No, when you BUY a server you should be able to do what you want with it, including burning up the CPU in a week. When you RENT a server, you get to do exactly what the owner says you can do.
I paid AWS for that, but I surely impacted the lifespan of that box compared to someone else that would use it for something more traditional. AWS seems happy to let people use EC2 for whatever they'll pay for, for the most part, but does this mean that Hetzner doesn't want me to calculate the next version of my fractal on their machines?
Or has Hetzner just decided they don't want Cryptocurrencies, and that's exactly the line?
Renting out hardware involves setting a price point that turns a healthy profit assuming some average hardware lifespan.
Crypto miners that rent hardware are leveraging arbitrage though, where the price of hardware rentals is just low enough that the crypto mining generates more money than the rental cost.
This means they will rent as many resources as Hetzner will let them and hammer them as long and hard as Hetzner will let them, because it’s pure profit. All the risks associated with buying hardware for crypto mining is dumped on Hetzner’s collective lap for a fee that’s too small to justify it.
Either Hetzner can raise prices to eliminate this arbitrage opportunity (at the expense of their normal/primary customer base and core business), bet big on crypto and pivot to being a crypto mining company and cut out these middle-men, or just ban crypto and go back to business as usual. If Hetzner has any faith at all in their core business model, banning crypto mining is the obvious choice.
Same with Hetzner. They aren't just renting a box to people. They rent a box and SLAs, basically promises that that box performs as advertised. And to achieve that they have invested a lot, which will be pointless if they'll start mining themselves.
Hetzner calculates tightly on the assumption that many renters don't tax the hardware. This assumption enables a profit on rented hardware. Like already said, arbitrage, but different: by taking away profit from Hetzner.
Meanwhile in a top voted comment from yesterday's thread: "I'm thrilled by [Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining]": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27200700
Right where they were, given the rather significant difference between owning and renting.
And completely off topic.
So you'd oppose right-to-repair if manufacturers are willing to carry out the repairs themselves, presumably negating the environmental/waste benefits?
>And completely off topic.
That's the beauty of comment trees. If it becomes too off topic for you, you can collapse it.
If you want to treat your car however you like, you can buy a car and abuse it to your heart's content.
If you’re asking philosophically: the answer is exactly the same. The line is wherever they say it is, it’s their hardware.
Uh, in the contract (here the Terms and Conditions) the customer agreed to? That's kind of how business transactions work. Hence why they updated the T&C. This isn't some abstract question of philosophy, it's their hardware that they rent under their T&C which they can revise at will (and customers may then go elsewhere, or not).
In the case of rental in general, it often includes some expectations around non-abusive usage. Part of the entire freaking model of "rental" is that a customer of some property can cease usage at will on a rapid time frame, dealing with no capital expenditure/depreciation/maintenance issues, and then the property can be rented to new customer. If one customer destroys said property or massive degrades it such that it can no longer be used for future customers, that completely changes the entire equation. And most rental businesses outside of special (and extremely expensive) situations don't want to deal with that. There isn't anything unreasonable about that. If people want to use hardware to the absolute max with absolutely zero control except the law and contracts for their energy/bandwidth, that's what colo is for.
Well specifically here, their T&C has 9.3 (https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/agb):
>9.3 We are also entitled to terminate the contractual relationship for good cause without notice.
>Another important reason, that can result in block or determination without notice, may be that the customer uses content, which affects the performance or the safety of the server.
So basically, "Are you being an asshole and fucking up our equipment and/or experience for other customers? Do that and GTFO." And that's it. It's not a big deal.
>You can't say that T&C ban mining crypto for proof of stake
They certainly could. They can put anything not contrary to law in the T&C they want, and they don't need any reason for it either. They can flat out forbid cryptomining period regardless of if it's proof of work or proof of stake or proof of steak or anything else. They can do it because it mostly tends to be abusive and it's too much of a PITA to sort through and "why the hell don't you just buy your own server and colo", or the can do it if they feel it's morally wrong, or whatever.
>In other words "mining" is equivalent to "computation" of any sort
It's not though, it's mining. They can discriminate by application if they like. Now as a practical matter sure, if you're doing something that causes zero issues then even if they say "no mining" you're highly unlikely to face any sort of trouble. They don't seem to be actively and zealously out to get customers, they just don't want assholes as customers. It's obviously unlikely they'd bother anybody merely doing reasonable computation. But a blanket "no mining" rule may still be worth it to them for what to point to in case of issues given the business incentives involved. And that's ok.
I mean, it seems like you're trying to be cute here and rules lawyer as if they're a computer running a program, not humans running a business. That's not the case though. Customers and Hetzner have 100% short period consensual transactional relationships in a crowded market. Neither side owes the other anything in particular outside a single billing cycle. They don't need a bright line, and indeed bright lines tend to be INCREDIBLY challenging and a bad idea when it comes to this kind of general population service limits (ie., outside of high price serious SLA ones where someone genuinely is paying for everything). It gets too complex to tailor to situations like "John Doe has been a great customer for 10+ years and needed to do this one time super heavy thing and we're going to cut him some slack" vs "Joe Blow who just joined a few months ago on a bottom barrel tier and whined at support constantly and suddenly thrashed our hardware pursuing the latest pump and dump", which businesses certainly can and do treat differently even if both parties "used the same amount of hardware resources in a given period". If it becomes a big enough deal, a judge can sort out whether something was for "good cause" or not, but it's unlikely to go to court over such chickenfeed money (nor would an abusive customer win anyway).
In short: If you want a specific SLA with bright lines and so forth, you need to negotiate a specific contract to that effect. Expect to pay for it. If you want the "sign up in 30 seconds on the website come one come all!" offer I'd pay close attention to the T&C and in particular sections like 9.3 above, which if anything is fantastically generous to the customer vs what you'd get from American companies.
That said, Hetzner will wield the banhammer whenever you do things that interfere with their network infrastructure, so port scanning or connecting to many potentially unroutable IPs is a sure way to get your server taken offline. And I believe most if not all cryptocurrency networks run decentralized with P2P connectivity, which means they would cause a high rate of unroutable connection requests.
Also, they can't really offer a beefy server and free HDD replacements for €50 monthly if too many people abuse it and run Chia. So as a current customer, I'm quite happy that they keep the noisy neighbors out ;)