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Want to use Hetzner at work, worried about all these reports of account deactivation
I have been a very happy Hetzner customer for years as individual, and I am thinking we cold migrate also our infrastructure at my day job from Google Cloud to Hetzner Cloud to dramatically cut our bill.
Are all these stories about account deactivation only due to those people providing false information or dodgy behaviour?
Does/can this happen also with well established and popular companies (I work for leading event management platform Brella) who obviously would only provide correct information and engage only in lawful activities for regular business?
I really want to use Hetzner Cloud for this (using my Kubernetes installer https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s) because we could save a ton of money compared to Google Cloud while still using a reliable service, but I am worried about all these reports of account deactivation and things like that.
Comments
I am not sure what you info you are trying to get. Can it happen? Yes. Can it happen with any provider? Also, yes. Does that change the fact about you wanting to work with hetzner? Thats your call.
I have yet to find another provider that matches the pricing of hetzner.
@NetDynamics24 posted a response to your post in the other thread that sums it up nicely.
Every company in the world can and will on occasion choose who not to do business with. Every hosting provider in the world will instantly terminate an account under the right circumstances (and the ones that tell you otherwise are liars with 15 customers who haven't been around the block yet).
Do we know any companies who have reported this kind of issue for example in this forum?
We have been using Google Cloud for 7 years and have quite a bit of infrastructure there, so I am really scared to push for a migration (since we want to cut spending) with this kind of risk
I've been using Hetzner for almost as long, if not as long. But you'd be hard pressed to find someone as popular as they are if no one had a story of how long they'd done business with them without any such problem. You'd be equally hard pressed to find someone as popular as they are that had no opposite stories going around.
While you've been using GC for 7 years, countless other people have likely been turned away and had their bridges burnt there, but I doubt you frequent forums with heavy users of GC because they're not as enjoyable to talk to as the low end crowd, and much less of them are hobbyists and typically don't air the dirty laundry of their employers.
As with most large companies, you are one single and insignificant customer to them, therefore you always put yourself at risk.
You must understand that in order to achieve such pricing they oversell on a massive scale. Such policy is usually incompatible with care for the customer.
You need to come prepared for the ID test, those people you hear about being blocked didn't prepare enough
If you follow these tips, You will increase your chances of passing the test and rent 10-15 years old hardware at 25-35 euro
I've used Hetzner in previous companies and the current one as well. Never had an issue.
Just have a proper verified account in name of your company and you'll be fine.
For vps or dedicated servers? Or both?
How to oversell a dedicated server?
I highly doubt that Hetzner would treat a company the same way as they treat an individual. As long as you provide valid company registration information, I doubt there is anything to worry about.
You don't ask people to pay for the price of the hardware, you expect them to make no use of the available resources and bandwidth.
For Germany what they do is incredibly cheap considering the price for just electricity.
@vitobotta
You're trying to crowd-source an estimate of the level of risk introducing Hetzner will have on your company's infrastructure to weigh and see if the risks outweigh the benefits/savings compared to GCloud. I'd caution against it.
I think this might be a good time to jump on a call with Hetzner's sales team and see what assurances you can receive and get a better understanding of their policies. I mean this risk is present for any and all businesses. It's the sales team's job to make sure your questions are addressed, so reach out to them and just ask to their face. If you're serious then they're serious and a quick 15-30 minute call to settle your concerns is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Also, see if you can get it in writing. Even if you email them saying "Hey thanks for our call! As we discussed, you mentioned X, Y, and Z and that's what really addressed our concerns. Let me discuss with the team and I'll reach back out if we decide to move forward with Hetzner. Thank you for your time." or some other professional message.
On another side of the coin, I think reviewing and seeing if this lines up with your incentives might be a good thing to think about. How would the financial savings from switching from GCloud benefit you and your role? Sure you're saving the company money, but you have to think of it more like how would you introduce this value. Because sure you might look good for a moment, but if you're the person who's introducing this then you'll probably be the person who manages it (I'm assuming since you're mentioning you want to use your own solution in-house). This is something of a long haul. You're adding a fair amount of work/overhead to your work for additional value (assuming this isn't a task outlined within your role). Think about how you want to navigate these waters. Who can you call on to provide backup in case shit hits the fan?
Here are also some additional thought points:
I'd strongly suggest think this through before moving forward with Hetzner. I've never worked with them but I've heard good things about them. I am sure they're business critical but if you're the decision maker in this then they better make a compelling cost savings argument with additional benefits or else I'd say it's not worth it. From management perspective, going from "Google", an industry leader (Cloud division valued at 1.29 trillion dollars) to Hetzner, a market lead within dedicated servers (but just a player in cloud services) (published 290 million euros revenue in 2020) would be seen as additional risk and if Hetzner drops the ball with you, sure they lose the contract but if it was only a few thousand dollars a month then that really isn't much. For you, it could limit your professional growth.
Edit: I'm not saying don't go with Hetzner. But it's one thing on this forum of hobbyists and small-time hosts to host on Hetzner. It's another for a larger company. I'm not talking about not using Hetzner I'm talking about switching from already an established and considered accepted solution and switching to a different infrastructure/base. This is a move that may have benefits but the benefits really need to be good for you to take a potential risk in case they fuck up. Because to a certain extent, your reputation is now tied to Hetzner doing a good job.
That was pretty straight forward - every business has terms and conditions that they can ruin other's business in no time in their own will.... AND we gladfully accept them!
Hosting companies will not let go of sales for no reason. If they reject someone then the reason is solid. Also, they do not go around closing accounts for no reason. Germany is different. Their CERT scans the entire IP ranges associated with the country and sends email reports to the hosters about potential abuse/vulerabilities. Hetzner forwards those emails for you to take action. If you ignore them they close your account. If you are a new customer with shady info they could close your account. But both are valid reasons.
Don't just take for granted the stories like: all my info is legit and I am not doing anything wrong.
One downside about Hetzner is that there's a lot of abuse on their network due to cheap pricing (Can happen to other providers too)
BUT
The main problem would be expanding in future. Hetzner has only 2 general locations available as of now (Germany, USA). From what I can tell, their expansion is pretty slow. So, in the future if you want to load balance your application to different parts of the world, you would have to go look for another provider. I'm not sure if your company is targeting a global audience, but this is something to keep in mind.
Hetzner allows abuse on their network. Ovh, vultr, digitalocean, linode and other past heavy abusers now control they networks way more efficient. Hetz will do the same eventually. And no, they are not so cheap, they just popular.
Go for it. Hetzner has a good reputation overall and should be good for backend workloads.
Google Cloud does that kind of thing too. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912 for example. You pretty much have that risk with any cloud provider.
Any web host could do this, so you must be prepared. Solution = regular remote backups so you can switch web hosts when needed.
Is hetzner issuing warning to their client before they deactivate the account? I am asking because clients may have valuable data and just deleting everything can harm them. I understand that they are free to decide with whom to do business and clients need to have backups elsewhere.
I would make super sure migration won't cause any problems because if it does it'll be you who they blame..
Personally, the biggest issue I have with Hetzner is them just disabling your port(s) if you receive a DDoS type attack.
But regardless of which 'cloud' provider you choose, you should not be choosing just one..
The main thing is to have backups, regardless of the provider we use
I once had an account there, and I didn't get a warning before my account was deactivated.
Overall Hetzner is a good provider. Many people also feel comfortable there. But always make sure to make a backup of every data you save