Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about Hetzner, but there's something completely inhuman about the overall tone of that email even on top of the overall crappiness of the situation.

> No lead time (not even a paltry 24 hours) to find an alternative service provider.

> No mention or clarification that any data will be available for download in some fashion. Imagine relying on them for anything truly critical and being insta-banned. You can't operate a tech company on a server like that.

> No apology for having to do this. Using the word "unfortunately" doesn't count. They're giving a human being a shitty day: the least they can do is playact at being a tad sympathetic.

> No explanation of any wrongdoing or a reason for why this is needed. Even a simple "Due to legal requirements" or "excess resource usage" might help.

> No way to contact anybody if there's any error or outstanding business issues.

> A display of real arrogance by using the word "final" and "cannot be appealed" in the message.

> Addressing themselves as the "Your Hetzner Online Team" rather than a specific individual. If a human made a decision, they should own responsibility for it. If a human didn't make that decision and it was some algorithm, there's no way it shouldn't be appealable.

They are learning "best practices" from the best (Google and others), I imagine.

Going to say this was not the first warning. They would not do this even if you are doing something very wrong the first incident; maybe your server was hacked etc. There is more to the story. I would call them myself as I also do with OVH when they send me panicky emails, and it is always something we can easily resolve. And yes, I did have a few hacks long ago with them that were my fault and port scanners & spambots were installed. But I was told that and got amble time, in rescue mode, to fix and update it all.

Unfortunately Hetzner cutting you off seems to be a common occurrence. Even if you haven’t done anything wrong, they can essentially fire you as a customer if they decide you’re too expensive for them.

I have used OVH in the past, but these days I would definitely think twice before using budget providers like these.

Maybe they treat me better because I am a long term customer. That could be. I don’t think these providers are that budget really; OVH has a budget provider (kimsufi) but ovh isn’t one anymore, imho. Unless compared with cloud and ‘enterprise’ providers.

Anyway maybe it is because I am a long term customer of all of these; I do tend to have a talk upfront what I plan todo and tend to make sure I have a contact there. OVH is too big for that now (I had a contact until about 8 years ago in France), OVH is not.

If not aws or other overpriced (for dev/test stuff) cloud provider; what do you use as non-budget provider?

Well I'm not 100% sure how it is these days, but IIRC OVH IPs used to have a bad reputation, because their cheap prices attracted spammers. On the other hand, my current e-mail provider uses Hetzner and I haven't had any problems getting my e-mails delivered, so who knows.

I currently host my stuff on Uberspace, if I needed a 'real' VM I would probably go with TransIP because I already have my domains there and they are local to my country. I'm just talking from a personal perspective though, I'm not hosting any business servers or anything like that.

Admittedly it's also very possible that the reason you hear more about issues with OVH and Hetzner is just because they have more customers.

I am indeed also overpaying for a VM and a few domains on TransIP (I am also from NL like you I guess) :) And I had massive issues with them in the past. I had less issues with Hetzner anyway. So also a matter of experience.

This was the first email I received, after my welcome email on July 15.

This was a dev instance, maybe I was hacked, cannot rule that out. But was not expecting an outright ban with no details on what has happened.

Sorry to hear it; it seems very strange. Maybe indeed because the account was new and ‘something’ flagged it. I would try to call them anyway; phone is usually easier in this case; find it hard to believe they would check your info and just hang up.

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