Hetzner is terminating contracts with all users who had a Russian postal address
Just received:
We regret to inform you that due to the tense geopolitical situation with Russia, we will be ending our contractual relationship with customers from Russia.
Political decisions have led to changes in the legal regulations that affect our business with Russian-based customers. Unfortunately, we can no longer have contracts with customers with Russian postal addresses. This will affect everyone with a Russian address stored on Hetzner Accounts.
After we analyze the customer databases, we will send the affected customers a notice of termination for all products and services on Friday, 15 December 2023. It will take effect from 31 January 2024. We recommend that you take appropriate measures now.
136 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadIt however worked out better by default. She was so infuriated she closed the 401K and bought an investment property which we work on together. I haven't seen her this excited in a while. We work on the property on the weekend together.
I created an account last week (and rented a server), and it didn't ask for much of anything. I think I filled in my address (not sure), but certainly not an ID or proof of address. Could have filled in anything I wanted.
Corporations are simultaneously sophisticated and idiots. Sometimes the output of sophisticated compliance pipeline is plainly idiotic.
Quite a few arrests and already a bunch of convictions.
I would hope that they at least offer some kind of "pay for a year up front" kind of deal so that you can actually plan a migration.
Quiet reminder that the actions of politicians and the actions of businesses/people - while not mutually exclusive - are usually quite disparate.
I do feel for the citizens and business that do not endorse Russian aggression who: by accident of birth, find themselves on the wrong side of history.
I also feel for any ops who may have to do a painful migration over Christmas due to this.
That notion of course does not to take anything away from the victims of the Russian invasion; which is many orders of magnitude worse of course.
EDIT: Downvoted because why?
However it could also be "Just easier" or that Hetzner doesn't want to deal with Russians anyway.
Normally the way these financial sanctions go is that you are permitted to give service if it has already been paid for but you cannot take new service. Annual contracts are a normal thing but I don't see the option in Hetzner right now, so it could easily be an oversight.
It could easily be that they take monthly billing only (normally) and have no desire to introduce this to bypass the "russians cannot purchase services" style sanction.
I am pretty sure Martin Hetzner lives in Germany.
This makes the jail option very unlikely.
LOCATION. We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany) and in Helsinki (Finland). In Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon (USA), we also provide AMD-based cloud servers and cloud features.
that's under 6 (working) weeks from today.
I'm trying to read where you got 2 years from, but I can't find it.
Was there an additional warning from before? or are you suggesting that when the Russian military invaded Ukraine that every Russian business and citizen should have pulled out of using European services?
Which is what I suspected. A formal warning is the only one that matters in terms of actual notice.
Likely some of the more recent arrests in Germany have woken up Hetzner to the possibility that what they are doing may well be interpreted as illegal even if it wasn't spelled out to them in a way that they heard it, or maybe they figured the war would be over before it was their turn. Who is to know? The fact that they turn around now is possibly reflective of direct pressure on them or it may be their own reasoning, someone downthread suggests that Hetzner may well have lost its usefulness in terms of being an intercept. The possibilities are endless and it is all just speculation, I'd take the letter at face value and leave it at that.
A ton of Western companies started pulling out of Russia in short order. It should have been obvious to anyone that even if their particular Western supplier continued to provide services for the time being that was at high risk of termination at any time--even absent a specific public statement. So, yes, the rational plan would have been to pull out of using European services or at least have a contingency plan to rapidly do so.
I assume you mean T + 6 weeks, where T is the time since the invasion and T is approximately 2 years, even though T + 6 weeks is still less than 2 years?
Edit: missed the "not"
"I hope this is not going to be a massive hit"
What sort of stuff do you look for that seems good?
>prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
There is no discrimination on racial or ethnic lines going on. If Russia wouldn't have invaded the Ukraine they wouldn't have put their citizens in this mess in the first place. Actions have consquences
Actions performed by one set of people (government). Consequences are for average Russians, who don't have any say. Those who "actioned" did not face any consequences still, and I don't think they will.
Almost 2 years passed since invasion, EU still buys resources from Russia. Children of Russian politics still live and study abroad, EU and US included. But average Russians, yes, they faced a lot.
* Religion
* Ethnicity (real and percieved)
* Attachment to statehood
In the 19th century, many scientists subscribed to the belief that the human population can be divided into races. The term racism is a noun describing the state of being racist, i.e., merely subscribing to the belief that the human population can or should be classified into races with differential abilities and dispositions, which in turn may motivate a political ideology in which rights and privileges are differentially distributed based on racial categories.
FWIW The UN does not define "racism"; however, it does define "racial discrimination". According to the 1965 UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,[22]
> The term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
So sanctions fit that definition, ironically.
Yes, that's wrong too. But, you know, those happen but that doesn't mean this is right. It is possible to be both against the war in Ukraine, Guantanamo Bay, the way the Israeli state handles Palestine and be pro Jewish all at the same time.
Both of these figures, Russian diaspora and ethnic minorities in Russia, are in the neighborhood of 30 million people.
Not on us that they've let their reputation slide so far
Following your logic: US and its NATO minions are brutalizing countries nowhere near them (Syria, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - to name a few from the last 30 years), it had (still has?) prisons where Muslims were tortured and the world should have sanctioned it and its businesses and citizens with the harshest sanctions for that.
Tell me more about reputation slide.
Committing.
Or did Hetzner announce their termination of Russian customers back in 2021?
This is the sort of thing that keeps Hetzner execs up at night and scared of 4am knocks on their doors:
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/geschaeftsf...
Similar actions all over Europe with the intensity increasing in the last six months. Most of these are about dual use tech and outright sanction busting but hosting doesn't necessarily get a free pass and I figure Hetzner execs are not brave enough to figure out if theirs is the finest line to be drawn around this.
My guess is that the US authorities appreciate the data they can gather from these sources.
Being civilized is in the eyes of the beholder, with each faction believing they are civilized and justified. Are you painting an entire culture and people as uncivilized?
Just because dictatorships loath the idea that neighboring countries have superior standards of living due to their incompetence and corruption, doesn't mean everyone around them has to live in a lower standard of living because one guy wants to keep living in luxury no?
spamhaus doesn't forgive or forget.
My guess is that Hetzner got tired helping intelligence services bug their customers:
https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident
You can find the full list of "lucky" companies in here -- https://236-fz.rkn.gov.ru/agents/list (sorry, it's in Russian, but google translate should help you out).
Change your postal address if it's (still) Russian?
As per some Russian devs I know, this worked for the vast majority of service providers that issued similar statements in the past. As cynical as it sounds.
I imagine getting them to provide a proof of new address (which I think is what Hetzner requires from all customers) would be enough. On the other hand, if they just close the accounts for having lived in Russia at a certain point in the past, that would be quite shitty.
1. The war is not an inconvenience, it's a disaster.
2. You had at least 1 year to move elsewhere.
Isolationism isn't the answer here. We live in a globalized world and by integrating our economies we disincentivize war and strife. Maybe Hetzner is acting out of principle, maybe they choose to do this because of optics. In any case, it's the wrong move both pragmatically and idealistically.
> Maybe Hetzner is acting out of principle, maybe they choose to do this because of optics.
> Hetzners actions are clearly because of sanctions against Russia. They say so in their email.
> My response asks whether "the geopolitical situation" is a good justification
It's very hard to follow your logic and what you think is the reason Hetzner is cancelling some customers
Either way, your original comment is whataboutism as judged by HN members. Maybe it is not elsewhere, but it seems here it is
As for whataboutism, downvotes here can also represent simple disagreement. The first comment suggested that Europe "really tried", i.e. that Europe is acting with noble and good intentions. I think that's ahistorical, but I can see how people who believe that take offense to my post.
If you believe that a country that invades another country should be the target of international sanctions, you believe that the US, along with many other countries, should be the target of international sanctions.
Do the people arguing that Russia should be the target of international sanctions act as if they believe the US should be the target of international sanctions? For the most part, they do not. It makes me question whether the real reason they want sanctions on Russia is because Russia invaded another country. Maybe the real rule is that when countries that you oppose invade another country, they should be the target of sanctions. That seems the be the rule that is actually practiced.
There's a lot of room to criticize the sanctions and what countries they get applied to, but that isn't something that's up to Hetzner.
The original message from Hetzner suggests that this is also some kind of compliance issue rather than being driven by some kind of individual opposition to the war.
Specifically due to FATCA and related regulations that require foreign banks to report US citizens and potentially open the kimono if the IRS demands more about what they're up to.
No one outside of the middle east gave a shit about Iraq or Afghanistan enough to take the financial hit from pulling out of the US.
Even with moral shortcomings the US market was too big and too stable to walk away from. The Russian market was marginally stable, corrupt as hell, and mostly a source of raw materials and simple value-adds. For the EU that meant cheap gas, at the cost of funding people who hate you, and not taking steps to better nuclear or renewables.
Russian government added Hetzner to the list of companies who must move their infrastructure within Russian borders in order to operate with Russian citizens. Few years ago they introduced a law on how companies have to process personal data. (It is kinda similar to GDPR, but the government might abuse it in the way to get access to data government needs). Obviously Hetzner doesn't want to create infrastructure on Russian soil. It was quite risky even before the war.
You can find the full list of "lucky" companies in here -- https://236-fz.rkn.gov.ru/agents/list (sorry, it's in Russian, but google translate should help you out).
[0] He's much older than the average life expectancy for men in Russia (which is probably around 63 years now) and ill but with expert medical care he might still live for another 10-15 years, one just might wonder how it would affect his brain.
Source: https://russianfield.com/180days (see aborted calls rate, and it is not the lowest i've ever seen)
Anecdotal evidence: I live in Russia and I know only a couple of people who supports P. Both pro-war and anti-war people do not.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
One consequence of the current war is that people realized that Russian money going to the EU was actually pretty often used to support Russian interests.
/sarcasm on
Thank you Hetzner, for making it so much easier for Putin and his Goebbelses to brainwash
Russians and turn them into North Korean zombies..
/sarcasm off
Roskomnadzor keeps blocking sites in Russia en masse, and Western governments keep enacting policies that keep us from accessing the truth and fighting the state propaganda.
Hetzner's decision won't hurt Putin and his regime in the slightest. In fact, it will make it even stronger..