i am always angry if i see articles about them here on HN because such a vendor should be blacklisted and not promoted.
That’s not my experience. We get these emails about once every 6 months, we act and respond, and they don’t take anything down.
Is it possible that maybe others had a different experience than you, and those experiences are as valid as your own?
Besides, what was your website about? I've received notices I had to reply to within 24-hours, otherwise they delete the servers. But I've always replied and complied, so never had any servers deleted.
Even if most people will have no problem with them, I’d say that knowing how a company handles edge cases like this is much more valuable than knowing how the handle things when everything is fine.
If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high.
If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and not checking emails as frequently (given - I assume - that many of Hetzner’s customers are individuals) or any other number of reasonable situations, you’ve effectively had no warning before service termination and deletion of data.
I don’t mind cloud providers acting on suspicious usage patterns or abuse reports but there has to be some kind of due process or it just ends up unnecessarily destroying goodwill in a brand/provider.
What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc.
I know one company with a very good manager and I think they would have managed it with 5 people being in the group of people who would handle this kind of thing (keeping track of all services etc. Obviously only 1-2 person does this but redundancy so it falls back when they are on vacation), slightly over 30 people in company size altogether.
If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.
If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.
Realistically to have 24/365 email coverage you'd need like, full-time founders or at least a couple of paid employees.
For what I was considering, I will be a "founder" but I'll still be working my day job. So effectively that is > 16 hours per day (work + sleep) I need to dedicate to the day job. While I will generally be able to respond within 24 hours, I can't 100% guarantee it.
some random app vendor didn't like the free promotion on our website https://macupdater.net/
we can delete any "offending" page within a few hours, but taking the whole server offline first and asking questions later is not OK by Hetzner.
others had better experiences and got a 24-hour timeframe. just asking but is this during business hours or can they send you a notice on saturday and you'll be offline by sunday? doesn't seem much better.
I was considering them for a small project, but as this project will be nobody's fulltime job, I can't guarantee that I or anybody else would necessarily see that email within 24 hours.
They offered to "recover" the account, which was basically just an account shell with my info. All of the assets and backups had been permanently erased.
Now we need to know the full story. Did you have a public DMCA takedown link and actually handle requests and the complainers just ignored that and went over your head to Herzner? or did you just wing it running a server with UGC thinking it's surely gonna be OK?
I am not saying you were wrong but you only tell a small part of the story
However this is more related to EU regulation rather than Hetzner itself.
Hosting things within the EU has become really tough.
I, as a European, using mostly dedicated servers within the EU (including Hetzner) haven't noticed this at all. What are you referring to specifically?
Some "use cases" like building marketing profiles and alike certainly has gotten harder, but that's a feature so I'm guessing you're not referring to that. I don't think general "hosting things" has become any harder than before, assuming you're not trying to slurp up as much data as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
Unfortunately the act is designed to block vague categories like "hate speech" and "misinformation" and has huge fines attached, so it's designed to ensure that very trigger-happy enforcement is the only workable strategy. It was written to whack Facebook and Google primarily but it's possible that the wording also captures Hetzner, or they're worried that it might.
If they do feel they fall under it then they'd probably have to automate takedowns in response to abuse reports. As otherwise they'd need 24/7 on-call content reviewers, which goes against their low cost nature. So if this is the cause it's really an issue with German law being unfriendly to smaller/cheaper content hosters.
The questions here are rhetorical. It doesn't matter what we think the answers are. The penalties are so huge that if there's even a tiny chance of a judge disagreeing with you, then you have to take measures to avoid the risk.
But sure, maybe eating a broccoli will be construed as murder in the future, so best not eat anything at all.
they did NOT give any 24 hours.
I have no idea if that was the reason, though.
f.ex. the situation with egress costing money in the US, but it's free on all EU location.s
Aren't you confusing Hetzner Cloud with Hetzner Robot (dedicated servers) here? AFAIK, Cloud has egress costs while Robot is usually unmetered.
They are exceptionally fast at detecting things like that though.