This happens literally all the time with Hetzner, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of this story (or seen it here on HN), but they're cheap, and most people aren't going to find the people complaining online about it even if they do actually try to find out more about the company, so I'm afraid it hasn't hurt them much.

> Hang on, Hetzner literally deleted all their data without warning?

That’s what the post said. But of course we have no idea if it’s true or not. No evidence was provided, and we are only hearing one side of the story.

I'm going to review my backup strategy these holidays, and look at how much downtime my services would incur if Hetzner shuts me down.

The reality that they have this power, and that they'd delete data irretrievably, scares me.

Last year I had a misconfigured port on a Docker service, and someone was able to exploit it and run a port scanner. It was during a period that I was away from home, so if I hadn't seen their service abuse emails in time, I could have returned home after a few days to find all my data wiped out (or uptime monitors complaining).

Honestly

as much as we like to hammer on EU (lack of) companies, one potential improvement point is customer service

German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU

Only reputation Hetzner has is "cheap".

>Both for Hetzner’s reputation

For what now?

Yep, this is common with Hetzner and has been the case since forever. Unfortunately all the comments even suggesting that Hetzner is not good for running serious scaled businesses for this reason and many others usually get downvoted to oblivion and remain hidden.