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Comment by ethanwillis | Hacker News Reader

This might be true in terms of direct monetary costs.

I want to like Hetzner but the bureaucratic paper process of interacting with them and continuing to interact with them is just... awful.

Not that the other clouds don't also have their own insane bureaucracies so I guess it's a wash.

I'm just saying, I want a provider that leaves me alone and lets me just throw money at them to do so.

Otherwise, I think I'd rather simply deploy my own oversized server in a colo even with the insanely overpriced hardware prices currently.

edit: And shortly after writing this comment I see: "Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124930

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Yes there is some bureaucratic paper churn to deal with them, but it's a one time cost. I did it once probably more than 10 years ago. Since then, login to the website takes me <10s (with OTP) every couple of days and then finding what I'm looking for in the web UI or the API doc is usualy just 3 or 4 clicks away (their website is a bit messy).

Compare that with AWS, where login is slow and unreliable (anyone else got an error message after every login and has to refresh to get in?), the website is a giant mess collapsing under its own weight, and slow like it's still running websphere.

Over the last 10 years, I've certainly lost way more time working through aws paperless bureaucracy than complying with Hetzner paper bureaucracy. And I'm not even using aws for that long.

Can you elaborate on what the bureaucracy is you experienced? I'm a Hetzner customer since last month and so far I thoroughly enjoy it. Have not encountered any bureaucracy yet.

I think I was still being a bit too harsh even after throwing into my comment that other providers aren't perfect either.

But basically after the initial paperwork I had some issues with my account getting flagged even though I wasn't using it 99.999% of the time. It's not a huge deal for me because I wasn't trying them out for anything serious. I just questioned how often that might happen if I was actually using it seriously and what kind of headaches it could cause me while re-verifying everything with them.

From people I know if everything is going good then their service is great. Server performance is good, pricing is good, etc.

You’re renting an entire infrastructure, I think a bit of KYC is reasonable.

I had more trouble onboarding AWS SES, with a process that felt more like me begging. With which I said fuck it and went with self hosting ever since (on a bare metal server no less)

I was asked for a passport photo when I tried to open an account. They literally asked for a passport photo immediately after the signup form. Like WHAT? I couldn't believe my eyes. The most insane shit I've ever seen.

If I was letting some random person rent one of my servers without oversight, I'd sure want to see some ID first.

Quite commonly required by law in Europe; but often times not implemented very seriously by hosting providers, but Germany seems to be an exception.

I remember a time in France for instance, about 15years ago, it was mandatory to provide your ID when bying a mere prepaid sim card. No seller would actually check, and a coworker of mine who used to work for one of the largest french telcos at the time told me that once they ran some stats over the customer database and noticed that most names where from popular comics and TV show. They laughted and moved on. These days, the seller would at least ask for some ID.

aka circling the cattle.

It's weird seeing people on HN complain about this aspect regarding Hetzner because it's the complete opposite of my experience. Two years I've rented a dedicated server for around 40 euros monthly from Hetzner as a business customer and I had no issues whatsoever. They didn't ask for a business license or personal ID or anything really, I provided a VAT ID along with a business name and address but it wasn't anything extra compared to what I also provided Migadu or Porkbun for example.

I suppose they might have more KYC procedures for personal accounts based outside the EU otherwise I have no clue.

I'm based in the US and I tried twice to create an account for Hetzner (a personal account as well as a company / startup account). They rejected all my attempts. I don't quite understand their business model :)

similar experience, as well. not sure what's going on with hetzner.

Same, Hetzner has always been very flexible with me when it comes to practically anything. It's always been humans answering my queries, with of course various quality but overall quite good especially for the price. I gave them some VAT number to get reduced prices at some point and that was it :shrug:

Used them for more than 10 years. There was a one off, straightforward process of providing some details back then, and then nothing more.

I love their pricing and the simplicity, but they don't give the impression of being highly skilled. They have zero managed services, not even managed K8. Their s3 (very mature tech at this point) is utterly garbage even one year after their launch.

Then the bureaucracy you mention which is just a reflection how they work internally as well.

> I want a provider that leaves me alone and lets me just throw money at them to do so.

That’s been my experience with Hetzner.

A lot of people get butthurt that a business dares to verify who they’re dealing with as to filter out the worst of the worst (budget providers always attract those), but as long as you don’t mind the reasonable requirement to verify your ID/passport they’re hands-off beyond that.

That's fair and I don't have any major issues with that.

I guess my concern on the bureaucracy is if you are unlucky enough to get flagged as a false positive it can be an annoying experience. And I can't really blame them too hard for having to operate that way in an environment of bad actors.

You're definitely right that the budget providers do attract the types of people trying to do bad things/exploit them in some way.

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