Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning?
That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially for their customer.
That’s actually insane and business killing. Both for Hetzner’s reputation and potentially for their customer.
Maybe they're cheap for a reason.
They deleted all of my data a month in due to not beleiving my name was real, and without even bothering to contact me to verify anything. They deleted my backups as well because I was dumb enough to keep them under the same account.
I learned a valuable lesson the hard way and have improved my methods as a result, but sad that it cost me an entire month's work due to carelessness and recklessness on their part.
Sure, it's "cheap for a reason", but let's not pretend like this type of expectation is advertised, especially as many on HN tout them as a drop-in replacement for competitors.
Wonder what's the algorithm they use to know a "real name"
I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.
I actually moved a business of ~100 FTEs from AWS to Hetzner once. Aside from the migration cost, the price was roughly 25% of AWS.
At the end, the biggest gain was not monetary, but human. For years, that business could retain skilled engineers who had the opportunity to work close to bare metal, caring about the nitty-gritty technical details of backups, failover and high availability.
And they did not even cost much. That they had so much leeway in designing the system instead of "relying on the cloud" was a major retainer.
I left many years ago, the business switched frameworks since then but they stayed on Hetzner.
P.S. Yes, that was before Hetzner Cloud became a thing )
* crypto mining (I used it when it wasn't causing much trouble but I noticed my nodes were constantly attacked at a ratio I newer saw for other servers); IIRC Hetzner's current ToS forbid crypto mining
* things in legally grey area which might be legal in some places but not so in others, especially in the EU
* protect your servers well; if you become a victim of an attack and your servers will start attacking other, Hetzner will isolate them and notify you so that you can solve the problem
Other than that, the only problems I had in the last 15 or so years are failing bare-metal components that they promptly replaced, that's all.
So beware of their ToS.
I disagree. It's not just the nuisance of wasted clock cycles. It also makes the network a juicy target for hackers. To anyone about to reply "you don't think people hack them now?", how do you think the correlation of attack sophistication and frequency looks for a network with/without a bunch of FREE MONEY inside? :)
Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.
So moot.
Besides, no mainstream crypto is mined anymore except Bitcoin.
> also some arbitrary financial technologies they don't like
It is obviously a hostile language created by lawyers who did not spend much time researching the subject.
Of course it's unenforceable in practice and that is why a hefty chunk of Ethereum nodes are hosted on Hetzner for years and years with no problems.
They do that even within EU, and even when your credit card passes 3D secure validation.
[citation needed]. Even when they shut down Russian customers they gave advance warning. This is the first time I have heard of service being shut off (and data deleted) without any warning.
That’s what the post said. But of course we have no idea if it’s true or not. No evidence was provided, and we are only hearing one side of the story.
And in that hackernews thread we have dozens of people relating similar stories.
Was that on a phone call? Because if not, surely there is some record?
The reality that they have this power, and that they'd delete data irretrievably, scares me.
Last year I had a misconfigured port on a Docker service, and someone was able to exploit it and run a port scanner. It was during a period that I was away from home, so if I hadn't seen their service abuse emails in time, I could have returned home after a few days to find all my data wiped out (or uptime monitors complaining).
as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service
German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU
True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany.
Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you loose once, but if 80 of the 100 customers you scammed don't sue you or don't win, then you're still at a net positive and therefore it's profitable to keep doing that.
Also that Germany doesn't have common law, so lawsuits aren't arbitrated based on precedent, so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law that minimizes their risk of loosing by slam dunk every time. Also, some German judges art just tech illiterate boomers who will throw out a case they don't even understand unless you're Axel Springer.
(some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.
Secondly, Germans aren't used to being very demanding and lighting a brand on fire on social media the way Americans/Anglophones do on Twitter when they don't like something, partly because of cultural reasons where making a fuss in public is discouraged/shamed, partly because of legal reasons where a company can sue your or at least send you scary legal letters for libel if you damage their brand online like that in Germany. Or at lest, the company can simply demand the social media platform take down the offending posts, and by German law they have to comply which the likes of Google/Meta will comply automatically without any arbitration.
Also, culturally, the conservative Germans seem to have have gaslit themselves into believing everything "Made in Germany" is perfect without fault, while everything made abroad is of poor quality or at least worthy of scrutiny, so they just default to using German products without looking across the fence to check out the foreign competition. This way of thinking is more typical of manufactured goods but not sure how much it applies to SW products and services.
Couple these with the difficulty of starting and scaling a business in Germany as a small entrepreneur and with the legal and bureaucratic hoops designed to keep foreign competitors out, mean that German companies operating in Germany who became established players, have litte incentive to improve beyond the bare minimum, so they can keep providing poor quality services while still staying in business. It's classic of an economy of well connected dinosaurs sitting on old money.
This is factually false.
> (some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.
Any examples here? The fact that contracts like these, if you forgot to cancel them, can only renew for one month is better than anything I've seen anywhere else. Also that you must be able to cancel anything online with the click of a button if the contract was made online. Add that to the fact that any clause is worthless if it includes something a reasonable person wouldn't expect. I don't know many countries that actually enforce this - Germany does all the time.
The problem is you always need to sue to get justice for that which means paying for lawyers and consuming time and money plus stress.
(Also in some cases, it's the other way around. If your landlord wants to increase the rent it's on them to sue you if they have a valid case.)
Do you have a source for this? (maybe it's a new thing) Because the subject of cancelling contracts is even a meme in the German (expat) community
(of course for your standard German you need to be able to plan your life years ahead)
Initial contract terms can be longer (up to 24 months) and as the site points out, the new rules only apply to new contracts, others can be up to annual.
> Regulations for fairer consumer contracts are on the 1. March 2022 came into force and ensure that you can terminate automatic contract renewals for contracts for regular goods deliveries and services (such as streaming services or magazine subscriptions) more quickly.
> In addition, the 1st was founded. July 2022 a termination button duty introduced to simplify termination processes.
And yet they're still put ion the rental agreement because the landlords know they can get away with it s it's a seller's market.
>I really have no idea what you're talking about here.
Google or look on reddit posts of foreigners getting screwed in Germany.
If your landlord puts something in the contract that is against the law you can sign it and simply ignore it.
Or simply because the alternative is being homeless?
And why should the default for foreigners be getting screwed?
As I already mentioned, you can simply sign a contract and then proceed to ignore all the illegal clauses. They're not binding.
> And why should the default for foreigners be getting screwed?
People getting screwed because of them not knowing their rights is basically something that can happen in every legal system, and if people come from other countries without certain legal protections, they're more likely to not know about them. That's just a reality of life.
And if it's about the apartment, you've probably paid a deposit. And if you ignore some of the clauses, they will probably try to get back at you and punish you by not returning the deposit (or part of it). From here - GOTO 1 ;(
This is total nonsense.
I have the opposite perception. Most of the customer-screwing business practices I constantly see in other countries don't exist in Germany, because nobody even dares trying them.
I had Google take down my (negative but factual) review of a restaurant because of apparent "libel". There was basically no recourse (except "you can file a complaint but we'll probably ignore it"). I guess that explains why there are so many bad top rated restaurants.
one would have to reconsider a century of stereotypes if they weren't.
For what now?