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So last week (on Sunday 1 December at 00:00), our server host canceled its service without warning.

TL;DR: we do not recommend using @Hetzner_Online 's service

Everyone else: a short 🧵

Murphy's law states that if things can go wrong, they will. Ideally in the worst possible way.

For us, that meant having our servers disconnected at 00:00 on a Sunday 1st (so likely a scheduled deprecation on their end).

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.

Turns out that Hetzner has decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers. There was no warning (yes, we checked our spam folder), and nobody could be reached before Monday morning.

When reached, they could not explain the reason for the cancellation:
Them: - We sent you an email.
Us : -We did not receive it, can you please resend?
Them: - We can't
Us: ಠ_ಠ

In the meantime, all servers had been wiped already so no way to retrieve our data.

If you are looking for a bad case of the Mondays, well, that was one.

@kiwix The poor communication is bad, but this is the worst. If you're terminating service, data should be held for a reasonable time, at least a month, unless it was manually inspected and deemed illegal even to possess (i.e. CSAM), to allow customer to retrieve/migrate it. Immediate deletion is a huge red flag.

@kiwix Even if you don't care about customers terminated fir violation of ToS, immediate deletion for them means same could happen to any customer by technical glitch or employee error. That should not be possible in decent professional hosting.

@dalias @kiwix Hetzner argued they sent a message you don't know when that happened, I have no reason not to believe them.

Someone will have filed an abuse notice due to copyright violations, hetzner will have sent an email and then terminated the account after not receiving a response, that's quite normal, isn't it?

@juliank @kiwix No, there needs to be a large window between disabling of account and deletion of data.

@dalias @kiwix The Digital Services Act, article 6 requires a hoster in the EU (who like social networks are classified as a information society service):
"upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the illegal content."

In the case of a server where they don't control individual content, removing or disabling access to that content exclusively is not possible, so removing all data is the only thing they can do.

@juliank @kiwix Um, no. They can disable access to the hosted server without wiping it.

See your own quoted text: "remove or to disable access".

@dalias @kiwix Yes but there's little point in denying kiwix access to their server and keeping it using resources and continue to bill them?

@dalias @kiwix I think this is where it gets silly because the regulation isn't written for three parties.

To give an example, f you host a social network and have the issue, you delete the users content.

But now if you don't host the social network yourself, copyright owners can just complain to your hoster, and then ask them to delete your social network.

The provider has the option of forwarding this to you as their customer but oh well if you don't respond they need too act themselves

Cassandrich

@juliank @kiwix They can act by turning off the server or disabling the routes to it. Not deleting it.