alt Hacker NewsMost of the times you hear people complaining about Hetzner shutting down someone's servers, it's because they were hosting content going against their ToC or similar.
But this seems to be about Kiwix (which in short is "offline Wikipedia" in various ways) and doesn't seem to be about questionable content in any way.
Eventually I guess we'll get Hetzner's perspective on this, as they tend to start writing publicly about issues once the other side starts writing publicly about it as well.
Personally I've been a happy user of Hetzner for many years, with no issues that weren't my own doing. But reading about people having their servers deleted in the middle of the night on a Sunday (Berlin time) and all data wiped immediately, with no recurse, does sound a bit aggressive. Luckily it seems like both me and Kiwix has mirrors for the data we care about.
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> Besides Wikipedia, content from the Wikimedia Foundation such as Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity are also available for offline viewing in various different languages. [0]
> Users first download Kiwix (or a browser extension), then download content for offline viewing with Kiwix. [1]
> Our main storage backend became entirely unreachable. For the average user that meant not being able to access the library and download files, and for us that meant not being able to connect to it and see what was wrong. [2]
Maybe some odd photos landed on WikiMedia which then got automatically synced to Hetzner's servers and then triggered some alarms.
I can't judge about Hetzner deleting the data, but them not attempting to really get in touch with the Kiwix team -- after all they should know that they are trying to do some good in this world -- is a really horrible move. In the same category as Google blocking access to user's accounts without any word, or German companies suing security researchers for notifying them about a security flaw in their systems.
Shame on Hetzner.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix#Available_content
My experience is the opposite. They are completely deaf when it comes to reports about ToC violations. You need a lawyer to get them to take anything illegal down.
>But reading about people having their servers deleted in the middle of the night on a Sunday (Berlin time) and all data wiped immediately, with no recurse, does sound a bit aggressive.
There are several comments under this thread from people reporting essentially that happening to them.
"hosting content going against their ToC or similar"
Or hosting content that Hetzner misclassified as against their ToC. Or that they decided was because of a string in a random file name. Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images and decided that was risky (nevermind that this is common and they have moderation and a strategy for if someone tries to host anything illegal, but that one employee reviewing it was twitchy that day and there is no recourse), etc.