany.
If they hate US residents they should declare that clearly on their website, not wasting customers' (and their own) time.
That would still exclude non-driving customers, which means allowing at least one additional form of ID per state - suddenly you have to support at least 100 IDs for US customers, while German customers have exactly 1.
Not sure how you arrive at them "hating US residents", that's a weird conclusion to get to.
When in Rome ...
Your case is unfortunate, and I totally understand why you'd be taking you business elsewhere, but probably an outlier.
Otherwise, we'd need to ask the same about AWS et. al. as we've definitely seen more than enough wrong account closure complaints on here.
Herzner get flack because they are probably the only German entity that the average HN user has dealings with. Anyone who has had exposure to German bureaucracy will recognise the hostility.
Either way, it’s their process so you’re of course welcome to go elsewhere if you want. I don’t see it as a “bad thing” for companies to require some level of trust.
I don’t care how cheap they are. You get what you pay for.
My experience in the EU has been nothing but stellar.
They're growing year after year, so clearly they're doing something right.
I have all my stuff on vultr now.
I think most online operators that have "spend $3 with us" tiers have to be super vigilant about card transactions, and when you fall into the cracks you're a bit SOL.
I'm happy customer for years and will be even with these changes.
They have 400 GBit/s of DTAG transit.
Showing that they are rich as fuck without saying it.