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Comment by BillLumbergh | Hacker News Reader

Been seeing a lot of negative posts surrounding experiences with Hetzner of late. Definitely facing issues and losing reputation.

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When you ride the cloud/ai hype wave you end up with making fast and not very healthy decisions. Same things happen with other providers so whatever is your choice you must have disaster recovery and replication in place. If you wanna go cheap just make some s3 backups on R2, BackBlaze, Wasabi.

Hetzner was always like that, even before the AI wave. They lowball people with cheap pricing and arguably this attracts a lot of "unwanted" people, so Hetzner always acted strict on such issues.

Last time I used them (pre-2020) they were going as far as requesting customer's ID and rejecting them on the basis of country of origin, and I assume this also includes facial features that may resemble "an average scammer". Obviously this did not happen to European/American IPs so they never faced such issues, and as such this practice was invisible to the world.

I can say for sure OVH and Scaleway would try to negotiate with you before erasing your data - this may have changed over the years.

    > they were going as far as requesting customer's ID and rejecting them on the basis of country of origin

Wouldn't this be required for most cloud providers? Else, how do filter out buyers from Iran, Syria, or North Korea, who are probably banned from buying your EU-based services?

I've used OVH, Scaleway, Linode and Amazon in the past, right now I use a small provider that resells Serverius and Hetzner, none of them ever asked me for my ID and all of them allow usage of VPN to sign up for service. As to payment, at least Amazon used to allow usage of debit cards in the past. Hetzner was the only provider that asked me for an ID. I'm not from the banned countries either.

Wow, that is crazy to think about. It must be so easy for Iran and NK to rent a billion hours of GPU time to simulate nukes using stolen bitcoin. Hoi. Truly dystopian!

Neither Scaleway, Oracle nor AWS ever asked me to scan an ID document to prove my identity. I presume my debit card details were sufficient.

Or Hetzner Object Storage! Was released last week and, as you'd expect, cheaper than all of the above (though r2 would be cheapest if you need a lot of bandwidth, since it's free with them)

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