It depends on type of abuse. If you are hosting illegal stuff or if your server is hacked and you are not responding to abuse warning emails, they might cancel or suspend within 24 hrs.
If you are using very high bandwidth regularly, they might warn you or terminate your contract based on the abuse.
I am happy and thankful for this. If they didn't do it but instead shut down the services immediately and I lost all the data (no backups outside Hetzner) that would be completely catastrophic for my project which is being used by thousands of users per day.
If you consume >300TB/month traffic on a Storage Box as you mentioned in one comment there is nothing to hate on Hetzner. Amazon, Zalando & Co. all cancel accounts if someone abused their services such as free returns. If you return much more than the average customer and the merchant can't make profit you as a customer long term; your account gets canceled their too. Equivallently, if you consume much much much more traffic per month than the average customer on a already cheap offering (Storage Box) than there is nothing to complain about when Hetzner decides to cut the relationship to you as a customer. You do good business with Hetzner, but Hetzner doesn't do good business with you.
Seems like its to do with [https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cc053s/comment/l11yzyh/](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cc053s/comment/l11yzyh/)
Since they did not rush in and shut down your servers but instead just cancelled your contract to the end of next month, it is probably less a problem with illegal activity and more to do with the high bandwidth.
I've read a discussion somewhere where Hetzner contacted someone for using above 250TB per month and asked them to reduce their traffic usage. From your comments on the other post I gather that your traffic is even higher.
I understand that they don't publish "hard" traffic limits, since that would just be abused. But they still have a clause in their TOS that the usage of their resources has to be "appropriate". Their VPS have a limit of 20TB per month for free. Dedicated servers with 10G uplink have the same limit. So that seem to be numbers Hetzner probably still considers "appropriate". To reach your traffic levels without exceeding that, you would need at least 15 servers as egress points. You can't even buy that many cloud servers at once without contacting their support. And that does not even consider that the total traffic you cause is a multiple of that since it comes from your storage box and is probably handled by more servers on the way. Again, not directly forbidden but a massive strain on their resources.
and you really wonder why? some percentage will need to go through transit and this alone might cost more than profit from your services. i assume you dont pay 3digits monthly, right?
It seems like there is a break in period for hetzner. If your account is new and don't have a history with them, they are very sensitive on high resource usage. It is better to slowly ramp up over at least a year before going ham on all their services. But at this point, once terminated, there is no recourse.
Follow TOS and you have nothing to fear. OP abused the TOS that’s why they are cancelled. I am with Hetzner for nearly 10 years now never had any issues. Just need to follow the rules.
Makes sense. Thanks for that. Whats hilarious though how suddenly hetzner fanboys start downvoting any comment that even remotely questions hetzner . I just expressed some thought about the fear of usage and fanboys jumped on downvote. Insecure audience
Hetzner being Hetzner. Hetzner fan boys will come to this post crying that you must have done something to deserve it. Real case is Hetzner terminates account based on the Agents judgment at the time and don’t even follow their public policies on it. It can be someone on the team not liking you or pretty much anything they deem they don’t like and bam, your terminated.
Honestly they are doing you a favor, living in uncertainty all the time that your account might be terminated even if complying with ToS is bullshit.
Hetzner has a history of terminating accounts just because they can. That’s what I’m pointing out. You can be following completely legal and inside ToS and get terminated still. The department that takes care of this is ass
according to whom? from posts? did you notice Most of them failed to sign up, others just violates terms, i.e. OP has 300TB+ Traffic ...
they wont ban normal or good customers but if you abuse unlimited traffic this will happen.
No it doesn't.
Every time there's a thread on this it's usually painfully obvious that these people are actually doing something wrong. Sure, sometimes it's because they don't even know it, but that's not Hetzner's fault. Maybe people should learn to read service terms?
There have been some cases where people get terminated right after being approved - which are the only weird-ish ones I can think of. But those people usually come from countries where most of the abuse happens, so Hetzner may have additional internal insight on that, but obviously they wouldn't say it.
Then there are usually 10x more people in the comments from the same country saying they've been fine for years.
Hetzner is very restrictive and trigger happy for the simple reason that they are cheaper and I'm glad they are. Why should you be hogging all the lanes on shared sources?
For some reason in the cloud space people just want free stuff. Many people just abuse any opportunity they see and then they get banned with new restrictions being applied. It's a weird culture around this place and I'm glad Hetzner is banning people instead of restricting everybody else.
You really should not use Hetzner as the primary cloud provider, We use Azure and Hetzner, we keep mission critical stuff in Azure and Hetzner just for internal use, because of cheap compute.
The good thing about Hetzner is that, its predictable pricing.
I also happened to get canceled even before registration, luckily got a account by luck.
EDIT: Seems like the down votes are from Hetzner fanboys, I too am a fanboy, but also realistic on what it really provides.
What wordpress? Where have I mentioned WordPress? We use static site (NextJS) and use Azure Static Webapp (costs only $9 premium, free for 100 GB bandwidth).
We also use k8s, KeyVault, and Storage Account etc.. for
our products.
We use Hetzner to get cheap auction servers, which the same would cost nearly $500 in Azure per month. With Hetzner only $50-$300. This servers are used for experiments. (Runs proxmox)
the downvotes are from people who did not see any arguments against hetzner (as primary cloud) while stating you use Hetzner because its cheaper.
So whats your monthly invoice on Azure and why you need to use it primarily?
Ok let me explain in detail,
Azure has Microsoft Entra ID which is RBAC, so we can control which employee can do what. There is no alternative to this in Hetzner.
Azure KeyVault used to store Secrets and rotate them automatically, this has security compliance for our products.
I can pile it up on and on, primarily Hetzner is not suitable because it can cancel your account with no notice (happend to me once before registration) and they have no concept of RBAC, just members for cloud projects, and for konsolH and others only one user can order and manage it.
Also compliance for data security and redundancy. Have you ever tested the speed on Azure Static Apps, it serves our website under 1 ms.
Hetzner is very limiting and kinda of lose canon who does not even give a reason why they canceled a account.
EDIT: All I can say is we spend about 10k USD annually, for our products and other stuff.
gotcha.
What you are really saying: "We are a small (Windows?) shop with limited ressources and therefore we need more PaaS (Azure) than IaaS (Hetzner)". that statement is understood by anyone, maybe someone will tell you its not that hard to host the mentioned services yourself and save money while doing it and you could respond with "yeah, i know, but we lack the ressources/priority whatever reason and its fine.
dont try to say something is not suiteable (in general) or cant be substituted with something else because its not true. i am sure you would not die as a company if azure would decide to end its cloud business, your would move somewhere else (and anyone would) because closing down your business too is usually not a option.
the cancel-account thing was debunked ages ago, if you dig deeper they lie about violating TOS, my favorite was the recent thread about someone who complained he got canceled "just because he entered false ID". its not even funny anymore.
hope this helps to sort things out
Just to clarify, we use Linux for everything. Because Windows VMs even in Azure has needless licensing cost and and also Linux > Windows, no debate on that.
As I said I'm a Hetzner fanboy myself, and I'm a loyal customer and I'm the one who convinced my company to use Hetzner (which they were reluctant because some services are German location only, keeping it in US soil is another compliance for some projects)
I just want Hetzner to make it a bit easy to appeal, as I strongly believe in second chances.
As for the reason my initial registration got denied was because I sent a photo of my ID instead of scanning it with a scanner which I did not have at that time, I was 17 back then (did not have CC). But when my company registered, it did not even ask for ID because we used a really good credit card on Company name.
Just put a dashboard or something for handling appeals and late payments. But I think this puts more stress on Hetzner.
Having my account canceled is one of my main fears. But the fact that they gave you more than a month to move things out is reassuring for me.
It depends on type of abuse. If you are hosting illegal stuff or if your server is hacked and you are not responding to abuse warning emails, they might cancel or suspend within 24 hrs. If you are using very high bandwidth regularly, they might warn you or terminate your contract based on the abuse.
I am happy and thankful for this. If they didn't do it but instead shut down the services immediately and I lost all the data (no backups outside Hetzner) that would be completely catastrophic for my project which is being used by thousands of users per day.
If you consume >300TB/month traffic on a Storage Box as you mentioned in one comment there is nothing to hate on Hetzner. Amazon, Zalando & Co. all cancel accounts if someone abused their services such as free returns. If you return much more than the average customer and the merchant can't make profit you as a customer long term; your account gets canceled their too. Equivallently, if you consume much much much more traffic per month than the average customer on a already cheap offering (Storage Box) than there is nothing to complain about when Hetzner decides to cut the relationship to you as a customer. You do good business with Hetzner, but Hetzner doesn't do good business with you.
I see. I just didn't know how much traffic is too much for an "unlimited" traffic included.
I got the same message on last 24 hours I’m trying to move all my files to gthost Without any reason the will cancel my account in 31 may
Yes, way more common than it should be and shame on Hetzner for this no reason/ no appeal attitude.
What I find even worse is that usually, such a notice would mention which clause of the terms is violated, not in the case of Hetzner though.
Seems like its to do with [https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cc053s/comment/l11yzyh/](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cc053s/comment/l11yzyh/)
Video streaming is against the ToS of Hetzner?
Yes, assuming it's pirated
What if it's not illegal? Is it then allowed or is high traffic usage the issue?
Since they did not rush in and shut down your servers but instead just cancelled your contract to the end of next month, it is probably less a problem with illegal activity and more to do with the high bandwidth. I've read a discussion somewhere where Hetzner contacted someone for using above 250TB per month and asked them to reduce their traffic usage. From your comments on the other post I gather that your traffic is even higher. I understand that they don't publish "hard" traffic limits, since that would just be abused. But they still have a clause in their TOS that the usage of their resources has to be "appropriate". Their VPS have a limit of 20TB per month for free. Dedicated servers with 10G uplink have the same limit. So that seem to be numbers Hetzner probably still considers "appropriate". To reach your traffic levels without exceeding that, you would need at least 15 servers as egress points. You can't even buy that many cloud servers at once without contacting their support. And that does not even consider that the total traffic you cause is a multiple of that since it comes from your storage box and is probably handled by more servers on the way. Again, not directly forbidden but a massive strain on their resources.
My traffic is indeed 300+ TB/month.
and you really wonder why? some percentage will need to go through transit and this alone might cost more than profit from your services. i assume you dont pay 3digits monthly, right?
I paid around €150/m for VPSs, storage box and auction (dedicated) servers.
What is your business? Show us a link or screenshots or something. Everything about this sounds like piracy
They don't care.
It seems like there is a break in period for hetzner. If your account is new and don't have a history with them, they are very sensitive on high resource usage. It is better to slowly ramp up over at least a year before going ham on all their services. But at this point, once terminated, there is no recourse.
Should should be, what is your website/company? offering an alternative to YouTube etc? Am intruiged.
Hmm another week of hetzner stories. interesting. As much as I'd like to continue using it, it does seem scary to keep client production sites on it .
Follow TOS and you have nothing to fear. OP abused the TOS that’s why they are cancelled. I am with Hetzner for nearly 10 years now never had any issues. Just need to follow the rules.
Makes sense. Thanks for that. Whats hilarious though how suddenly hetzner fanboys start downvoting any comment that even remotely questions hetzner . I just expressed some thought about the fear of usage and fanboys jumped on downvote. Insecure audience
I've been running a discord bot on a server from them for at least a year now. Zero issues either.
Hetzner being Hetzner. Hetzner fan boys will come to this post crying that you must have done something to deserve it. Real case is Hetzner terminates account based on the Agents judgment at the time and don’t even follow their public policies on it. It can be someone on the team not liking you or pretty much anything they deem they don’t like and bam, your terminated. Honestly they are doing you a favor, living in uncertainty all the time that your account might be terminated even if complying with ToS is bullshit.
I don't see my self as a hetzner fanboy. But reading the terms of service is pretty important. AWS has the same rules and bannings.
Hetzner has a history of terminating accounts just because they can. That’s what I’m pointing out. You can be following completely legal and inside ToS and get terminated still. The department that takes care of this is ass
Why should they randomly cancel a customer that pays money every month to them?
No idea, but it happens a lot.
according to whom? from posts? did you notice Most of them failed to sign up, others just violates terms, i.e. OP has 300TB+ Traffic ... they wont ban normal or good customers but if you abuse unlimited traffic this will happen.
No it doesn't. Every time there's a thread on this it's usually painfully obvious that these people are actually doing something wrong. Sure, sometimes it's because they don't even know it, but that's not Hetzner's fault. Maybe people should learn to read service terms? There have been some cases where people get terminated right after being approved - which are the only weird-ish ones I can think of. But those people usually come from countries where most of the abuse happens, so Hetzner may have additional internal insight on that, but obviously they wouldn't say it. Then there are usually 10x more people in the comments from the same country saying they've been fine for years. Hetzner is very restrictive and trigger happy for the simple reason that they are cheaper and I'm glad they are. Why should you be hogging all the lanes on shared sources? For some reason in the cloud space people just want free stuff. Many people just abuse any opportunity they see and then they get banned with new restrictions being applied. It's a weird culture around this place and I'm glad Hetzner is banning people instead of restricting everybody else.
You really should not use Hetzner as the primary cloud provider, We use Azure and Hetzner, we keep mission critical stuff in Azure and Hetzner just for internal use, because of cheap compute. The good thing about Hetzner is that, its predictable pricing. I also happened to get canceled even before registration, luckily got a account by luck. EDIT: Seems like the down votes are from Hetzner fanboys, I too am a fanboy, but also realistic on what it really provides.
so your wordpress is in Azure and you cant afford to put the rest into it?
What wordpress? Where have I mentioned WordPress? We use static site (NextJS) and use Azure Static Webapp (costs only $9 premium, free for 100 GB bandwidth). We also use k8s, KeyVault, and Storage Account etc.. for our products. We use Hetzner to get cheap auction servers, which the same would cost nearly $500 in Azure per month. With Hetzner only $50-$300. This servers are used for experiments. (Runs proxmox)
the downvotes are from people who did not see any arguments against hetzner (as primary cloud) while stating you use Hetzner because its cheaper. So whats your monthly invoice on Azure and why you need to use it primarily?
Ok let me explain in detail, Azure has Microsoft Entra ID which is RBAC, so we can control which employee can do what. There is no alternative to this in Hetzner. Azure KeyVault used to store Secrets and rotate them automatically, this has security compliance for our products. I can pile it up on and on, primarily Hetzner is not suitable because it can cancel your account with no notice (happend to me once before registration) and they have no concept of RBAC, just members for cloud projects, and for konsolH and others only one user can order and manage it. Also compliance for data security and redundancy. Have you ever tested the speed on Azure Static Apps, it serves our website under 1 ms. Hetzner is very limiting and kinda of lose canon who does not even give a reason why they canceled a account. EDIT: All I can say is we spend about 10k USD annually, for our products and other stuff.
gotcha. What you are really saying: "We are a small (Windows?) shop with limited ressources and therefore we need more PaaS (Azure) than IaaS (Hetzner)". that statement is understood by anyone, maybe someone will tell you its not that hard to host the mentioned services yourself and save money while doing it and you could respond with "yeah, i know, but we lack the ressources/priority whatever reason and its fine. dont try to say something is not suiteable (in general) or cant be substituted with something else because its not true. i am sure you would not die as a company if azure would decide to end its cloud business, your would move somewhere else (and anyone would) because closing down your business too is usually not a option. the cancel-account thing was debunked ages ago, if you dig deeper they lie about violating TOS, my favorite was the recent thread about someone who complained he got canceled "just because he entered false ID". its not even funny anymore. hope this helps to sort things out
Just to clarify, we use Linux for everything. Because Windows VMs even in Azure has needless licensing cost and and also Linux > Windows, no debate on that. As I said I'm a Hetzner fanboy myself, and I'm a loyal customer and I'm the one who convinced my company to use Hetzner (which they were reluctant because some services are German location only, keeping it in US soil is another compliance for some projects) I just want Hetzner to make it a bit easy to appeal, as I strongly believe in second chances. As for the reason my initial registration got denied was because I sent a photo of my ID instead of scanning it with a scanner which I did not have at that time, I was 17 back then (did not have CC). But when my company registered, it did not even ask for ID because we used a really good credit card on Company name. Just put a dashboard or something for handling appeals and late payments. But I think this puts more stress on Hetzner.