I've heard that Hetzner is a good provider, so I want to buy a cheap unmanaged VPS server in the USA. But can not find any mention about VPS. Any help, please?
Just need to replace this one (the same bad story $$$ as Netlify recently): https://www.leaseweb.com/fr/cloud/virtual-server
I don't seem capable of actually setting up an account with Heztner and logging in. Their security is so tight, it seems to constantly lock me out. What if I were an actual customer? Yikes.
Does anyone else have this issue?
Yep:
Dear Mr David Allison
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
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
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
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.
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.
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?".
Literally this. Their staff won't provide any details, nor even a route towards a solution. When I asked what they suggest doing in this situation, they simply stopped responding.
Of course they don't. If they tell you why they have banned you, if you were a scammer, you'd know how they caught you and what to do better next time.
That's why none of the fraud prevention systems, be they at a tech company or a bank, tell you exactly why you've been banned/denied.
Any somewhat decent company would have an alternative, more rigid verification process to rely on when the basic one is insufficient. It doesn't require telling which part their doubts lie with. They do sometimes ask for an official ID, but apart from that...?
Either way their reasoning is flawed. An actual fraudster will simply keep trying and find out themselves, because they have nothing to lose. Therefore it's security through obscurity at best. Meanwhile legitimate customers/prospects suffer.
What? That sounds extremely unacceptable.
Can we get some context please, there must be a reason.
Were you able to backup first?
I created an account to evaluate them on Sun, 18 Jun 2023, 13:25 UTC. I verified my account on Sun, 18 Jun 2023, 13:29.
I received the above email entitled 'Rejection of Your account XXXXX' on Mon, 19 Jun 2023, 09:15.
I didn't follow up further. No backups required as I hadn't purchased anything
Yup, I bought a dedicated server because I needed a CPU with AVX2 and VT-x, and it went poof some days later.
They didn't even do me the courtesy of emailing me to tell me about it, I had to ask support:
> When I try to log in to my account it tells me that my credentials are invalid, and when I use forgot password it tells me that my account is disabled?
We recently did some routine reviews of our customer accounts. We noticed some suspicious information in your account.
We have some concerns regarding this information and we have decided to close your account.
We do not share details about why certain accounts appear suspicious. Publishing this information would make it easier for people to create fake accounts and abuse our services.
I even went through their live-video face verification and passport scan and they didn't budge on this.
Were you an 'uncomplicated' customer i.e. from a country not associated with tons of online fraud, connecting plainly from a 'normal' ISP account (not a VPN, not using a browser cranked to the gills with privacy plugins) and using a conventional payment method registered to you at your address in the same country you were connecting from etc?
Yes. New Zealand.
I had the inverse experience.
I setup 5 x $220/month servers and I wanted to make sure my payment method worked, contacted support a couple of times, wanted to make a prepayment or something.
No dice, they didn't want to take my money until the billing period closed, luckily everything worked fine.
It wasn't their cloud offering though, it was for the dedicated servers (Hetzner Robot), I don't know if that makes a difference.
I didn't ask to "take my money", just gave it to them forcibly by wire transfer, it showed up in my account all right.
I have a dedicated server in Hetzner and I don't understand what this means. How do they decide when the server is "used"? Based on CPU allocation? SSH sessions? HTTP traffic? Power?
It's easy to shut down virtual servers and continue from the same position. It's not that easy to do the same for servers.
The linked page is very unclear about this.
Whatever that means, you will pay more.
No, you'll max pay the same. May pay less.
Wonna bet?
They‘ve stated clearly that you pay the same. Its just calculating stuff differently that you can now remove a dedicated machine mid-month and get the remaining time‘s money back. Which wasnt the case until now.
Why would they do that and lose money? Apparently, they plan to charge more and push you to cloud services, which are more lucrative.
This is actually revenue-loss for them as canceling a dedicated server in the middle of the month will no longer result in a full month charge...
Exactly.
They have been using this business model for years for their VPS products and Hetzner has slowly been moving to unify their products because it's such a disjointed mess right now.
Like, it's completely unreasonable to expect to pay more.
They are doing it to stay competitive. Remember, cloud computing is a highly competitive market and customers can and do switch providers.
Sure, I could bet $1000.
Bet accepted, term: 1 year.
How do they decide when the server is "used"?
If you turned on the server, it's being used.
A server that is simply turned on does not necessarily mean it is "in use."
This is true, but it still may be how Hetzner decides usage. I'm not sure if this is the case, but it seems pretty reasonable when you're talking about bare metal.
I think you're getting lost in semantic games. Cloud providers sell you access to their computational resources. When you pay for a server, you're paying for the right to access that server and do what you wish to do with it. Much like when you rent a car, you still pay for it if you keep it parked.
A server that can't be sold to someone else is in use
https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/
Do you bill servers that are off?
Yes. Until you, the customer, delete your servers, we will bill you for them, regardless of their state.
If you have a dedicated server, you'll just be paying the monthly price. It's always in use.
If you decide to stop completely with the server halfway through the month, you'll pay for the hours.
Of course, a shut down server that's yours is still yours and you'll be billed for it.
I'm not so sure about this, their description specifically calls out one-time-only costs like domain registrations as being the only things excluded. Cautiously optimistic in addition to the recent reappearance of new GPU models being offered to existing customers, Hetzner may be prepping an hourly-billed bare metal GPU product at a great price
Hetzner bare metal already deploys in a couple of minutes when renting existing hardware, and there is plenty of precedent for hourly-billed bare metal services around. I think they're intending to move all their bare metal over to hourly billing.
On the cloud product listing they make it pretty clear that "in use" means "allocated" and not "consuming electricity". Pretty sure their fees are staying the same, and we are still paying for every hour a server exists.
„Used“ means as long as you rent them / as long as they’re assigned to your account / as long as you have access. Dedicated servers are physical objects in the real world, contrary to virtual servers they don’t stop „to exist“ just because they’re no longer yours.
Previously you could only rent physical servers for an entire month. If you’re doing this the price is still the same. But going forward it will be possible to rent for a portion of the month only (x amount of hours).
It seems pretty clear to me:
How precisely does Hetzner calculate the hourly billing?
The beginning of the hourly billing starts as soon as the product becomes available to you.
So for a dedicated server you start paying once the server has been commissioned to you. You stop paying once you return it.
If I understand correctly your cost will stay the same. The bill for march might be a bit different but the total cost should be identical. Their usage will also stay the same-ish with usage = allocation for CPUS, Ram and storage.
"If you use a product for the whole month, we will continue to invoice you for the same monthly amount as always."
Last time I checked, Hetzner doesn’t have any dedicated offerings in the US, only cloud, is this still the case?
Still the case, right
Any recommendation for a provider with dedicated servers in the US?
I’m with a provider now who is phasing them out.
There are several dedicated server providers in US but not much is known about their track review.
OVH has a datacenter in Toronto which may close enough to the US for many people. They provide dedicated servers.
OVH operates data-center close to Montreal (BHS), 8ms latency to NYC. Also it's 100% green hydro electricity powered.
Hydro power is not green. The benefit are it's cheap (in terms of cost to produce) and produces no CO2 emissions. The downside is it makes it harder to fish to travel from the ocean to their spawning sites. Like all power sources, it has benefits and drawbacks and it absolutely impacts the environment.
Hydro on the north of Quebec (most of % electricity produced) is not that a fish-reach area at all. But yes, on some areas in the world that's a concern.
OVH's Toronto datacentre is not operational yet. But you can pre-order. It's going to be interesting to see what this does to pricing for the Toronto hosting and compute market, as that location has always been more expensive compared to other North American locations. Right now it looks like OVH will not be offering their lower tier offers out of the Toronto DC.
At a prior company I'd occasionally lease dedicated servers from INAP (now calling that part of their business HorizonIQ after bankruptcy and reorg) - https://www.horizoniq.com/services/compute/bare-metal/
Their business was always a bit chaotic but the technical side of the organization was competent. We were colo'd in one of their datacenters so it was nice to be able to rent additional capacity in the same facility. Servers were manually provisioned, but manageable as you'd expect via online portal after provisioning was complete.
So... not a glowing recommendation I guess, given their corporate instability? But a recommendation nonetheless, the corporate instability never impacted our technical operations and the product was good.
OVH have some in the US. I've only had good experiences with them. I like Server Hunter to get a general overview:
https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=product_type%3Adedicated...
No suggestions from my own experience. Probably Leaseweb or OVH worth checking.
What does it mean to have a "dedicated" offering for the US? Hetzner lets you create servers in their US datacenter, isn't this enough?
Dedicated servers, the things we used before cloud or vps
It would be nice if cloud offerings like Hetzner would allow one to set the contract duration and pay in advance, for example, one year. And once that year passes, you could tell them to extend it for another year, or do nothing and get your server deleted. This way you have a control over your spending and avoid surprises. I guess some providers (OVH?) allow you to do that, but of course it requires that all costs be fixed and have no "extras" for bandwidth consumption or things like that.
You can buy credits using a bank transfer [1]. You can also set E-Mail alerts in case your monthly invoice is higher then expected (more traffic etc.) [2]. However, there is no auto-delete as far as I can tell.
[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... [2] https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/#how-do-i-keep-my...
I’ve been waiting for Hetzner to allow adding credits into one’s account using credit cards or debit cards (or other modes like PayPal). Being outside Germany (and the EU), a bank transfer is not possible or is difficult and prohibitively expensive.
Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
You can use a bank like Wise which lets you have accounts in many currencies for such bank transfers. Fees between their accounts are quite competitive (I used them many times in the past).
Didn't know you could buy credits, but well, for me the key is that no debt is generated when your credit goes to zero. In this case, if you exhaust your credit but your server keeps running, Hetzner will not stop it and will send you the bill next month. Yes, you may have received an email warning but it does not give the same peace of mind.
At least with the dedicated servers there are no surprises. Monthly cost is fixed, if you exceed the bandwidth limit you'll be throttled. Maybe their cloud offerings offer the same?
From what I can see in their webpage, they charge something like 1 eur for every extra TB but apparently there's no way to set a limit (so you can be protected in the event of a DDoS), only an alert.
As far as I known there are no surprises on Hetzner, they're a solid company, not one of the shady ones that bill on usage without limits.
I agree it's not as bad as other companies (like the other day Netlify story) but Hetzner doesn't allow you to set limits either, so in theory you can still be charged without knowing how much it'll be in advance. You can also leave something on while thinking it's off and, yes, it's your fault too, but it wouldn't happen if it just consumed your credits and no more.
Scalingo (a European PaaS) allows you to do this by buying credit, a simple solution. I wonder why other providers don't offer this.
and avoid surprises
I think for most people and organizations, auto-deletion of a server _is_ the surprise ;)
I've only ever heard fantastic things about Hetzner.
I'm shocked PE hasn't bought them yet and raised prices.
So had I, until I actually tried to sign up. Have a look at the way they treat you when they have (unfounded) suspicions. It's beyond ridiculous.
So many problems just disappear when your prices are (relatively) expensive…
Maybe. But price is still one of the larger concerns for many people. When I checked this a couple of years ago, it seemed like Hetzner’s Storage Box (the one sorta competes with your rsync.net) had a much lower price, a much larger capacity per dollar/euro and more storage tiers.
They ask for a government ID in some cases. I was able to provide one with some details masked, and they wanted the name on my account to match the name on the government ID. This is a commercial transaction, not Facebook. So I was kinda ok with that. But it is weird and ridiculous.
Whether to provide proof is at least a choice you get to make, but in my case even that wasn't on the (empty) table.
Meh, ymmv. I migrated a bunch of stuff from OVH->Hetzner a few years ago and the support experience was absolutely, insanely, beyond-belief bad.
P1 call having to explain "what's an ip address" to their 'engineers'.
About 6 hours after we moved prod over, they brought down my EIPs for like 4 hours because of a route they didn't understand and flagged as spam, and in the end we rolled back the migration and cancelled the contracts.
Bummer for them; we ended up scaling out to several hundred thousand euro a year in OVH, which has been absolutely fucking exemplar.
So while some people really do rave about them, I was so annoyed by that experience that I will almost certainly never use them again.
Being a German myself, I'm 90% sure it's because the support is based in Germany, where technology goes to die.
What are EIPs?
If you are referring to the eth stuff, everything to do with crypto is banned on hetzner
I assume they're talking about elastic IPs and not Ethereum Improvement Proposals
Elastic IPs i believe - you can attach/detach an IP to a server instead of having a new IP everytime
Hetzner is one of those "just take my money" services, so more power to them.
Besides, for some reason I always thought they charge hourly but show pricing in monthly format for easier pricing.
Way better than DigitalOcean, I hope they keep being that way
Hopefully the people that are running it now are better than the people that started it, however I will never use Hetzner's services for anything again as long as I live.
What is it about the people that started it that puts you off?
Can you share some specific reasons?
What other services fall into the "just take my money" category? I fully agree, Hetzner is a good deal.
FastMail, Cloudflare, GitHub co-pilot and OpenAI are some of the other services that comes to mind.
That was only for cloud products until now I think
For anyone else who may be confused - this is already the case in Cloud (obviously), but now will apply for Robot as well.
This structure will be similar to our Cloud billing.
It says it here, but I glanced over it :)
What is the difference between cloud and robot?
Cloud is VM's Robot is bare metal
s/‘s/s,/
Otherwise the VM possessive reads like:
Cloud = VM’s Robot = bare metalConsequently cloud = bare metal; which agrees with the axiom that "it's not a cloud, it's just someone else's computer".
Traditionally, cloud referred to an abstraction above "someone else's computer", keeping the specific details of those computers hidden from the user, allowing the operator to do things like swap out the hardware, move the data to another datacenter, etc. without the end user ever noticing.
But tech people love to come up with new definitions for the same terms all the time, so anything goes.
Thank you
Hetzner's cloud console (https://console.hetzner.cloud/) was introduced for their vServer migration (competing with the likes of Linode). Robot (https://robot.your-server.de/) was used for their vServers previously and is still used for their dedicated servers and domain names and such.
This is actually great. I maintain a library[1] for interacting with the Robot interface using Rust, but testing is heavily gated because of the potential costs it might incur, which is why a lot of the purchasing/cancellation APIs haven't been thoroughly tested.
With this billing, I'll be able to do thorough integration testing without breaking the bank.
And of course with hourly billing, horizontal scaling becomes much more feasible.
Have you reached out to Hetzner? Feels like they should waive those bills in exchange for the free dev work you do for them.
I haven't actually. I believe they do offer modest amounts of credit for creating useful libraries, documentation and such targeting their platform, but I never really looked into it.
Try reaching out to Katie - seen her in various parts of the internet. Think she’s a community manager or something like that. Eg
https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1agom04/are_there_...
A company, acting reasonably?
Are you new to Earth?
At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers and the docs don’t clarify if it will remain.
At the moment there is still a one-time order fee for dedicated servers
For (some) dedicated servers, I think. Last time I checked the lowest tiered dedicated servers didn't have any setup fees. If it's not mentioned, assumed it'll remain.
As diggan said, there's usually at least one of their dedicated server offerings for which setup fees are waived, so I figure my tests would use the API to find out which one and use it :)
When are they allowing sign ups for third world countries?
Or any country for that matter? I was rejected from right next door (NL).
It's very strange that they rejected your account from another EU country. Are you sure you created your account with real data?
One doesn't accidentally make things up, and for invoices to be booked, my accountant wouldn't have it any other way.
There is no such thing as third world country anymore. That is a relic or yesteryear. [1]
Yes, signed up from a 3rd World Country late last year.
I signed up after lot of failed attempts. I think now they have fixed their verification process. Please give it a try
We will always use the hourly price when it saves you money, meaning when you have used a product for less than a month, and the total hourly price is less than the monthly price.
That’s nice, I guess.
we have decided to no longer send invoices to all of our customers on the same day. Instead, we will spread them out throughout the month. You will always receive your invoice on the same day of the month. But this day will be different from customer to customer.
It’s not clear to me when the billing moth starts. Is it the day the invoice is sent or is it a regular calendar month? Either way it might be confusing.
I'd hope that it's based on calendar months. Wouldn't invoices that span multiple years make things a lot more complicated in terms of accounting in general?
According to the doc everyone will be getting a new random billing date to help rebalance customer support load over the month.
You certainly will read that in the invoice?
The email I got said this:
What is important after the changeover? • We want to be able to offer you even better customer service in the future. For that reason, we want to change the date of your invoice. This will make it easier for us to quickly answer questions about your invoices. Starting in April, your new permanent billing day will be the 12. of the month.
I think they have just spread the billing day out across the month for all customers
Does anyone know if Hetzner is looking to open up a datacenter in Australia or in Southeast Asia?
South America would be great as well
South Africa sounds like a good compromise between Australia and South America :)
Wonder what's the shortest possible latency between those points?
Alternative, more interesting question: Assuming Hetzner have a data center in Germany and one in Finland, where should their next data center be in order to reduce latency as much as possible, in the most countries?
They also have one in the US.
So probably East Asia?
That's just for cloud I think, and also not their own data centers.
Why isn't their US Data Centers not listed in the table of Data Centers they run? https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/data-centers-and-con...
Maybe they don't operate those data centers themselves? Outsourced perhaps.
Which data centers does Hetzner operate?
Yes, they state as much when you order anything and talked about it at length when they introduced the US offering.
They're shipping their specialized server systems to select providers for housing, essentially. Most maintenance is done remotely... aside from replacing faulty hardware etc
Hetzner's US cloud zones are colocated in someone else's facility (AFAICT they don't specify where): https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/#are-the-se...
If anybody has migrated from AWS to Hetzner what was your experience? What kind of cost savings did you see?
I know it's not a like-for-like comparison, I am particularly curious about the price differentials though, AWS is often a premium.
Got an order of magnitude saving, mainly due to absurd AWS network traffic costs.
I helped some smaller companies move from AWS EC2 to Hetzner dedicated servers. One example: Biggest cost saving was in the bandwidth bills. They also realized they don't really need to be able to scale up/down in minutes or having 6 instances online, but having two beefy machines lead to better performance, less latency and cheaper monthly bills.
Originally they just went with AWS because the developer who did infrastructure stuff was most (only?) used to it and had some certification or similar, without really thinking about why AWS. Reached out to me when they started to wonder why things were so expensive for what they were doing.
If monthly price won't increase than this appears to be a good change. But their dedicated servers have an "installation fee", so it won't be cost-effective to rent them for short periods, and VMs are billed on hourly basis already, to my knowledge. Not sure which products this change covers.
Not all of their dedicated servers have a setup fee; for example, the lowest spec AX model does not.
Server auctions don't have a setup fee either. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
Will this cost more for existing customers?
What they should have made more clear is, for existing customers - will this be cost neutral or cost more.
Ideally, this is cost neutral for existing customer and gives the flexibility of paying partial month for partial usage.
the post says: "Just to make it clear, the montly price you will pay will NOT change, even if you see some short-term changes in monthly totals on your invoices during the transition period."
This is for existing customers. If they offer servers for an hourly rate I would expect prices to up with a priced in setup fee
This overall sounds like it makes sense and brings their billing into line with other providers.
But it's super confusingly written and presented. Why is this an essay with CAPITAL LETTERS to try to simplify things. It looks like they put in a ton of effort to make sure people aren't confused, but this doesn't seem like the thing to give people to ensure that they aren't confused.
Huh, to me it feels they just tried to emphasize the most important things, like your bill never being higher than the monthly price would be. Like, the opposite of what tech companies usually do.
Hetzner ist best, kein protest.
Lol. For kebab production, maybe.
If we can get over the fact that they ban accounts out of nowhere, that can be good news. But not for me. Because I couldn't even sign up.
Same here. I provided an authentic US drivers license for their verification (which I normally wouldn't do) yet that didn't pass the verification, no reason given. Well, if they don't my money, fine, I'll do it elsewhere.
I just started a hosting gig myself. I got tired of the costs.
Only if Hetzner enters in LLM hosting for masses, it'd be fun
So basically some large customers wanted to rent physical servers by the hour so now everyone gets to rent physical servers by the hour?
What a beautiful company.
Nice but illegal in some European countries. If you have a cost with a fixed deal (aka bare metal server per month) law has it that its upfront. If its a monthly cost it should be invoiced be the first 5 days of the following month.
I guess I can tell the IRS that Hetzner has a problem with their cron jobs or with the uniform distribution of their accounting people workload.
Just use DigitalOcean. Easy setup and very cheap VPS options.
Thank you, Sir.
that said, while digital ocean is great, as far as i know hetzner is somewhat cheaper. compare!
at digital ocean, 12$: 2GB RAM, 1vCPU, 20GB SSD, 2TB transfer
at hetzner, 10,50$: 8GB RAM, 2vCPU, 80GB SSD, 20TB transfer
Yes, but Hetzner costumer service is from another planet. So in case of issues they won't be able to help, and you will have issues.
Hetzner has good support.
I sttongly disagree based in my interaction with them. They were very rude. That said, their services are reasonably priced and they have been competent throughout my time with them.
Hetzner would be far more appealing if they ever decide to muzzle their rebid support team.
No, they were German. Knowledgeable and efficient, but they won't coddle you or pretend that their life depend on your miser account. If you have a problem that can not be solved by their standard process, they will rather drop you than try to accommodate you.
No, I'm afraid you're way off. Their response was far from efficient. I reported a fault in their interface and they wrote a whole peragraph demeaning me in a passive aggressive manner.
The workaround (to their subpar system) was a single line at the end. Very opposite from German efficiency if you ask me.
That said, I did switch newer deployments to another cloud provider who is more professional, so it really does seem that they do not care about my measly account :-)
Cheers!
German efficiency is a myth. German “rudeness” is not.
yeah they dropped my account and kept the money, now I know how they can be that cheap
Their abuse team is rude. Their technical support is usually professional, and the one time I talked to their legal team they were superb.
They're Germans, after all
This was my experience too, both with my tiny personal account and my giant clients accounts
DigitalOcean has a long history of kicking out customers with no warning and no explanation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11036554
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596138
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29600320
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38880713
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127683
And in case of no issues, you save quite a lot of money.
Similar to the other commenters I much disagree - "but this ofc. rly depends on what you expect from them..."
If the thing has power, network, working hardware and is able to "boot into there rescue-system" that is all they care about. And for that support has been stellar including preventive disk swaps, moving disk into new chassis and such with feedback and action within minutes basically 24/7.
But the software end is ofc. entirely on you, down to the BIOS where they roll you a network-KVM-Cart to the box for some hours after requesting it with a click. They wont fix your HTML errors, nor your php syntax errors, or explain how to setup SSL on your apache, nor will they help when you dont know how to operate ssh/putty ;) and if "with such an issue" one bothers the 24/7-datacenter guys (and not just "8-16/5 normal customer support") I may even understand that it seems a little rude ;-)
Care to share why?
I've been a Hetzner customer for nearly 10 years now. I just checked – first invoice in June 2014. And during that period, Hetzner's support – which I needed maybe 3 times since things generally just work – has always been stellar.
I've used Linode too, and their support was comparable (=also great). But Hetzner wins on pricing, hands down.
I actually appreciate Hetzner hasn't join the BS enshittification gimmick train (yet). If that's your complaint.
DigitalOcean is at least 2-3 times more expensive with 10-3 times less bandwidth
DigitalOcean, even before it had huge layoffs, blocked my new account and wouldn’t allow me to pay. There was absolutely no support whatsoever for that. Just a template email and no other way to escalate or write to a human. I can only imagine how much worse it would be now with reduced staff.
Be ready to handover a copy of your national ID/passport
I've had a similar experience where my account was banned despite providing all the info they requested (including my passport).
Hetzner was the only provider where I was banned despite providing everything I was asked for. I've deployed services on plenty of providers (AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc) without issue.
Apparently, this has been an on-going struggle for them. A few weeks ago they were even called out on an episode of the syntaxFM podcast for this behavior after one of the hosts had his account banned [0].
It's still a bit of a mystery to me honestly. Is their fraud detection so poor where they're forced to ban new sign-ups in this manner? How can Hetzner's competition tell that these accounts are legitimate (without ridiculous requirements such as passport) and Hetzner can't (even when provided with full home address, passport, etc)? I'm assuming Hetzner can't because they've seemingly developed a reputation for banning legitimate developers and the only reason I can think of where they'd be fine with that is if they actually have a very difficult time telling whether an account is legitimate or not.
[0]: https://twitter.com/stolinski/status/1750226126499139665
They are like Ryanair and Lidl brands - you get a reasonable product super-cheap. Don't argue about the terms and conditions, just be happy to do business with us. If you don't buy, somebody else after you will. This is not classic VC-funded IT. It's mass-market, low margin, low risk consumer products. It's not Enterprise IT.
It's mass-market, low margin, low risk consumer products
None of those have anything to do with demanding that customers expose themselves to identity theft risk.
They banned my prepaid account, I had few bucks on left on it to test and evaluate some selfhosting services. I didn't try to ask for my money back as I saw it like a pointless time waste trying to contact them.
Can you elaborate? I have a VPS and a storage box on Hetzner and I'm so far satisfied with it, minus the sometimes confusing interface between their different products.
Because they are so cheap, they are often used by spammers or other shady entities. So occasionally they may ask for ID. For example, if you connect from one country, use an address from another country and use prepaid card from yet another country.
used by spammers
Then why don't they just ask for ID if you want port 25 unblocked?
Doesn't add up.
The ports are blocked by default for new customers. After a few billing cycles, a request can be made to have it lifted.
They have never asked me for any of my three accounts. And one I paid with credit card the two other with bank wire.
They didn't even ask me for that, straight up banned my account.
This will be required in the US for all providers within a year unless a sufficiently large number of people comment on the Commerce Department's proposed rule: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/us-department-commerce-...
You're looking for the cloud servers: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
Sorry for my silliness, so 'cloud' is a new name for 'VPS'?
VPS are a part of the cloud offering now. Just like EC2 is part of AWS. Once change is that traditionally VPSs used local disk storage, while cloud servers use network block storage.
Usually clouds offer additional higher level features, in addition to basic VMs, such as load balancers, object storage and managed containers. Though Hetzner currently offers very little in that regard.
Hetzner Cloud uses local NVMe SSD storage. They used to have Ceph based network block storage, but deprecated that around 2 years ago.
This rename has been a thing for 10 years now. All the VPS providers jumped on the cloud bandwagon and call themselves cloud.
Virtual private server == anything that is not a whole machine, usually referring to small VMs.
In hetzner speak you want a "shared vCPU server".
That's roughly what others offer as VPS, just more clearly spelled out (IMHO). You get fractional CPU usage that should be burstable and roundabout one core.
Thank you, finally I understood that.
Managed virtual servers are available here: https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/
VPS = you get a virtual manchine which you administer yourself.
Managed servers are something different entirely.