Hetzner deactivated account without any reason

vitobotta

I have been happy with Hetzner for many years as an individual so I suggested we migrate from GCP at work to dramatically cut our bill. However I am worried that they might pull the plug on our company account out of the blue.

Does anyone know if they have ever done this kind of deactivation for companies too, or just individuals?

jar

@vitobotta said:
I have been happy with Hetzner for many years as an individual so I suggested we migrate from GCP at work to dramatically cut our bill. However I am worried that they might pull the plug on our company account out of the blue.

Does anyone know if they have ever done this kind of deactivation for companies too, or just individuals?

I don't think that's an overly fair concern, at least not any more so than it is a fair concern of every vendor you'll ever work with regardless of size or brand recognition. Just keep backups always.

jar

@stefeman said:

@angstrom said:

@bdspice said:

@loay said:

@stefeman said: This is your issue. Hetzner/OVHCloud do not generally welcome Bangladesh, Lebanon, China customers due to various reasons.

Mostly abuse. I am from a very sanctioned country and I had no problem registering with most US and European providers.

Bangladesh is not a sanctioned country.However if you dont want me as a customer after asking my NID/Passport, just tell me why and delete all my data.

The point is that they don't need to tell you why -- they don't need to give you the details

There have been a number of similar threads regarding this

It's natural to feel a bit annoyed or upset when you're rejected, especially if you feel that it isn't justified, but in the case of hosting providers, it's best to simply move on

There's quite a bit they can actually do if it happens right after they get visual photocopy of your passport and you are not given any plausible explanation after you have provided GDPR identity data.

Nobody just cared enough to suspect or cause problem to a company with size of Hetzner.

It becomes illegal when there is a suspicion that your data is used wrong or if ID documents are otherwise harvested on mass scale without any plausible explanation for such behavior's.

All you have to do is tip off the GDPR office of Germany about this practice, and if they ignore it, you can tip off TÚI which is the auditor of Hetzner about this shady practice. Even if its just headache, they can cause insane amount of workload and costs just by reporting their experience and referring few other past cases which are not hard to find by checking google.

It's just too much work for a revenge cause you were "fooled" of your ID details and then rejected. Hetzner could easily cover their ass by citing their abuse policy or saying that they think the risk for abuse is too high. But they opted to not tell this information to avoid giving the customer a possibility to argument any further.

You're effectively talking about trolling them because you're upset with them. You know they're not an ID harvesting operation because you know who they are. And if you find out that they're not deleting IDs and try to cause a problem for them, "rm -rf id_collection" and they go about their day, you'll never know about it and you'll never get any satisfaction over it.

NetDynamics24

@vitobotta said:
I have been happy with Hetzner for many years as an individual so I suggested we migrate from GCP at work to dramatically cut our bill. However I am worried that they might pull the plug on our company account out of the blue.

Does anyone know if they have ever done this kind of deactivation for companies too, or just individuals?

Yes they can do it and they have done it in some cases. They have confirmed that to me. We have hundreds of servers with Hetzner as we are their resellers, and we worried about it so we asked them. Here is their reply:

"It can happen for example due to non paying, abuse (illegal/suspicious activities), but yes we are also writing prior notices, but of course sometimes it can lead to an immediate termination. But it is impossible to cancel a valued customer with 140 or more servers with immediate effect."

This is also one more reason why some clients prefer to purchase their servers from us and not from them.

jar

@NetDynamics24 said: They have confirmed that to me

I feel a relation to this as I just had to write a damning piece in my Discord about how I was always a little worried that being too honest would hurt me, and as of last night I feel like it finally did. No one asks Amazon this but you can be sure that they permanently and immediately terminate customers. You know Google Cloud does. You know every company does.

Astro

@jar said:

@NetDynamics24 said: They have confirmed that to me

I feel a relation to this as I just had to write a damning piece in my Discord about how I was always a little worried that being too honest would hurt me, and as of last night I feel like it finally did. No one asks Amazon this but you can be sure that they permanently and immediately terminate customers. You know Google Cloud does. You know every company does.

Yeah I am not sure what the revolt is about. Its standard practice across the hosting industry. Sometimes the owner calls you stupid(MaxKVM) other times they just refuse you before you even buy a service from them.

bdspice

@default said:
@bdspice - Maybe you should move on. They simply do not want you - this is all the information that matters. You do not have rights in this case, since there is no contract and no payment between you and Hetzner. Hetzner does not want you - quite simple. Maybe you should just move on instead of killing your neurons for any provider. This is likely because of the risk involved (just an assumption), but you are not the first nor the last case - this is all normal.

@jsg said:
@bdspice

Btw, I once benchmarked a Hetzner VPS (in the 4- 5€ range) for a friend and frankly, I was disappointed by its rather mediocre performance and low bang for the buck. Really no loss for you (other than your feelings).

Last time in post here i asked for some best VDS for encoding purpose and someone suggest me to use hetzner cloud so could i take snapshot and use it for hourly purpose. Honestly i think Crunchbits VDS and netcup might be best but Crunchbits slight expensive (17$) with no snapshot and netcup need to cancel before 30days. I will moveone to one of them, but Hetzner have my ID and saying they are not telling reason. thats why i created this post.

jsg

@bdspice said:

@jsg said:
@bdspice

Btw, I once benchmarked a Hetzner VPS (in the 4- 5€ range) for a friend and frankly, I was disappointed by its rather mediocre performance and low bang for the buck. Really no loss for you (other than your feelings).

Last time in post here i asked for some best VDS for encoding purpose and someone suggest me to use hetzner cloud so could i take snapshot and use it for hourly purpose. Honestly i think Crunchbits VDS and netcup might be best but Crunchbits slight expensive (17$) with no snapshot and netcup need to cancel before 30days. I will moveone to one of them, but Hetzner have my ID and saying they are not telling reason. thats why i created this post.

Sorry but my experience with Hetzner is very limited (to said a week or two testing/benchmarking). And I'm also not in a position to talk about (video and/or audio I presume) encoding.

What I can tell you though is that netcup is a fine provider in terms of what you get. So fine in fact that I'm a customer since quite a few years although I've experienced them as bureaucratic assholes. If a dedicated dual (decent, not some old crap) vCores VPS with plenty fast SSD (or NVMe or whatever it is these days) disk space for less than $10/mo (iirc) meets your needs you shouldn't care too much about those 30 days, at least not if you plan to stay at least for half a year.

Maybe we can manage to lure @AXYZE to this thread; he seems to be very knowledgeable and experienced with encoding and such.

bdspice

@jsg said:

@bdspice said:

@jsg said:
@bdspice

Btw, I once benchmarked a Hetzner VPS (in the 4- 5€ range) for a friend and frankly, I was disappointed by its rather mediocre performance and low bang for the buck. Really no loss for you (other than your feelings).

Last time in post here i asked for some best VDS for encoding purpose and someone suggest me to use hetzner cloud so could i take snapshot and use it for hourly purpose. Honestly i think Crunchbits VDS and netcup might be best but Crunchbits slight expensive (17$) with no snapshot and netcup need to cancel before 30days. I will moveone to one of them, but Hetzner have my ID and saying they are not telling reason. thats why i created this post.

Sorry but my experience with Hetzner is very limited (to said a week or two testing/benchmarking). And I'm also not in a position to talk about (video and/or audio I presume) encoding.

What I can tell you though is that netcup is a fine provider in terms of what you get. So fine in fact that I'm a customer since quite a few years although I've experienced them as bureaucratic assholes. If a dedicated dual (decent, not some old crap) vCores VPS with plenty fast SSD (or NVMe or whatever it is these days) disk space for less than $10/mo (iirc) meets your needs you shouldn't care too much about those 30 days, at least not if you plan to stay at least for half a year.

Maybe we can manage to lure @AXYZE to this thread; he seems to be very knowledgeable and experienced with encoding and such.

As You also recommend netcup, i just created account there. since i need it for sudden use for few hours or few months for first time, i dont need for atleast half years. But For now, i am going to test them for atleast 2month.

loay

@bdspice said: netcup

They also require ID/address verification, alternatively you can try avoro/php-friends.

bdspice

@loay said:

@bdspice said: netcup

They also require ID/address verification, alternatively you can try avoro/php-friends.

Minimum contract term 12 months, not suitable

jsg

@bdspice

If you got a VDS or VPS from netcup you shouldn't worry anymore about others, at least not for the moment. Again, I lack the knowledge and experience wrt encoding audio or video but generally speaking netcup VPS/VDS are fine servers and I think you'll like it (although what I wrote above was absolutely not meant as luring you to netcup).

In case after using it for a while you want to try another provider you are at the right place. There is quite some choice on LET and plenty of users willing to help.

bdspice

@jsg said:
@bdspice

If you got a VDS or VPS from netcup you shouldn't worry anymore about others, at least not for the moment. Again, I lack the knowledge and experience wrt encoding audio or video but generally speaking netcup VPS/VDS are fine servers and I think you'll like it (although what I wrote above was absolutely not meant as luring you to netcup).

In case after using it for a while you want to try another provider you are at the right place. There is quite some choice on LET and plenty of users willing to help.

I know LET and Love it. Daily Visit atleast once without any reason. there is no other website i daily visit except social networks.

angstrom

@stefeman said:

@angstrom said:

@stefeman said:

@angstrom said:

@stefeman said:

@angstrom said:

@bdspice said:

@loay said:

@stefeman said: This is your issue. Hetzner/OVHCloud do not generally welcome Bangladesh, Lebanon, China customers due to various reasons.

Mostly abuse. I am from a very sanctioned country and I had no problem registering with most US and European providers.

Bangladesh is not a sanctioned country.However if you dont want me as a customer after asking my NID/Passport, just tell me why and delete all my data.

The point is that they don't need to tell you why -- they don't need to give you the details

There have been a number of similar threads regarding this

It's natural to feel a bit annoyed or upset when you're rejected, especially if you feel that it isn't justified, but in the case of hosting providers, it's best to simply move on

There's quite a bit they can actually do if it happens right after they get visual photocopy of your passport.

Nobody just cared enough to suspect or cause problem to a company with size of Hetzner.

It becomes illegal when there is a suspicion that your data is used wrong or if ID documents are otherwise harvested on mass scale without any plausible explanation for such behavior's.

All you have to do is tip off the GDPR office of Germany about this practice, and if they ignore it, you can tip off TÚI which is the auditor of Hetzner about this shady practice. Even if its just headache, they can cause insane amount of workload and costs just by reporting their experience and referring few other past cases which are not hard to find by checking google.

It's just too much work for a revenge cause you were "fooled" of your ID details and then rejected. Hetzner could easily cover their ass by citing their abuse policy or saying that they think the risk for abuse is too high. But they opted to not tell this information to avoid giving the customer a possibility to argument any further.

Of course, we can't be absolutely certain that Hetzner deletes the ID documents within a fixed/reasonable amount of time, but it would seem too risky for them not to do this -- too risky with respect to the law and too risky with respect to their reputation

Imagine if you walked into a bar, paid for the clothes storage deposit, the doorman asks you to present your ID. He walks to a scanner with your passport, makes a photo copy of it, hands the photocopy to office lady and walks back to you and says: "I'm sorry you need to leave", takes off your drink from your hands and throws you out and then asks for the next guy to present his passport, and you see the exact same situation happen again. In between the passport harvesting, about half are allowed in.

You ask "what the fuck is this?", but you are not given any reason, nor you are told what happens with your account (passport in this case). All means of communication are now gone too as they wont answer any further questions. You start to think that they just wanted to harvest your passport information and threw you out.

The establishment would be seized under a day and investigated for identity theft.

Alternatively, if one doesn't trust Hetzner in this respect, then why even bother to try to be a customer of theirs?

That's like asking why did you trust a scammer. You had no idea at the time of transaction.

If someone does something suspicious, you usually change your image of them regardless of how you thought about them before.

Your reasoning is backwards

The point is that you/we have no evidence that Hetzner has done something suspicious, so why assume that they have done something suspicious?

Just like in other areas of life, you can decide not to trust someone or a company beforehand, in which case you wouldn't show them your ID, but if you decide to trust them (to a certain extent), then you might decide to show them your ID

It's simply strange to reason as follows: "Okay, initially I trust you enough to show you my ID, but if you then don't give me what I want, I'll decide/conclude that you're (very probably) harvesting my (and other people's) ID data, although I have absolutely no evidence for this"

Whereas if they gave you what you wanted, then you very probably wouldn't decide/conclude that they're harvesting your (and other people's) ID data

Yes, it is possible that Hetzner is harvesting people's ID data. But why stop at Hetzner? If Hetzner is harvesting people's ID data, then netcup must be as well. Indeed, perhaps most hosting providers are harvesting people's ID data

AXYZE

@bdspice said:

@default said:
@bdspice - Maybe you should move on. They simply do not want you - this is all the information that matters. You do not have rights in this case, since there is no contract and no payment between you and Hetzner. Hetzner does not want you - quite simple. Maybe you should just move on instead of killing your neurons for any provider. This is likely because of the risk involved (just an assumption), but you are not the first nor the last case - this is all normal.

@jsg said:
@bdspice

Btw, I once benchmarked a Hetzner VPS (in the 4- 5€ range) for a friend and frankly, I was disappointed by its rather mediocre performance and low bang for the buck. Really no loss for you (other than your feelings).

Last time in post here i asked for some best VDS for encoding purpose and someone suggest me to use hetzner cloud so could i take snapshot and use it for hourly purpose. Honestly i think Crunchbits VDS and netcup might be best but Crunchbits slight expensive (17$) with no snapshot and netcup need to cancel before 30days. I will moveone to one of them, but Hetzner have my ID and saying they are not telling reason. thats why i created this post.

I've recommended you Hetzner Cloud back then because you needed to encode for hour a day and that ends up costing you one euro per month. Or two euros if you need two parallel encodes.

Hetzner 3vCPU+4GB is still most cost efficient option for 1h/day encoding workload if you use snapshots and delete instance when its idling.

For 24/7 encoding at small scale netcup is the way to go. Or you can get latest Pulsedmedia dedicated offer and get Intel QuickSync for around 20euro with your own dedicated CPU.

Next month I'll try Alwyzon VPSes for video encoding, but they have 20% CPU FUP so you cant encode for more than 4h a day (still fine for my use case). They have Zen3 cores for cheap.

Smith42

With Hetzner being cheap and having low margins on their products, I assume they do a quick risk assessment of clients and refuse the ones that they believe would get them in trouble with the feds. With all the spammers, hackers, iptv and live-streaming filth they have to deal with, Hetzner probably has a terrible reputation among feds from various countries.

Assuming OP is from Bangladesh, Hetzner must've had a bad history with customers from that region. At the end of the day, I'm sure there are clauses in their TOS that allow them to refuse service without explanation.

chip

@bdspice said:

@RickBakkr said:
OK. Nice statement.

It's perfectly fine for a business to define who they want and who they do not want as a customer, regardless of giving reason. In the past, when we rejected a customer, the first thing they did was publicly shame us for being 'rascist' (yes, I quote the spelling mistake), to which I strongly disagree.

Might be best for you to accept their judgement and move on. Plenty of fish in this sea, if one does not want you, you should not want them either. Go with someone with whom you'd feel at home.

One Should Explain Why They don't want someone as customer when they are doing business in open world. Explain there is good reason to decline specific someone or simply say we do business only whom we like.

To be fair most trade laws preserve the right to do business with whoever you want and not do business in the same manner... the only caveat is you can't "discriminate" .... but its perfectly fine to not do business with someone just because you don't want to.

bdspice

@AXYZE said:

@bdspice said:

@default said:
@bdspice - Maybe you should move on. They simply do not want you - this is all the information that matters. You do not have rights in this case, since there is no contract and no payment between you and Hetzner. Hetzner does not want you - quite simple. Maybe you should just move on instead of killing your neurons for any provider. This is likely because of the risk involved (just an assumption), but you are not the first nor the last case - this is all normal.

@jsg said:
@bdspice

Btw, I once benchmarked a Hetzner VPS (in the 4- 5€ range) for a friend and frankly, I was disappointed by its rather mediocre performance and low bang for the buck. Really no loss for you (other than your feelings).

Last time in post here i asked for some best VDS for encoding purpose and someone suggest me to use hetzner cloud so could i take snapshot and use it for hourly purpose. Honestly i think Crunchbits VDS and netcup might be best but Crunchbits slight expensive (17$) with no snapshot and netcup need to cancel before 30days. I will moveone to one of them, but Hetzner have my ID and saying they are not telling reason. thats why i created this post.

I've recommended you Hetzner Cloud back then because you needed to encode for hour a day and that ends up costing you one euro per month. Or two euros if you need two parallel encodes.

Hetzner 3vCPU+4GB is still most cost efficient option for 1h/day encoding workload if you use snapshots and delete instance when its idling.

For 24/7 encoding at small scale netcup is the way to go. Or you can get latest Pulsedmedia dedicated offer and get Intel QuickSync for around 20euro with your own dedicated CPU.

Next month I'll try Alwyzon VPSes for video encoding, but they have 20% CPU FUP so you cant encode for more than 4h a day (still fine for my use case). They have Zen3 cores for cheap.

Currently i am trying to get a root server from netcup. Inform me with your update for encoding vps you got good experiance

Thundas

The funny thing is, for me, hetzner verification went without a hitch, I pulled out from Netcup verification when they asked me to send a selfie with my ID.

Maounique

@RickBakkr said: Might be best for you to accept their judgement and move on. Plenty of fish in this sea, if one does not want you, you should not want them either. Go with someone with whom you'd feel at home.

I remember when BurstNet blocked my account back in the day. We were both very polite.
-Your order has been cancelled.
-Any chance for a refund?
-A refund has been processed to the card owner.

That was it, GL, HF. They don't want me and my real data, fine, since then I became adept at faking it all over the world.
Let the crime fit the punishment.

bdspice

@Thundas said:
The funny thing is, for me, hetzner verification went without a hitch, I pulled out from Netcup verification when they asked me to send a selfie with my ID.

i just send selfie with ID yesterday today they asked me i want vat redemption or not. however i am Non-EU user so i should be VAT and GDPR Redempted. Now they forwarded it to concern depertment. No server yet, Lets see how it happen in netcup.