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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Note that if your credit card expires, Hetzner will just turn off networking to your stuff until you fix it. No warnings given, and you'll find out when your alerting/customers/staff contact you to let you know something is wrong.

Guess how I found out... :(

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You can pre-charge your account to give yourself a buffer in case your payment method doesn't work for whatever reason, although it requires a bank transfer.

While I guess that's useful, when my CC expired other places sent reminders/warnings which is the standard business approach.

It was only Hetzner which didn't, and instead they turned off networking to all of our stuff (dedicated servers, some VMs, etc) with no warning. Then their support team screwed us around for a while as well.

I'm about as unimpressed with them as it's possible to get. :(

The standard business approach is to update card details before the card expires, instead of relying on service providers sending warnings when payments are already failing.

Life gets in the way, some things fall through the cracks. A good business will send warnings about expiring cards.

Sure. In this particular case it was "expired" early due to some random place guessing the number and the bank rightfully taking precautions.

I updated all of the places I remembered, but missed Hetzner and a few others. Only Hetzner didn't have their shit together enough to gracefully notify us. Or account support staff who were at all interested in assisting.

It's curious that you use expired to mean "payments were rejected before the expiration was reached".

Sure. Wrote that late at night when overly tired. There's nothing nefarious going on here.

I'm still not exactly sure of the correct terminology for the situation. I'd noticed two suspicious transactions on the credit card, rang up my bank about it, and we agreed they'd better generate a new credit card and kill the existing one.

I then contacted all of the places that I knew of to update them with the new credit card details. I missed Hetzner and (from rough memory) two others. Only Hetzner wasn't able to handle it correctly.

There are multiple warning levels and you should get email notifications. I happened to overlook those as well and also only noticed it when they turned off networking. However, that was two weeks after the invoice due and it got unblocked in seconds after the payment went through.

I assumed I'd missed warnings as well, but when I actually checked (after fixing the issue, because priorities) there were indeed no warning emails/sms/etc at all sent.

Literally, no kind of notification, warnings, anything at all. Due to this, and their support team being incredibly unhelpful during the outage, they're now on my personal blacklist for literally everything.

So instead of strongly recommended them, which I used to do, we've migrated 95% of everything off Hetzner and I'm hanging out for it to be 100%. And I warn others away from them at every opportunity. Like here. :)

We will not be returning to Hetzner. Ever.

I was using pre-charged account until waiting for a new bank account and credit card. I wasn't even hosting any VPS for a month or so, but Hetzner closed my account with no explanation, never got my money back. F*ck them, thieves.

Well that is indeed crazy, can totally understand your sentiment.

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