Hetzner is cancelling all of our servers without reason
We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit called Unredacted, which operates services and infrastructure that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy.
Today we received a notice that Hetzner is cancelling all of our servers, and without any prior warning. They do not give a reason, and their decision is final. We've always paid our bills on time and have never received an abuse report.
Edit: To be clear, we are not operating any open proxies or censorship circumvention services on Hetzner IPs.
Most of our critical infrastructure runs on top of Hetzner, and this will disrupt our important work while migrating everything to another provider.
In the spirit of transparency, it's important to know why critical infrastructure is being pulled out from underneath us. We'd like an explanation from @Hetzner_OL at the very least.
We understand that they can terminate an account for any reason, but this is not typical of most providers to do for an account in good standing. If this can happen to us, it could happen to you as well.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
Comments
You should probably avoid German companies for this kind of project, it is among the worst possible countries for it.
Highly unlikely that they will provide any meaningful explanation here.
OpenVPN installer | WireGuard installer
I concur, Hetzner hates anonymity tools and organizations who help with censorship evasion.
You should be looking for less mainstream providers that will care about you, @MannDude and @HostSlick can definitely help.
I'm aware of your work and use services provided by you everyday, and I thank you for doing what you do.
Sorry but hetzner is sh*t, i would never use it, basically no host in germany
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/180504/hetzner-traffic-use-notice-unlimited-unlimited
As others have said, Hetzner and German providers in general are a poor choice for anything even slightly out of the norm - it shouldn’t be the case and nobody can be expected to simply know this, but it sadly is what it is.
Interestingly though, it seems you mainly provide censorship evasion services and other privacy focused services. If you’re not running these at Hetzner, how are servers there considered critical infrastructure?
They just haven't been the same after 1945.
Whose fault eh?
Late reply here, but we run our XMPP & Matrix service on Hetzner.
Additionally, we do run some services there, but they do not use Hetzner IPs and are tunneled to and from Hetzner.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
Will they be moved over to Incognet?
Yes they will. Preparing for that migration asap.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
How much more expensive are they, or did you get a special deal and they are price-matching Hetzner?
https://unredacted.org/about/supporters/
https://x.com/unredacted_org/status/1842616379033186598
It's about 3x more expensive for dedicated, but IncogNET is providing the server at cost which we really appreciate.
They did donate some virtual servers as well, which was very helpful.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
What was the account type? Individual or company?
Company account. We provided proof when registering a while back, and they approved our account.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
I have a very similar experience to the OP. I, too, work in the field of helping people circumvent censorship. Hetzner named the company after their Führer->Hitzler->Hetzner, using the famous red color as their brand color. I hatezler! They provided no reason, and the communication was dismissive. Where you talk to a robot that introduces itself once as "Steffen" once as "Dominek", repeating the non-sense. All the staff are German.
… what? 🤨 It’s named Hetzner after the founder, Martin Hetzner, and of course most of the staff are German; it’s a German company.
Maybe you're right, but he crushed my small business like Adolf Hetzner.
Haven't read such agitated BS in a while...
I understand that the bold "H" on that famous red might evoke different associations for different people but google yourself
https://www.google.com/search?q=hitler+cloud+hosting+company
I expect it is a free speech advocate pushing the limits of free speech by being insulting to Germans. He's probably just looking for drama. Lets ignore him and see if he goes away.
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No.
Hetzner is named after Martin Hetzner, the founder and owner of Hetzner.
It is his family name, surname.
It is as if i had a company and called it Janevski.
@unredacted that's quite the controversial services there per big brother being the biggest opponent. Wish you the best in your mission, but I can imagine the potential level of complaints you may get. Why not colo your infra instead?
You know how the saying goes. Everyone you don't like = hitzler
Thank you. We're actually working on doing that right now: https://mastodon.social/@unredacted_org/113502886203400157
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
These are great colo places I suggest in USA. Not sure if that is in scope though since you were in Hetzner DL?
Depending on how many 1u's you need, I can make a couple suggestions:
https://oplink.net in Houston TX (Sprint TX) area. Hands on Colo support. Best support you can get hands on, superb. You dont even need to visit the site, ever, I mean it. Ship your server to them, they will rack and help configure and image the OS. Migration is on you though. The best part is the network quality and the support. Network is 1 Gbps unmetered per 1u (or aggregated per rack) upgradable to 10Gbps burst 1 Gbps commit, or more if you need it. The best benefit is the DDoS protection at edge with a Corero SmartWall 100 Gbps DDoS attack capability, plus the Lumen primary quality backbone, and Cogent as backup backbone. The DC is elevated northwest of Houston, very unlikely to have disaster from storms. Tell Ryan P. I sent you there.
https://www.trgdatacenters.com/ if you need more than 10x 1u's to rack, then this is the same DC that oplink uses above and has similar handson plans. I think you will need your own uplink transit, switches, and routers. More commit, more space an power, less cost, still hands on remote for you. I dont think they provide net transit, but you can check. Choose Lumen if you can in that DC, it is absolutely the best quality transit I've ever used. Cogent if you must...
https://microtronixdc.com/ Have not colo here yet, but these guys are doing good work and provide great prices for the level and quality. The network has a transit carrier from their DC to the backbone that is a bit wonky/latent bound, but it's not that massive 30ms plus to a major city. Located in Pennsylvania. Same deal, you ship your server ready to go, they rack them, but less hands on is my understanding, but HDD swaps and such are handled fine by them.
Thanks for the suggestions & details. Heard of some of these and we certainly will consider them for future expansion.
At the moment, we need local access to the DC for our core build out & projects. All of those DCs are a bit far at the moment.
Unredacted is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides free and open services that help people evade censorship and protect their right to privacy
Stay away from German pro censorship companies like these, learned this the hard way. All the best !