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Comment by jerrythegerbil | Hacker News Reader

As a (previous) customer of Proton from many years and a user of their drive product, you should be aware that earlier this year the drive API endpoints began to block their own VPN egress quite often for rate limiting. They also block many cloud provider’s egress. They also don’t officially support rclone, and their changing API spec often breaks the compatibility.

I saw the writing on the wall and migrated rapidly earlier this year ahead of crypto product launches ahead of the email fiasco. It was hard to get data back out, even then.

Proton still stands for privacy. But the dark patterns for lock-in I can do without.

Hetzner Storage boxes with rclone and the “crypt” option are a drop-in replacement, at ~$40 for 20TB. That’s where I went instead.

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As a current (avid) user of Proton VPN and Drive, I have never seen issues with interactions between proton drive and their vpn.

I have, and the technical support representative at Proton confirmed it, but not without implying that it was my fault for using rclone. I asked the official recommendation for Linux users to do automated or scriptable backups onto a Proton drive and the answer was that some kind of SDK was planned for the future. Proton drive stopped working completely with rclone shortly after that, which was about two months ago.

I want to be happy with proton but their poor linux support across all their products makes it difficult.

To be honest, all consumer cloud storage providers get touchy when you access them via API.

Dropbox API refuses to sync certain 'sensitive' files like game backups (ROMs or ISOs). There is no way for Dropbox to know if you own the game and thus can own a backup, they just play file police.

I wish Hetzner made storage boxes available in their US regions.

I wonder if it would ever be possible to reach that value-per-dollar in the current economy.

Hetzner works because it was built a long time ago when talent was cheap, which it was because the property Ponzi wasn't at the stage where an average post-tax middle-class salary barely covers rent. Since then they've managed to stay afloat because it's only maintenance and small incremental changes from that point on.

Building such a new operation (and offering competitive prices) from scratch today would be impossible based on labor costs alone. This is presumably the same reason they don't offer their very-good-value dedicated servers in the US either, only "cloud" VPSes which are orders of magnitude more expensive.

This theory ignores the entire Midwest rust belt where the property pricing squeeze often barely exists and senior level engineers barely cross $100k for salary.

By your logic AWS should also be cheap since it was also built under similar timing.

Hetzner is cheap because they don’t provide the same level of abstractions. They also have competitors in the same price range. They aren’t wildly unique.

Dutchie here married to someone from the Midwest. Can confirm, those houses look really cheap there. It was one of the reasons why we considered living there. But the Netherlands won out over other things (e.g. healthcare).

Boy did you make the right choice.

What you describe does not reflect the situation where Hetzner is located.

I think the situation may not reflect cost of hands and housing. But the sunk cost of Hetzner to be in Germany, compared with the break-ground cost to construct their existing model in the rest of the world: I think that part is true. Selling off services in German hosted racks is at this point, massive profit on low price because the sunk cost has already been covered. They are sweating an asset into people like us, who want cheap disk but not the 100% reliable coverage of a contract which gives us replication, offsite, 3-2-1 class services. If they took that into the US the sunk cost component would not be covered, their sell price would be significantly less profitable.

The cost of hands and housing for hands, yea thats marginal in this.

How can someone not familiar with the technical details use the alternative you suggest? Is there software (even if paid) that can sync to it?

A non technical person would probably Google “Hetzner Storage Box”, click the first link, and read the page that answers all of those questions.

There is many free software suites that Hetzner Storage box supports, up to and including official support for rclone (the free tool used in the post we’re replying to).

https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

How would you handle end to end encryption?

Probably using rclone (the free tool used in the post we’re replying to).

What was the email fiasco?

It's a storm in a teacup.

Effectively there was a proposed Swiss Law that would force Protonmail to cooperate in sharing customer data with authorities if requested.

The law hasn't passed, and it was even deemed illegal by the EU.

It did raise an interesting issue though, as Protomail was strictly in Switzerland, they realised that they were at the whim of their lawmakers (which was kinda the point in the first place as Switzerland has great privacy laws). However, if those laws did become adversarial, it would greatly affect Protonmail users. This is why they started diversifying some services outside of Switzerland, in case something like this ever did come to pass.

It's not a storm in a teacup.

They lost thousands of emails and they treated every customer individually while blocking people from complaining on their subreddit.

Then, it was posted here on HN and they finally decided to stand up and fix their reputation by saying they care and want to do better, after months of silencing the issue as much as possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33432296

Oh... It appears we were talking about 2 different things. After reading what you wrote, it appears that too is a storm in a teacup.

You are complaining about them "losing thousands of emails" when that is clearly not the case. The issue was with their IMAP bridge, meaning the emails in question would have been lost on a local host, not on Protonmail, and the 'lost emails' were fully recoverable just by logging into the web interface.

The emails were lost as it was rewritten by the bridge hence causing a loss.

You are, once again, confidently incorrect.

There's also the controversy around the CEO: https://blog.joyrex.net/moving-on-from-proton

comment about the linked blog post: he replaced Proton Drive with Synology, which is kinda cheating (comparing apples to apple trees). Also he did not include a cloud drive in his pricing calculations, which is also cheating...

Anyway, for anyone actually looking for good cloud drive hosting, without any BS: rsync.net (you encrypt on your side before sending anything. I use Vorta with them).

Also the same server can be used by multiple (trursted) users, like family members etc.

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