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Comment by slig | Hacker News Reader

That's terrifying. Did they at least give you time to backup your data?

Please note that Hetzner does this only in couple cases: a) fake account data ; b) previous strikes (unpaid invoices, abuse etc..) with them ; c) in some cases customer is from country they do not do business with. I bet gazzilion OP above is within a or b

A) No B) No C) No

I got the same thing. My account was neither fake or had any previous strikes, it was a new account.

Their ToS also classifies Crypto-Mining, farming or plotting (whatever that is) as grounds for cancellation.

Also everything forbidden by German law results in a cancellation. So if you would have for example posted something before 2017 about a state leader that might seem like an insult your server might be gone. ( https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-07-26/ger... )

https://cdn.hetzner.com/assets/Uploads/downloads/AGB-en.pdf Section 8.3

Make sure you avoid p2p stuff that scans for other servers on the hetzner network, too, even if it's legitimate and not infringing on copyright. They won't ban you right away, but their systems will detect it and give you 24h to confirm you're not infected with malware before shutting down the server. For IPFS or Bittorrent, you should be able to use it for legitimate purposes after blocking the local IPs.

d) the customer is black, romanian or a jew

I'm awaiting donwvotes, but honestly, if they don't give you a reason, everything can be one, and refusing a service on arbitrary grounds seems illegal to me :D

It's a private service; private companies can choose whoever they want to do business with. They're not a public service.

Are you sure about that? I know of a precedent in Poland, where a company refused to service (print some kind of invitation cards) some LGBT people, and was punished for it.

I imagine the laws in Germany are similar to the laws in Poland in that regard, both countries being in the European Union.

In USA, I really doubt any company could refuse to serve black people. Or women.

I wonder if the downvoters of my previous message share your (I'd say quite wrong) opinion or there's another reason for the downvotes - I'm up for a discussion!

I don't know about the downvotes, and I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but there's a difference between a service to the public (e.g. a café or a restaurant) and a service such as Hetzner.

No there is not, there is a difference between government services and private businesses but all private businesses play by the same rules

In Germany you are allowed to discriminate on all not protected factors.

protected factors are: race or ethnic background, gender, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation.

belief has a very high bar to meet, you are for example still allowed to discriminate against members of a political party.

discriminating based on location matching ip adress or not doing business with certain countrys is fully legal

I was evaluating them at the time. No data loss

Maybe you personally had no data loss, but I believe that the question was the more general "could other users in this situation expect to be able to recover their data?".

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