New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
I think people are are being way too stupid about the entire situation:
Turns out when your company gets bigger and gets more customers, you'll get more negative reviews and more cancellations! Hetzners policies do obviously have some to do with it but oftentimes what you'll find is that writing a coherent policy that makes everyone happy is impossible -- and oftentimes what you'll need to do is just make a decision to stop doing business with a customer because of perceived risks you don't want to take.
What you'll find everywhere is that the bigger a company gets, the more complaints you'll find about "stupid" rules or "arbitrary suspensions". These are real to some extent but honestly, this is something that you cannot really avoid... But if you look at the raw numbers, the vast, vast majority of Hetzner users are probably happy. It's just that you dont hear about happy users, you hear about the ones that aren't happy.
I don't think you understand how censorship circumvention services work. Modern public ones aren't just a single proxy you host to let people on, you need to be way more sneaky about your choice of provider. You need to get hundreds of servers with different IPs, and then you need to find a way to manage the distribution of the different proxy servers to different people.
If you want to learn more about how this works you should look into how Tor Bridges work, and how their bridge distribution system works. I think they added a new one called Lox recently which has some really cool math behind it.
Now back to the original accusation. What OP is almost certainly doing is simply hosting their infrastructure around the storage and distribution of proxy servers on Hetzner. That is, when someone wants to request a proxy they will reach the Hetzner box which will then find them a proxy and send them the URL.
This obviously will not generate any abuse reports -- no traffic is being proxied through Hetzner. Why might you want to use Hetzner for this? Well Hetzner is a big and well known provider that is reliable. Most providers you'd use to actually serve proxy traffic will be tiny and unreliable, especially when you get to the realm of providers good for hopping the GFW.
You don't want to host such important infrastructure on those providers because they could deadpool at any time. On the other hand, proxy servers are disposable -- they're almost ephemeral in nature. You want flexibility and reliability is now secondary.
If you like to hand over all your docs and then be humiliated and lose your business, you can go ahead.
You seem bitter -- no reason or logic behind your words.
Imagine being mad that Germans are strict in regulation. :V
You come to the store to buy a product or rent a product. They scan your documents into their file and give you the product or rental. A few days later when you come to buy the product or rent again you are beaten, your previous product or rent is taken away before it expires and you are thrown out the door with nothing.
In this situation, the same thing is happening. If you are used to this in your life, you will not be surprised.
Many people are not even allowed to walk through the door of the store without a face check at the entrance, this one is right and this one is wrong.
In general, it is surprising how until now some such did not unite found a good lawyer and sued.
Sue for what? Hetzner is on no way legally required to accept you as a customer, they have every right to decline you as a customer and they do not have to say why.
There are some exceptions to this rule (in some countries banks are not allowed to decline customers without valid reason) but generally both persons and companies are free to decide who they want to do business with. The bottom concept this relates to is that no individual or organisation should ever be forced to sign a contract against their will, which luckily seems to be something that most countries agree on.
There is such a thing as moral and material damage to the buyer or tenant. If in EU the consumer or the customer means nothing, then you have a problem that needs to be solved. Otherwise everyone will wipe their feet on whoever they want.
That is irrelevant to my point. OP claims he never received any abuse notices at Hetzner, yet he shows a screenshot of a IP being blocked which only happens if he has received at least one abuse notice that he has not handled in accordance with their guidelines.
I've handled 100s of abuse notices at Hetzner, I understand how their system works.
Fact of the matter is that OP claims Hetzner cancels the servers without reason yet shows a screenshot of something only caused for a reason.
No one cares about GDPR rule - I did that before.
I've already explained this.
The "abuse report" was made on the exact same timestamp (different time zone) of the email that was in the original post. That is the report I received. A report with no details.
You've continually made false claims and assumptions without delving into a single thing. Not sure what your problem is, but you're wrong.
I want to personally thank @MannDude @ https://incognet.io/ for helping us out so much.
I'd also like to thank all of the people who have reached out to us in support as well.
This whole ordeal has been a large waste of time, but good things have come from it.
I understand that Hetzner has the right to deny us service, but I think it's important to hold large companies accountable, and call them out when they mishandle something. This isn't the first time people have had their services cancelled without further explanation, and it certainly won't be the last. I think it's fair to say that even the most basic explanation would suffice.
Nowadays, those huge companies like Hetzner or WorldStream, in our case, are just careless about their customers. We used WorldStream for 15 years, and they kicked us out simply because we have the term "Offshore Hosting" on our page, even though we don’t use their service for any offshore hosting nor have had any abuse requests for the last 5 years. We have to move about 40 servers within 30 days, at least they gave us that time.
For anyone using WorldStream, be careful, you could be next when they casually "review" your account.
Here is their reasoning, and they even sent me the "termination" notice using ChatGPT how professional.
The word Offshore is now censored?
shall I do to encrypt all data of my servers - just in case if some wants to clone my HDDs?
I thought encryption is a must for any sensitive data, even servers running at home
but if servers fails or rebooted - you have to enter each time the password
Yes, some inconvenience, but it brings more safety.
Also you can try some ideas like fetching luks key from local lan or even internet and pipe it to cryptsetup on the fly while booting, then setting another guard on the other side then it will be fine.
You know, there are quite a lot of users here who just love to "detect" crimes, lies, etc. and quite some of those (a) don't know (or care about) the laws of logic, and (b) have no qualms to construct allegations if the facts are thin.
And from a certain point on facts don't even matter anymore. Sad evolution, that (in my own - absolutely not related to LET or hosting - community I reign in hard on that well known phaenomenon).
I think you've found a good new home with @MannDude and hope that you can bring this chapter to a good end.
This to me seems absolutely simple and linear:
And since they didn't have a way of stopping the user or you from doing so, they had to decide what to do, and they've decided it was either too high of a risk or not an acceptable use case and outright decided to end your services.
@labze is also absolutely right when he says the print doesn't prove much. All abuse complaints we've ever recieved were emailed.
No, that's not what censored means at all.
I haven't trusted hetzner after they were caught with the XMPP stuff.
What was this?
For what it's worth, this thread has prompted me to finally cancel our only Hetzner box (Big storage dedi in Finland) that we were using for offsite backups.
It's been on my to-do list for like, probably 18 months or more. Just wasn't a huge priority. Original reason was because it's a 1Gbps server and it's geographically very far from most of the things we want to backup. New reason is because of this thread.
probably this one
(edit: added more link)
Yeah it was a scandal that never really got attention as the victims were russians during the ukraine war.
“The wiretapping may have lasted for up to 6 months overall (90 days confirmed). We believe this is lawful interception Hetzner and Linode were forced to setup.”
If law enforcement was involved, there’s not much that could be done. They have to comply with any legal orders, and that goes for any dedicated server or VPS provider.
And then people can't understand why Hetzner cancels a customer who provide a similar service.
No, you haven't, or not enough. Their ticketing system is used for both customer and internal. OP is having a ticket that shows only the title because it's discussing internally. In the client side, it shows blank and no email sent, unlike normal abuse report. I have got one in the past and then, an email saying they will not provide new servers for me in the next 30 days. I made a full review of my entire servers and fixed all the things I could found. Then, I wrote an email to explain everything I could think of and asked for lifting the limit earlier. They lifted it after 15 days and my account remains good standing so far.
I stand with the OPs, but as someone said, they have the right to choose who to do business with. Maybe they are required by legal or the reason is not listed in their ToS so it's hard to explain to you. Just move to another provider, cheer up.
Off topic:
Isn't there a Hetzner "abuse center"?
I received an abuse report email from Hetzner.
My first abuse report in 10+ years
@labze @Advin
They could have used a warrant canary but at the end of the day their primary interest is making money.