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Comment by metabrew | Hacker News Reader

IRCCloud had to move off hetzner for this reason. We were continually getting ddos'ed, and hetzner showed no interest in working with us to try and mitigate.

At one point they just suggested we "ask the responsible parties to stop", and closed the ticket.

Now we are on Black Lotus. Expensive, but the regular 50mb-10gbit ddos attacks are mitigated just fine.

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...however, if you aren't concerned about ddos, I still recommend hetzner.

Excellent value for money dedicated servers, with good automated systems. You can remotely reboot a dedicated server into a recovery image and fix problems yourself. You can run the install process yourself too, so you get exactly what you want... except ddos mitigation.

Yes, and also except for the hard drives ... I got dedicated server which had hard disk problems after less than 1 month (both hard disks in raid were almost dead), and they offered me to PAY additional fee to put hard disks which is not new o_O (they claim it has less than 1000 hours operation, and asked me like 20-30 eur per HDD, I'm not sure honestly), or to give me another one for FREE but it was possibly also crap ... I asked them to put free one, and I had to reinstal everything and I had to manually backup all data, reinstall system and set everything up from scratch because the RAID was not an option with 2 "damaged" hard disks ...

Did the disks have SMART errors to begin with? They're a budget provider, you can't expect brand new hardware with every new installation. Though, I'd agree that if the drives had a high number of reallocated/offline sectors, CRC errors, and the like, then hetzner was at fault. However, given that the raid array initialized & ran fine for a month, it seems that it could have just been a case of disk failure.

As for making backups & reinstalling the system yourself. You should have expected that. Hetzner is not a managed provider.

That sounds awful, how long ago did this happen? I had extremely good support both times one of my drives failed, I just followed their tutorial on drive replacement and they plugged me the new drive. After that I let the RAID replicate to the new drive and was done. I'm from Germany so I don't know if the support is a different one for me, but they never asked me to pay for a replace.

That said, almost every (cheap) server hoster will have something in their TOS forbidding IRC use.

I have no particular insight into why IRC is so troubling, it used to be popular for malware botnets (C&C) and it attracts its fair share of script kiddies.

Wow, thank you so much for irccloud, it's amazing! Paying customer since about 5 minutes into the beta here :) I didn't realise you founded last.fm too!

Was that not also because of efnet klining hetzner?

that was just salt in the wound.. we were getting slammed by ddos and null routed on a regular basis before that happened.

Offtopic, but: IRCCloud is amazing.

Wow, you founded Last.fm and IRCCloud.

Thanks for both!

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