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Comment by sergioisidoro | Hacker News Reader

I really liked Hetzner but I got burned by one issue. I had some personal projects running there and the payment method failed. Automated email communications also failed among so much spam and email notifications I receive, and when I noticed the problem they had wiped all my data without possibility of recovery.

It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape, but also made me understand that a cloud provider is as good as their support and communications when things go south. Like an automated SMS would be great before you destroy my entire work. But because they are so cheap, they probably can't do that for every 100$/month account.

I've had similar issues with AWS, but they will have much friendlier grace periods.

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  > It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape

It should be a wake up moment about keeping backups as well.

Yep. And importantly - backups on different cloud providers, with different payment methods.

Sorry to hear that.

But if you do not pay and you do not check your e-mails, it's basically your fault. Who is using SMS these days even?

Yes, absolutely my fault. But these problems happen. Credit cards expire, people change companies or go on leaves, off boarding processes are not always perfect, spam filters exist.

Add to that the declining experience of email with so much marketing and trash landing in the inbox (and sometimes Gmail categorizing important emails as "Updates")

That's why grace periods for these situations are important.

Who uses SMS? This might be a cultural difference, but in Europe they are still used a lot. And would you be ok if your utility company cut your electricity bill just with an email warning? Or being asked to appear to court by email?

How long after shutting you down did they delete your data?

That period should definitely be longer than a few days.

Hetzner will almost immediately nuke your data if you miss a payment and often outright ban you and your business from ever using them again.

Hetzner is great for cheap personal sites but I would never use them for any serious business use-cases. Other than failed payments, Hetzner also has very strict content policies and they use user reports to find offenders. This means that if just a few users report your website, everything is deleted and you're banned with zero warning or support, whether the reports are actually true or not. (This also means you can never use Hetzner for anything that has user uploaded content, it doesn't matter if you actively remove offending material because if it ever reaches their servers you're already SOL.)

That sounds really bad.

Hmm this sounds scary, even though I've had very positive experience with them. Any alternatives with similarly priced offerings that do not face this issue?

> Add to that the declining experience of email with so much marketing and trash landing in the inbox (and sometimes Gmail categorizing important emails as "Updates")

This is also something under your control - you don't have to use Gmail as your email provider for important accounts and you can whitelist the domains of those service providers if you don't rely on a subpar email service.

I had payment issues with Hetzner too, that was back in 2018, haven’t used them since. At least back then, and at least for me, they were unlike any other provider I’ve used which would send you plenty of warnings if they fail to bill you. The very first email I got from them that smelt of trouble was “Cancellation of Contract”, at which point my account was closed and I could only pay by international bank wire. (Yes I just checked all my correspondence with them to make sure I’m not smearing them.) Amusingly they did send payment warning after account closure. Why not before? No effing clue. That was some crazy shit.

I've had billing issues, and they have let it be resolved a couple of weeks later.

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