
Hetzner removes traffic limitation for dedicated servers - TimWolla
https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php?title=Traffic/en&curid=2842&diff=30324&oldid=29871
======
wink
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.

~~~
etatoby
Most of your comments are about disks. If you read the fine print, when you
order a new server, you don't get brand new disks, but used ones. When they
die, you don't get new disks, unless you pay a premium, but used ones. They
recycle the same broken hardware until it's untenable, and then some more.

~~~
chappi42
Didn't know this. Recycling is good for ecology.

At work we have some Hetzner servers. About two times a disk broke; with RAID
it was not a problem, a hassle, at least the first time, it was, yes.

~~~
gist
> Recycling is good for ecology

Looking at the recycling issue I wonder if you are using so many disks (that
fail) if it is possible to ship them to a low wage (sorry) country have them
taken apart and rebuilt using parts from other disks where different parts
failed?

~~~
51lver
It's possible to combine the parts from a disk with failed bearings and a disk
with a failed controller to end up with one working disk, but it's not worth
the effort unless your goal is data recovery.

~~~
gist
Hah why I said 'low cost country'.

------
zawerf
On AWS or GCP the cost per GB transferred is around $0.10. Even if you put a
cheap CDN on top, it costs around $0.01 per GB.

How is it possible that Hetzner (and other unmetered hosting) are giving it
out for free? If you max out the 1 Gbit for a month that's ~300 TB.

GCP and AWS would've charged you $30,000 for that!!! Are the cloud providers
just not competing with each other on price? How has the price remained so
high for so long?

~~~
southerndrift
At e.g. 3GHz and 8 cores, you only have 24 instructions to calculate one bit.
I guess the limit is the processor.

~~~
walrus01
AWS and Google's ASNs are big enough that they probably buy very little
transit at all, it all goes out peering ports at major IX points. And PNIs for
bgp sessions with major carriers (example: Comcast, RCN, Shaw, Verizon)

------
humanbeinc
Have been a customer for years now... they're one of the really innovative
hosters from Germany with dead cheap competitive pricing...

Also their new cloud options are top notch.

~~~
hardwaresofton
I absolutely love Hetzner -- they're pricing is near unbeatable. To be a bit
more precise, I believe that they offer cut rate pricing (which is not a bad
thing if you're the consumer) but _not_ cut-rate service -- there is _just
enough_ for a DIYer to be very productive and cost effective. This gets _even
easier_ if you use Hetzner Cloud directly, and they've got fantastic prices
for beefy machines there too -- while a t2.micro on AWS is ~$10/month on
hetzner cloud CX51 with 8 vcores and 32GB of RAM & and 250GB SSD with 20TB of
traffic allowed is 29.90 gbp.

Discovering the robot marketplace[0] (thanks to HN) was an eye opening
experience for me that showed me dedicated servers were viable and could be
competitive with the VPSes I'd been purchasing/using for years (I was so
excited I wrote blog posts about it). I've recently been thinking about making
a subreddit for hetzner (r/hetzner), so fellow users can talk with each other
but I am worried it would do more harm than good (increasing the burden on
them in terms of having to do PR in yet-another part of the internet that can
be pretty toxic in terms of community at times).

You can even deploy to them with terraform[1].

\-- warning, rant/ramblings below --

I feel like I say the same thing all the time, but I'll repeat it again here
-- if devops/infrastructure goes at all correctly in my mind, going to one
vendor for both your compute/data and your value-added services (so asking AWS
for EC2 machines _and_ to run RDS on top of them for you and offer support) is
going to dissipate.

Smaller companies can run sufficiently niche (many might disagree but I think
running postgres is within this ) with more innovation and decent support for
less cost than Amazon can. The vast majority of people who run RDS with
something like Postgres as a backend are unlikely to run into crazy issues
simply due to how well postgres is built, and how well known it is, outside of
gross misconfiguration.

Companies are already offering on-your-cloud solutions that use EC2 machines
to run their own software and offer support on top -- as container
orchestration systems become even more widespread I think people will stop
asking AWS or GCP for more than basic compute/data and a few tools they're
really good at, and go to more specialized smaller vendors.

[0]: [https://robot.your-server.de/order/market](https://robot.your-
server.de/order/market)

[1]:
[https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html](https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/hcloud/r/server.html)

~~~
Ush2iaph
> they're pricing is near unbeatable.

If you really want to penny-pinch unbundled solutions that charge you
separately for compute, storage and ip addresses might be even cheaper, e.g.
on scaleway you could get way with 1€/month if you go ipv6-only on their
smallest instance type with a minimal amount of storage. Plus you get
unlimited traffic with them.

~~~
jquip
Personally tried Hetzner, Scaleway and online.net, it's parent. Online.net and
scaleway have payment issues and their payment systems failed me more than
once, their website kept logging us out and their support staff did not seem
to bother. So I called it quits with online.net/scaleway. Hetzner has been
rock steady for me, however. Just my $0.2.

~~~
omnimus
I also had payment issues. It is so wierd. Payment system is the one thing
that even shady business wants to work 100%. I mean if i owe you money for
server and i am not able to pay with any of my cards that work anywhere
else... I just switched lol.

------
asdojasdosadsa
Long time customer of Hetzner, and can't more than praise them. Cheap,
reliable & super fast support.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I totally agree. I have used them (occasionally) for years whenever I need
extra compute for a few months, or for long term development servers. I
especially like running large Haskell builds after updating to new versions,
overnight machine learning runs, etc. on a rented server rather than my
laptop. For me, GCP is a close competitor to Hetzner for a different use case:
when I want a lot of compute for a few hours at a time.

------
samfriedman
I'm always hearing good things about Hetzner and especially the value on their
auction servers.

Tried buying one on the auction once, went through a whole rigamarole to
confirm my identity, send them ID pics, etc. In the end they decided to cancel
the order due to "suspicious activity". I was baffled by that as we hadn't had
any conversation besides sending them the order info & credentials. I assumed
it was a weird false positive... wonder if I should try again sometime.

~~~
m0nty
I don't remember providing them with ID but I've been a customer for a long
time, maybe it's a recent requirement. It's worth opening a dialog with them
if you're having issues - you'll be conversing with a real person and they can
probably be persuaded.

~~~
hoffs
A couple of months ago I purchased a VPS from them. They also required ID
(passport) to verify identity, but what was surprising that they suggested
using their gpg keys to encrypt the image before sending.

~~~
nielsole
Their argument is, that requiring an ID has solved most of the fraud problems.

~~~
BslSJDIz1gqWxXq
They lost my business when they required a passport. Like hell I'm showing you
that. If they wanna see my face they can look up my name on social media.

~~~
zaarn
They don't want to see your face they want to see official papers proving you
to be a unique person.

------
burtonator
Hetzner is great. We host about a petabyte of search data on them over at
[http://www.datastreamer.io/](http://www.datastreamer.io/) (my search
company).

I'm working on a new startup around a personal web archive and annotation
system ([https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)) which uses
Firebase but I would love to figure out how to use Hetzner as their prices are
amazing.

~~~
yazr
Is there any reason u r not supporting epub?

Is it just prioritizing or are there licensing/copyright complications ?

~~~
webmaven
Same Q here, burtonator. Please consider supporting EPUB.

------
perlpimp
My personal server is with them, their response has been better then some
'enterprise level' server solutions in my country. while costing hundreds of
times less.

------
cbg0
Link in the title might be slightly confusing as it is showing differences
between current and previous versions of the page. Here's the current page:
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en)

------
bpye
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.

~~~
h1d
When you realize AWS/GCE/Azure costs you about $0.1/GB for bandwidth, it
scares me it can be DDoSed to the point your bill goes out of the normal
proportion so easily. Other places have TBs of bandwidth within their < $50
plans.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
If you do move to Hetzner, you will quickly realize the value of premium
bandwidth. Maxing out your Hetzner pipe is quite difficult in my experience.
OVH/AWS (my other two experiences) on the other hand maxes out the pipe
without issue.

------
aogl
Hetzner rocks, have used them for years and they are super reliable and their
(more recent) cloud hosting options are dead cheap but also really good!

Great to see them features on HN!

~~~
levosmetalo
Honestly, I was a bit worried when switching from Digitalocean, but everything
still works perfectly for half the price. The only lacking part is the general
Linux documentation and how-tos, but whatever DO writes still applies to all
other providers.

They are the best kept hosting secret.

~~~
joering2
+1. Smart move switching away from DigitalOcean. I dont know what the heck is
going on with them recently but I started moving away as well. What broke
camels back was limit on number of servers you can have which is 12 at the
moment i believe. How the heck am i going to grow a startup if thats a
ceiling? Google is also full of stories of abruptly interrupted and frozen
accounts that you have tiny chance of getting resumed because they don’t tell
you what is wring due to “security concerns”.

~~~
jarland
Hey friend,

I'm sorry that you've had a bad experience, but we can help. Our support team
will gladly increase that limit for you on request.

On the stories that you read, I hear you. It's a tough situation because I
don't want to discount anyone's story. What I do want to point out is that
there are two sides to every story, and in such a relationship one party has
the duty of protecting privacy of the other. Sometimes we make mistakes and we
need to correct it. Sometimes what we do upsets people when we work to protect
our customers from those who would seek to abuse our platform. Abuse of our
platform lowers quality of service for everyone, and that is why it is our
duty to manage that. Each story will have it's own variables, and I'm happy to
discuss anyone's situation with them personally.

If you have any questions or there is anything I can personally help with,
please feel free to reach out at jdonnell@digitalocean.com.

Jarland

------
muks
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.

~~~
zifnab06
They wipe smart before giving you drives. Ovh does the same. Most drives have
a serial interface you can connect to with a special cable to do it.

~~~
_wmd
Any reference for that? Didn't know it was possible. Is it just to minimize
customer complaints about otherwise good-enough hardware?

------
zaarn
Recently got a very neat server box from the auctions page, having the traffic
limits removed would be amazing indeed.

Quite satisfied with support too. (Though I wish I could get a hold of a /48
IPv6 subnet from them, pfSense doesn't like /64 only networks).

~~~
hoffs
Are you running pfsense on remote server??

~~~
Operyl
It works great, have used it in the past. Right now I’m using openwrt/lede in
a VM as a NAT for VMs that don’t need a dedicated external IP. It took seconds
to set up.

------
lokl
Satisfied customer of their cloud. Was a satisfied customer at Linode for 10+
years but found Hetzner's offer too good to not at least try and I've seen no
reason to switch back.

------
cbluth
I am considering some servers from hetzner. Does anyone know of a decent
solution to put a few of these servers on the same "protected lan"?

~~~
cuu508
You can get physical private LAN! Usually an overkill, but it's possible.

When you order, you can specify extra things you will need. For example, you
can ask for a secondary NIC on each server, and to connect up the secondary
NICs through a dedicated switch. There are some caveats though:

* more expensive. When your servers have non-standard configurations, Hetzner charges a fixed extra per-server, per-month fee ("Flexipack"). The fees add up.

* The servers need to be in the same rack. If you order them all at once it's fine. But if you order, say, four servers now, and the fifth server a month later, the fifth one will go on a separate rack and won't get the private access to the four.

* Setup takes longer. If you order standard configuration, it will be ready in minutes/hours. When I ordered the extra NICs and switch, it took about a week to complete the order.

* A bit more configuration required. Primary NICs work out of the box. For the secondary NICs to work you need to tweak /etc/network/interfaces and the routing table.

~~~
chx
Flexipack is gone.
[https://www.hetzner.com/flexipack/](https://www.hetzner.com/flexipack/) just
shows the additional hardware prices. I posted this to
[https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/148931/hetzner-
drops-f...](https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/148931/hetzner-drops-flexi-
pack) mid-July.

------
parliament32
Hetzner has been fantastic, been using their dedis for several years now. You
can get rock bottom prices on their robot-auction-house thing too.

------
craftoman
Fresh Hetzner customer here. I've been using their services for personal use
for about 2 months now without any problems. I'm running speed and benchmark
tests regularly and they are actually very positive. I heard their old Cloud
panel was crappy but this one seems very promising. It's modern and simple
like those in Vultr or Digital Ocean.

------
gator-io
We get a ton of bot traffic from Hetzner servers.

~~~
zaarn
I recommend to nag their abuse mail, they tend to forward abuse information to
the server owner first (which is awesome for people running stuff on their
service, I got locked out of a previous provider in the US after someone fired
a malicious abuse complaint against me)

~~~
tetha
We had some of our legacy setup on hetzner used in a DDoS reflection attack a
year ago. That was handled really professionally by Hetzner imo. They null
routed the systems and requested us to get in contact with them within a
couple of working days or they'd void the contract. We handed them our office
IP to whitelist. Once I could get back onto the systems, I could finally
overrule all the stupid legacy hesitation and setup firewalls on the systems.
From there, the support confirmed the ports are closed and the servers got
freed again.

Good experience, in spite of the circumstances.

And the remote hands at hetzner are good, especially if you know how to work
with DCOPs. You know, have redundant systems, shutdown the broken system so
they can just do whatever they have to do once they're around.

------
ohopton
Hetzner is great - we run a couple of Ethereum nodes (non-mining) on there and
we've had zero issues with it for nearly a year. Great support, had SSDs
installed almost immediately, almost no downtime. Cheap!

------
osrec
Their virtual servers are really very cheap. How do they compare with
AWS/Vultr/Digital Ocean? Do they have an API for automation and is it
reliable?

~~~
petercooper
I "downgraded" from a physical server to a VPS with them when Cloud launched
and have saved a ton of money and the performance isn't miles off. Great
success so far. Network is solid within Europe though have noticed the
occasional bit of weird routing to the US.

~~~
osrec
Could you elaborate on the weird routing in the US please? I ask because my
app has a bunch of US users.

~~~
petercooper
I'm not a qualified networking engineer, but we had some US users report
outages which we investigated from US-based servers and noticed the normal
routing was screwy (in the sense that the normal direct routes weren't being
taken so latency was high). These incidents lasted under ten minutes and I
wrote them off as being peering related incidents as they had no effect on
European traffic.

I accept minor things like this as part of the price for hosting in Europe,
and have certainly experienced the same issues going the other direction (i.e.
me reaching US-based services) more often.

------
esseti
does anyone have a tutorial/guide on how to use hetzner for a k8s deployment,
the one of GCP is rather expensive for something of that size..

~~~
talkingquickly
This is a really good starting point; [https://github.com/hobby-
kube/guide](https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide) I've used it for several
projects and it works a treat.

~~~
esseti
well, i need a cluster not just for hobby.

------
owlninja
How is the connection speed/latency for these for someone in the US? Been
shopping for a hobby/personal server

~~~
xeroxmalf
Canada here but I get 40-50mbps single threaded / connection. Anything
multithreaded I can max my 200mbps home connection out.

------
haroldp
Anyone want to compare experiences between OVH/Soyoustart and Hetzner?

~~~
zaarn
I'm currently moving from SYS to Hetzner, the prices are much better and
support has been great. If you want to get something cheaper than SYS
Dedicated boxes I definitely recommend looking at the server auction (which is
basically SYS but different). I managed to grab a 128GB server for very cheap.

If you don't have an account you'll likely need ID verification, it was a
while ago but to my recollection they'll simply hold the purchase for you
while they verify so you don't loose a good spot. Plus you have to do it only
once.

------
ElectronShak
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

~~~
ElectronShak
I was also asked to signup again with a different email address if i needed
help....sad, right?

~~~
ElectronShak
Sorry guys, i re-applied, and went through successfully, the problem is, I
have no zipcode, in my country, so i had initially used 00000 as my zipcode, i
changed that and i got verified, thanks Hetzner!

------
Keyframe
That's what, up to max. ~300TB / month, at 1Gpbs?

~~~
Tepix
648TB (assuming 1GBit up and down each), see
[https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/](https://www.heise.de/netze/tools/bandbreitenrechner/)

~~~
chrisper
You can't saturate 1 Gbit up and down at the same time. It would be either 1
Gbit up or down, or 500 Mbit both.

~~~
gnode
Why? 1GBit Ethernet is conventionally full-duplex.

~~~
chrisper
Looks like you are right. I must have mixed up something I read recently.

------
buboard
this is gonna be great for my gaming server ... not that i ever reached the
quota

------
Timucin
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...

~~~
Timucin
Dear people who downvotes this comment, care to elaborate why?

Is it just because you don't like to see something negative about the provider
or is it something else?

~~~
TimWolla
As the submitter of the link I cannot even downvote your comment, but
something feels odd about it:

Hetzner provides unmanaged dedicated servers, thus _you_ are the one
responsible monitoring the hardware. The only thing Hetzner does is swapping
HDDs you identify as faulty (you provide them the S/N of the faulty disk via
the support form).

Personally I rent the super cheap Serverbörse servers for personal use. The
HDDs in there are fairly old (as it's their older generation servers). Over
the past 6 years I needed Hetzner to swap about 5 HDDs. When my server logged
issues when accessing a disk, I requested a swap, they swapped it less than 30
minutes later and I started the rebuild of my RAID. All without issues.

> The first one was totally Hetzner's fault since they have failed to identify
> the faulty disks when they check the disks for it.

Did you mean to say that they removed an incorrect disk when you requested a
swap? Or did you expect them to monitor the hardware for you?

~~~
Timucin
Hey Tim,

I totally agree but working on a remote machine it's not always possible, even
through KVMs, so Hetzner had to step in on this one.

There were 2 faulty disks from the same 4-disk Raid but once they have found
the first, they assumed that first disk was the issue and didn't test the
rest, so that ended up with loosing everything.

Even if they are helping as a courtesy, they should test all the disks and do
this right before let the customer continue.

~~~
TimWolla
I'm afraid, I still don't understand. We are talking about a rented dedicated
server here (not about some managed one), right?

> but once they have found the first

How did they find the HDD? As I said: They don't monitor your server. Did you
request replacement of the HDD? If you request replacement of one disk, they
swap one disk.

> Even if they are helping as a courtesy, they should test all the disks and
> do this right, before the customer continue.

How should that work? They remove all the HDDs from the server, put them into
a different computer to run a test? That would be a privacy nightmare _and_
add unnecessary downtime. I keep track of my HDD status (smartmontools, mdadm
Events, ZFS Event Daemon). I _know exactly_ what HDDs I want replaced. They
just perform the actual, physical, replacement for me. And that is absolutely
fine.

~~~
Timucin
This happened 4 years ago so I found the emails to refresh my memory. Here's
what happened according to the emails I have;

1 - I woke up to an unresponsive server in the morning. Couldn't reach to the
server in any way.

2 - Got in touch with the support and they asked me to give them like 50 mins
to check the hardware and disks and get back to me with;

 _Dear Client,

We have found this disk S/N xxx defective. Please confirm the full data loss
on it in order to replace it._

right after that they wrote;

 _Dear Client,

We have found this disk S/N xxx defective. Please confirm the full data loss
on it in order to replace it._

I asked if they mean data lost on this single disk or the whole array, they
said;

 _Dear Client,

We cannot tell you how is going to react the raid controller as can happens
also data loss if it is defective. For that, we recommend before to take
Backups of the data. When you are sure to replace the disk tell us, confirm
data loss and we will do it._

after many emails and sharing error messages I've got from the raid controller
Hetzner said;

 _Dear Client,

We see our test reported that 2 drives are faulty, but we have replaced one of
this only. Now, we could offer to replace the second faulty one (SN: xxx).

Could we do this anytime?_

I don't know what kind of test they did but I believe the report he mentioned
is from the very first diagnose they did.

I wouldn't know the details since I didn't argue on how they could oversee
this, I tried to find a solution.

Edit : I fixed the order of messages.

~~~
TimWolla
Thank you for looking that up. Hardware usually does not fail from one day to
the next, so to me it appears like your HDD monitoring was insufficient in the
weeks / months leading the full crash.

It should have detected the disks going bad and allow you to request a
replacement with 3 of 4 disks being good and then later a replacement of the
second bad disk with 3 of 4 being good, no?

> I asked if they mean data lost on this single disk or the whole array, they
> said;

IMO this is the correct answer from Hetzner. They cannot know whether you run
RAID 1 (which would be good), RAID 5 (which would have killed the array), RAID
6 (good) or RAID 10 (might or might not be good). Asking before replacing
could possibly allow you to save data in case the disk is not completely dead,
but rather has a bunch of faulty sectors only.

The only issue I personally see is the bad English. I am German like Hetzner
and even I have issues understanding that grammar.

------
Bayart
A mere decade after French hosts.

------
nik736
They should rather pay for DTAG transit than do such shenanigans.

~~~
stemuk
IIRC they ended the DTAG transit agreement due to DTAG having unreasonable
pricing requests for the renewed agreement (i.e. DTAG holding Hetzener
hostage, you can read more about it here [1]. If you are interested you can
still buy DTAG transit for your Hetzner servers via
[https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Double_Paid_Traffic/en),
do keep in mind however that this is a metered connection, not unlimited like
for regular web traffic.

[1] [https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-
extra...](https://www.golem.de/news/hetzner-und-netzneutralitaet-extrakosten-
fuer-bessere-anbindung-an-telekom-kunden-1511-117711.html) (German)

~~~
nik736
I know perfectly fine about this. It has nothing to do with being held
hostage. DTAG simply wants to charge more money, which is just business. You
can either pay it or not. Hetzner decided that it's not worth it for them, the
victim is the customer, because you probably are only able to download with
around 5mbps in the evening from a DTAG connection. The upgrade is not
possible with their cloud services, so it's a nightmare if you are a DTAG
customer.

The same as Level3 charges more than others (even though not as extreme as
DTAG) because they think their pipes are premium.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Hetzner simply wants to pay less money, which is just business. You can either
sell at that price or not. DTAG decided that it's not worth it for them, the
customer is the victim, because you probably are only able to download at
around 5mbps in the evening from a Hetzner server. The upgrade is not possible
with their internet connection, so it's a nightmare if you are a Hetzner
customer.

I mean, yeah, sure, it sucks for the customer. What I don't understand is your
implication that this is Hetzner's fault. Both sides could accept the other
side's conditions, neither side did, all of that is "just business".

What isn't "just business" is asking much higher prices than the competition
for the same kind of service and expecting customers to buy it. And if you
find that there are customers who do buy anyway, that's a hint that you are
dealing with a monopoly situation, which is appropriately described as
"holding people hostage".

