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Comment by Xunjin | Hacker News Reader

Great point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?

Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.

Hetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company.

US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!

Software In The Public Interest Inc. (creators of free desktop) is incorporated in New York so they have to follow US sanction law anyways.

Maybe it's time to consider changing it to another country which is actually OSS friendly and doesn't change all the time their politics.

PS: Sorry for the off-topic discussion.

RISC-V International moved from California (IIRC?) to Switzerland for basically this reason.

It's shocking and saddening to think one might need to change from the United States to some other country in order to seek freedom. But here we are

The USA being "Free" has mostly been a myth. It's "Free" if you're a member of the owner class, else you're freedom is subject to the whims of politicians and the wealthy. Aristocracy, really.

Yes agreed, although I think it's worth pointing out that the same is true of virtually every other country as well. Historically at least the US (generally speaking, plenty of people are exceptions throughout the entire history) aspired to freedom and equality, despite falling short.

True, but the spirit of the law died a long time ago, and the vision originally created by the founders has been distorted and "mythified" in favor of the desires and vices of monied interests.

Hetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it.

Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.

Are you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?

Do you?

Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware.

On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.

I had enough trouble with them that I don't even consider.

Such as? If you prefer, of course.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708

You're linking this everywhere, but it has absolutely zero relevance.

Your beef is not with Hetzner, but whoever decided to run the service. Unless the customer violates local legislation or the hosting providers ToS, the appropriate action is to leave the service running, be it AWS, GCP or Hetzner.

I would quite frankly have been very disappointed with them if they had done anything in response to you request.

There is no beef, just evidence that they do to run their service as professionally as other more established providers, which was the original argument and premise of the discussion.

Hetzner is German company and subject to German law. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Ignoring legal requirements is hardly professional.

Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed.

Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one.

Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.

Your expectations of what you wanted from Hetzner has nothing to do with their professionalism. They most certainly acted with outmost professionalism given the situation you describe, and the behavior to be expected from any hosting provider.

I get your frustration in the situation, but even if it would have been helpful to you, it would be extremely unprofessional for a hosting provider to invervene in the operations of its customers unless the customer violates the Terms of Service (an agreement you have no part in), a court order is made, or law enforcement makes a legally supported demand. Random legal notices sent by mail from strangers are not on this list, but could lead to Hetzner evaluating if a ToS violation is in effect that must be resolved.

If the customer is a business, it could be that they have breached the Impressum laws. It would have helped you if they had the impressum, but until legal action is taken it remains undecided if there is a violation, and if there was the consequence would be that the customer is liable for a written warning and in some cases a fine, as decided by the relevant authorities or a court of law.

I disagree. For one thing I think you misinterpret the legal situation. This is Germany, the provider is on the hook. Secondly, you do not have insight into the communication and I won't share it but I assure you their conduct was unprofessional.

The provider may be on the hook of legal consequences from authorities *if" their customer is a business offering services in Germany.

Nothing that would involve you as a third-party individual.

I think leaving disputes to the customer and only acting on legal orders is actually the most professional thing a provider can do.

Yes, with more than 100 VMs on Hetzner Cloud.

It's highly available though and the redundant replicas run on their separated physical machines

https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/placement-groups/overview/

Single machines die (and can't be started again for a few minutes to hours) every few months, but that's acceptable for me, and we also similar things happen at AWS.

Yes. Haven't had an outage in near 2 years according to our monitoring.

I do. I just rent 2 computers from Hetzner. One is main another is failover. If main dies failover kicks in while main is restored on another computer. Still way way cheaper than AWS which I would not touch with wooden pole unless required by client.

Sorry, but could you point out what is not professional? Not everyone needs a UI wrapper that offers tons of OSS services with high prices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708

How is this Hetzner's fault (or concern?)

"Hey your customer is hosting a website with random pictures on it. One of them of me is unflattering. Please make them fix it"

They were hosting a StackOverflow copy, which is OK because of Creative Commons. All my answers were still under my name as it should be.

The only difference to the original was my profile picture, which was an explicit porn image.

For several weeks everyone searching for my name or my StackOverflow answers saw that. I'm glad that I was not looking for a job at the time.

I exhausted all possibilities on all channels to rectify this situation short of using a lawyer. I put a lot of effort into getting things in order and seriously considered going the legal route but ultimately decided against it mainly because courts are hit and miss here when it comes to reputation damage of regular individuals as opposed to companies or celebrities.

EDIT: I should have answered your question how this is Hetzner's fault more directly. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed.

Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.

Hi there, would you mind giving me the abuse ID for this case. (When someone creates an abuse report with us, our confirmation email includes an abuse ID in the subject line.) If you still have that, and you would like me to ask a colleague about this case, please let me know. --Katie, Hetzner Online

To the best of my recollection I was never assigned or at least told one. I was not a customer so when my contact attempts were not ignored or answered with boilerplate, I was asked for my customer details, which I could not provide. No customer details, no support.

The channels to reach you were pretty limited and hard to find when I tried. I assure you, I tried everything short of getting a lawyer to send you paper mail.

I still have the communication history in my archives, but it would be a little effort to dig it out.

EDIT: Found the documentation. My first complaints were in March 2011. At some point I got assigned an abuse ID MU-000B0F55-1:18. In May the issue was still unresolved.

Hi again, Looking on the date for that, we don't have data about that case simply because of data protection laws that require us to delete data after a certain time. Does the abuse still exist? If so, perhaps you can create a new ticket (and include the old abuse ID from 2011 so that they understand you tried to report this in the past. You can also include a link to this thread in hackernews and mention my name.) When you submit your abuse report, you will receive an automated response with a new abuse ID. You do not need to be a customer to submit an abuse report with us. https://abuse.hetzner.com/en?lang=en Unfortunately, I cannot submit an abuse report on your behalf. --Katie

No, the issue is resolved for a long time, but thanks.

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