Hetzner removes traffic limitation for dedicated servers

I was a customer of Hetzner for years but my experience was way worse than others unfortunately.

I have lost my data twice on different hardware. The first one was totally Hetzner's fault since they have failed to identify the faulty disks when they check the disks for it. They were like `oops, sorry, it seems second disk was faulty too` AFTER I tried to re-build the RAID array on a recovery attempt. And the second one was being a bit unlucky, the RAID card didn't detect the faulty disk and tried to sync the broken disk with the healthy ones. So I lost data on a RAID-10 array, twice.

I asked them to do tests on the faulty hardware to identify the problem, to confirm my suspicion, so I could go back to my clients with a proper explanation and things got interested at this point;

While I was talking to the technical people at Hetzner and trying to explain why I think the RAID controller is the problem and how the RAID logs are confirming that, a guy called Arno, Head of Product Advice and Sales took my ticket over. He said;

``` First of all we want to apologize for what happened. Why it happened is hard to say. As you wrote at least one disk was so faulty that your data was corrupt.

Those things can happen and from our point of view no one can prevent from happening again. The only things that help are good backups and a good recovery strategy, which I think you have both.

Of course extra efford on your end occurs for recovery and since it happend the 2nd time, we want to compensate you for that.

What compensation would you expect from us? ```

which was kind of ridiculous because I didn't ask for a compensation, I didn't even imply that I want a compensation for what happened. I was simply requesting a solid explanation and/or confirmation and this guy was saying that I lost my data on a RAID-10 array because 1 (ONE) of the disks were faulty.

I asked him to handover the tickets to the technical people since he's from sales and what he says doesn't make sense. Also provided him some numbers about how much money the sites were making on that lost server, just to prove how wrong he is to approach to the matter from that perspective and guess that was the bit what triggered him.

He fought so hard to not handover the ticket back to the technical people, explained how much he knows about RAID-10, how loosing the server is our fault while making so much money the sites because the server was cheap (WTF?), they won't do the testing because they host many more servers with the same hardware and they are just working fine etc.

After using Hetzner for 7 years, I cancelled the service I take from them, along with other 11 company accounts and tens of dedicated servers and never looked back.

Hetzner is a company that ask you to move from their network to some other provider when you ask what happens if you get DDOSed (this happened before they introduced the DDOS protection).

So never again...

Hey guys, so after i saw this on the front page, and visited the site, there rates were surprisingly really low, I actually decided to try out the service.

TL:DR Its not as rosy or great as some people here suggested, and their response on contacting them came off as a little harsh to me.

Here is what truly happened, I registered, entered my personal details, confirmed my email, entered my card details, they then deducted about USD 0.010 from my card, which is okay, many cloud services do that to test the card validity or something like that.

So the next step is you have to submit a copy of your ID or passport, the reasons they give for this made perfect sense, so i sent in a photo of my ID, then in the morning, about 7 hours later, I got an email saying my account was rejected.

Easy, so I try to call their support team, to find out what i had submitted incorrectly, or what i had missed. The answer is not what you would expect given the praise their customer reps had on this thread, I was told the rejection is a management decision and i had to reapply with another email. note that even if i had wanted to reapply, now i couldn't because i wanted to know what data i had not included or submitted incorrectly.

I call in again and I am told the same thing. So i try to login and my account is deactivated, thats expected.

So that's my experience.

Sidenote: Do not start with a greeting like "good morning" when you call their support team, both of the people i called did not answer to that and waited for me to speak again, before they said anything, which i felt was quite embarrassing, like as though saying I should know better and go straight to the point when i call in.

Maybe someone else who got through has a different narrative, but if you also failed then your story is similar to mine. but If you want to have a great week, don't try them b'se they will steal your happiness for a day. Stay with AWS or GCP or Digital Ocean or whatever

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but apart from the new cloud stuff 've had nothing but bad experiences.

Many years ago: HDDs died like I've never seen it before, one every few months with just a couple of servers.

ca. late 2013: We had some production systems running on Hetzner hardware, we regularly! called their support to tell them the DC lost connection because our monitoring apparently was better than theirs and they acted surprised for not hearing something yet.

Only like 2-3 years ago: Got a new server, had SMART issues and had to have the disk replaced before the first 24h after ordering were up.

An ex-coworker of mine joked they must have added the "please change the disk" option in the support form just for him because he was running 20+ servers and actually had to call them every week to replace a dying disk.

Yes, this was all years ago - but I'd rather pay servers out of my own pocket than be oncall for production servers there, ever again.

I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about.

This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.

This is pretty great news. Reducing bandwidth costs is definitely a good thing.

I've always wondered how people run their own (personal use or side project) services on bare metal or VPS providers manage them without spending too much time. I've found that trying to run even a few services and have a reasonable solution for backups, software updates, etc to take more time and effort than it seems is worthwhile, it makes Heroku and App Engine particularly appealing as a lot of the issues are kinda solved with managed cloud providers. I would love to hear how people make this work.