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Hetzner is great, I run services for my clients and production apps on their dedicated servers which are cheaper and more performant than AWS-wannabes like Linode and Digital Ocean which I used to use.

BUT I just wish they'd stop with the crypto fear. You can be banned just for having any form of crypto software running (i.e. a Bitcoin core node) or any form of cryptocurrency data in any shape or form.

Quote from a Reddit user quoting Hetzner's support: "From support: Please note that the operating of applications that are used to mine crypto currencies is not allowed on our dedicated and cloud servers. Our policy does not allow to run any application in connection with cryptocurrency. This includes mining/farming, plotting, operation of nodes, storage of blockchain data and trading."

That's far too vague to be sensible. I wanted to write some software to play with the Forth-like VM that's embedded in Bitcoin, and that sounds like it's forbidden (storing of blockchain data). I don't want to risk my livelihood or clients' VPSes to find out.

These draconian T&C rules is why I am slowly moving to the other AWS-wannabe-but-cheaper OVH, that at least has more sane and business-friendly terms and conditions, rather than being subject to the whims of some German middle manager that decided they just hate anything vaguely related to cryptocurrencies.

Energy is an input cost in running a server, and Hetzner talks in this very article about how they can keep prices low because they are obsessed with minimizing energy utilization. So it makes some sense that they would ban crypto mining: permitting it would significantly increase overall energy utilization and could quickly make their business model unprofitable.

Also, servicing legal requests related to crypto operations exhausts resources, and they probably don’t want to waste time, money, and people on those either.

Parent comment doesn't want to mine, but just operate a node (e.g. for validating incoming tx, which has nothing to do with mining).

Parent comment isn't complaining about a mining ban, but that they ban even just storing blockchain data, virtually no CPU cycles involved.

Yes, that's why I wrote the second paragraph. Running nodes related to other aspects of crypto can attract law enforcement requests. Same reason a lot of hosting providers don't permit running Tor/VPN gateways, BitTorrent servers, etc.
> So it makes some sense that they would ban crypto mining: permitting it would significantly increase overall energy utilization and could quickly make their business model unprofitable.

Then adding an energy usage limit would make more sense instead of a broad-usage ban, and it is significantly less invasive to examine a server’s energy expenditure rather than the server’s productive use.

Also, how do they investigate and enforce this ban? If it is possible to get banned for ‘trading,’ does this mean they are inspecting all communication and activity on instances they host?

Adding energy usage limits is much more complicated than you make it sound. And it would impact many more use-cases than cryptocurrency. It's much easier to ban crypto-usage and lose a hand full of customers, than implementing limitations that will impact everyone, which might cause them losing many, many customers.
So now they have to add individual energy usage monitoring so a minority of individuals mine/trade bitcoin?

The environmental ethics behind proof-of-work crypto is dubious at best. Maybe they’ve made a choice not to support crypto operations for ethical reasons.

this also doesn’t take into account the possibility that they’d have to increase their overall electrical capacity (amps), load distribution equipment, UPS, and generators. at cost to all other users, less runtime, more distributed cost, etc…

you could always keep hertzner for work and use the others for experiments. although plotting being banned seems a bit extreme.
Question for people in the US that use Hetzner. Billing-wise, do they show up as a US presence? With Fastmail I have to disable some security on one of my bank accounts for a day every couple of years to add credit to Fastmail as they are based out of the AU as it pertains to billing. Would it be the same for Hetzner?

Fastmail has earned some trust from me so I don't mind having two or three years of credit on my account. With VPS/server providers and registrars I usually stay under 1 year so I can walk away without losing much. This would be more of a hassle is why I ask.

I am in the US and have been using Fastmail for years. I have no problem with automated billing to a consumer credit card. I have recently begun using Hetzner as well, and this also bills to the same card. I just looked at the Hetzner charge, and it shows up in the CC transactions as "hetzner.com" with a US domestic phone number associated.

My guess is that your CC has more strict foreign alerting than mine, so perhaps this is not very helpful information. But it is certainly possible, and perhaps Hetzner billing support (and Fastmail too!) have some advice for how to smooth things over with the bank.

The non US companies I have tried this with in the past also had a US number, but their receiving account was non-US and I am fairly certain that is what they trigger off of. The protection in place is intentional and if anything I have asked the bank for even tighter controls. I want something closer to the 3rd parties that allow making specific rules, unique card numbers for specific vendors but getting a bank to do that is difficult. My card does not have strict foreign alerting, it has explicit blocks of non US that I put in place. If someone outside of the US tries to use the card, it completely disables the card until I walk into the bank which is not a problem as they are just down the road and they all know me. The only option with Fastmail is to disable my protections for a day. I don't mind that as they have earned some limited trust from me and they are inexpensive. VPS and server providers can get more expensive really fast so I am less inclined to do that unless they show up as a US entity as far as the bank can see. That's why I was asking if others here also had to disable their protection or if they know for certain they show up as a US entity.
I use virtual cards for this
What kind of Mickey Mouse bank do you use that requires you to jump through hoops to send money to Australian or German businesses as if their were third-world countries? Is this common in the US?
Most banks in the US have a feature to block non US entities from billing their card if they so desire. It cuts down on fraud I dont know how much and also means that when fraud is being committed it is more likely that law enforcement can go after the people doing it as they may be in the same country. Not perfect, but nothing ever is. Some criminals are dumb and/or lazy. I assume non US banks also have something similar, to block countries outside of their own. Is this not the case? If this makes my bank Mickey Mouse then I guess that makes me Donald Duck or Goofy as I am very happy with the feature hence why I loathe the idea of disabling it for even a day.
In Sweden our banks block insecure international payments by default, those without a second verification step (using Swedish BankID). You can unlock your card for 60m to insecure transactions globally, mostly to deal with US recipients actually.
My non-us bank has a feature to block all non-3ds (aka, us transactions) outside of a 100km radius of my phone’s current location. I have to specifically authorize/exempt us payments (like GitHub).
I've been playing with Hetzner since June. One of their billing options is PayPal, which is what I've been using. That should come through as a US charge. Note: their PayPal option isn't a recurring payment; they send you an invoice each month and then you have to go into the billing page and pay it via PayPal. It's kind of tedious, not sure why they set it up like that.

P.S. before I put FastMail on my credit card, I used to have it on my bank debit card. My bank charged me some silly international fee, like $5.00 or something just for the privilege of using my own bank account, but I never had an issue with the actual payment. If possible, I recommend putting FastMail and Hetzner on a credit card and then pay the credit card with your bank account.

I had paid them with Paypal some time ago but I quickly cancelled my Paypal account of 20 years without hesitation after their first pass / attempt at using the power of money to control speech. [1]

If possible, I recommend putting FastMail and Hetzner on a credit card and then pay the credit card with your bank account.

I can pay them with a debit card but I block the ability on purpose. That's what my question was all about, not having to disable a security feature that I had the bank enable. If they have a US presence then they would be permitted. I've intentionally never applied for a credit card. I only spend money that I have. Most of my transactions are in cash. There's just a few things I use a debit card for, servers being one of them.

[1] - https://fortune.com/2022/10/10/paypal-users-fine-misinformat...

> "If we consider the typical lifecycle of a server, the highest costs arise from the moment when new hardware is purchased."

If that's the case, why aren't there more low budget hardware servers being offered? After all these years, there's Kimsufi by OVH but not much else.

There is a lot of very cheap hardware available these days that makes for a good small server to use as a mail server. Having a dedicated server for this purpose results in much better privacy.

I hope to see more low budget dedicated servers!

Real estate.

There is a constant battle to increase performance per watt and increase density. Think of it like performance per watt per sqft. Once the hardware improves significantly enough you’re losing money by not putting new hardware in that space utilizing that same power.

To make an extreme out of it, imagine an entire datacenter full of pentium 4 powered servers. Which could be replace by a single 42u rack. Nobody would want to pay what the electricity would even cost to run those servers.

Often times the oldest hardware running in data centers is hardware that has been running the same workload from the same customer for a decade.

> entire datacenter full of pentium 4 powered servers

> Which could be replace by a single 42u rack

Way, way less. A couple of nodes on EPYC with 2TB RAM already would have more capacity than that.

While you are correct, this is not what Hetzner said. If the highest cost in the TOC would be acquisition an not floor space over time, then OP would be right
having worked in this industry previously, i can confidently say that hardware has a lifecycle. towards the end of that lifecycle the hardware is no longer affordable to even have powered on.

if the server costs $46 a month to have racked up and powered on, and is less powerful than a $15 vps we’re offering in the same location then what sense does it make to continue offering that server?

The frontloaded cost model is not just the cost of the hardware, but all the other cost incurred before the first payment rolls in (transportation, build, installation, test, ...). Once it is up and running the variable cost are very low, just energy usage and customer support mostly.
How old you want to go? The first option I see on Server Auction is a €38/mo i7-6700, roughly 9 years old. An equivalent 14th gen would be the i3-14100, with 33% [1] more performance. Assuming this would be the server’s last customer, Hetzner might be decommissioning 12-15 year old hardware.

There is quite a big leap in energy efficiency between 6th and 14th gens. At some point they economically turn into space heaters.

1: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700-vs-...

Have you not seen their auction listings? Old dedicated gear for peanuts: https://www.hetzner.com/sb
Racks of N100s.
More businesses should work that way! I especially dislike these catchy 0 €* (or 0 USD) offers from other providers where all the truth is in the *.

I really whish that Hetzner continues to evolve the cloud business, so that more kinds of managed services could be booked.

(Ozgun from Ubicloud)

Hey there, I know you meant something different, but I just wanted to chime in. At Ubicloud, we're building an open source cloud and our managed solution runs on Hetzner: https://www.ubicloud.com/docs

We're planning to tackle a managed k8s service next. If you have any feedback for our roadmap, could you drop us a line?

I'm curious, have you had people walk away from using Ubicloud because it's a Ruby-based infrastructure project as opposed to something like Go or even Python?
Just keep in mind that https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm happened, although it's probably done by almost all hosting services
Looking forward to more US locations.
This is what I was coming here to request. Would love for them to bring their Colocation, Dedicated Server and Storage Box services to the US.
Would've been my primary choice if they start providing Asian servers, Iike Japan.
I think they announced a new datacenter in Asia 24hrs ago: cannot find the source but if I am not wrong you sure will read it, soon
I use them for various things that need beefy servers at a lower price, and can confirm that they are quite good at delivering that.
They require my passport for verifying identify. I am based in the US. This is a big no-no. When will these europeans understand that we don't give out sensitive documents to outsiders? Your laws and reasoning does not apply here in the US.

Drop passport requirement and I will spend $2k per month.

No need for passport when buying from inside EU

But if you have a hard time complying with that companies policy, just use another? They obviously do not care about such a tiny account to change their policies for you

> No need for passport when buying from inside EU

Not true. I got flagged when buying from Sweden, even though my card passed 3D-Secure validation (which essentially shifts liability to the customer in fraud claims).

They just have a clunky system that’s getting in the way of potential customers.

I think this attitude of thinking laws do not apply to you is exactly why they wouldn’t want you as a customer.
I don't like Hetzner. They cheat on the server auctions. And they're very nationalistic and want to dictate how you communicate with others, especially when the other part is German. And they're not even cheap anymore
Can you please substantiate and elaborate your claims with sources?
Genuine question: what’s cheaper?