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You can't put a price tag on individual users, thus it might be hard to determine when a user causes Facebook to suffer a loss just for hosting their content. See it like this: If a user blocks all advertisement, he still interacts with his friends - which is hard to value.

On the other hand - if you create an account, upload a few photo albums and don't add any friends to your account, you will probably cause a loss ;)

The first reason has been explained already: They are afraid of (online) credit card and identify theft.

The second reason, why a lot of people (especially from Germany) will not be asked to provide a scan, is that they have a credit history in Germany. It is really common to check your credit history first. The german credit agency they are using probably has no information about you, that is why Hetzner wants to make sure that you are not trying to defraud them.

It can be really tough to buy stuff online in Germany if the local credit agencies don't have information about your credit history.

I would love too do that, but most of my customers wouldn't be able to access the server afterwards. That's the only thing that's holding me back.

I tried, but the server seems to be busy? I am not getting a result.

I wouldn't exactly say that the list is wrong, just because half of it also applies to Python or Ruby. All languages have some kind of issues, so I guess it's an okayish list of Javascript specific gotchas.

Absolutely true. Though it would be very nice of them to let me upgrade my server while keeping my old subnet for free (which they don't). I can understand their rational.

That is true, but you have to keep in mind that you have to get the flexipack if you want to run more than 3 virtual machines with their own ip on it. And honestly - if my server had 64gb ram I would want to do that. "back in the days" I got my own subnet for free, now they are charging for it pretty heftily.

For starters you could check if they have a github account. This might not be the best indicator, but it could give you a hint.

You could explicitly ask for open source projects they have contributed too (or that they are following).