The fuck off contact page

One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card

That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.

Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.

Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too

Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.

Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.

> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card

> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.

In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.

You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.

So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.

As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.

Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this. We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms. The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions. The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location. There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie

Fascinating stuff, I really appreciate the high quality comment you have sent to me which I really appreciate

I just wanted to inquire about something which wasn't related to my account itself per se. So I think that one of the things which can be done by hetzner in this context is atleast having a community where people can talk to them (similar to scaleway's slack)

I am kind of involving myself in such a community so I have a lot of questions to ask and just having acquaintances involved in such industry. Is there any way that I can be able to contact you if I have more queries about this industry in general?

Very interesting, thank you for your response Katie. I might do the support-form request but since you are here, I think I am comfortable enough asking it in the public too and I don't mind it as this might be the best way

But imagine if a PAAS (platform as a service, well technically its still just an idea which can take a long time to work but just a theory but yes), wants to build on top of hetzner, I am extremely worried that since hetzner has a very strict abuse policy, they might not understand PAAS use case which can include some abuse from downstream lets say and might block my account impacting all the other PAAS solutions.

I wish if there was a way that some time could be given lets say 24-48 hours for the product lets say to work with abuse as I am just a single guy but I haven't coded the implementation mostly, quite frankly wanting to building upon hetzner but worried that It can fail due to any misunderstanding etc.

What are hetzner's opinion on platform as a service basically, I see some people using hetzner as providers but can hetzner understand the thing which I am saying basically and can it still be the right tool for the job essentially?

In the EU a ton of laws, legal complexity and costs kick in if you start having a forum (social media).

Having a closed forum helps a lot to avoid this.

Fascinating, I didn't know that, thank you!

Basically I dread the wall of email support sometimes because its too exhausting, assumes I am a company myself, assumes I must have a website, assumes I have a role at said supposed company.

Also I do not know in how many hours they might respond, Have they even read my message etc.

having something like telegram,matrix etc. can help but also at that point, I wonder if they all use email, can something like delta.chat be used to provide an instant experience to the email experience?

What are your thoughts on this, I am genuinely curious if delta.chat can provide a meaningful improvement over email because I dread having to open all of these things and then fear getting ghosted or fear that I would be able to explain myself only in a few messages worth of time maybe answering them to their questions,asking them questions etc. (I hope it may make sense)

> In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.

Seconded. Used to work at an MSP that had a customer that did "micro-hosting" on a free tier. Just sign up, put data, run w/ it.

There were weeks where I emailed my FBI contact 3-4 times with CSAM links, spam, or evidence of DDoS attacks. Crypto was just getting off the ground then but could totally see that being a thing if the timing were different.

Customer was willing to address it quickly and paid even after we gave them the "fuck-off" quote, so we kept em for a while...

For smaller providers, I've found that pinging them on social media, esp. Twitter, can help (I've even had the OVH support contact me directly after a public rant on Twitter). Or go to some forum with other people that know them, e.g. lowendtalks often have people that know hetzner, ovh, scaleway, etc in and out. They will also be able to offer comparisons and shoot through the marketing BS they often have.

Also, support often are happy to answer general inquiries not related to the product, as long as it's not for outsourcing reasons (not their job to help you set up Apache). They may even get you in touch with someone more technical if needed.

Anyways, feel free to shoot an email yes, username at me dot com.

You can get ghosted on IM too. Just ask anyone on tinder lol.

The downside of IM like Telegram or Matrix or Slack is that it's a broadcast bottle-in-the-sea way of communication. It's everyone's job to answer there, thus it's no one's job to answer there. OTOH contact mail boxes are often direct at people whose job is to read it.

That is completely fair, I totally understand that, but then again, those contact mail boxes end up being very similar to the "fuck off contact page"

Like, I definitely feel exhausted and dont contact those contact pages because of it, I have shared the pain points in the previous thread but they assume me mostly to have my own company, have a position and have a website etc.

I do not mind contacting them via email if its simple. But in reality, it isn't

In my opinion, starting out, I think that companies should definitely have instant messengers as I have had lots of appreciation to those providers who kinda did but anyways, my point here is that those look like "fuck off contact pages" to me and I feel exhausted and tired and don't even contact them and would much rather work with someone who has a discord and I contacted them personally and dm'd them and they understand my customer support solution lets say.

What are your thoughts on the opinion, I definitely get where you are coming from, but I just don't know, maybe make the mail so easy and not make it feel like a void ykwim?

Lowendtalks is absolutely nice and I am enjoying it a lot. I thought that cloud was centralized or cheap servers would be absolutely bad but to be honest I am enjoying the niche of low end servers too and they feel more personal to me :p

Very interesting that you mention twitter, my problem is that, I do not have twitter and do not intend on having one. Maybe mastodon?

Sorry for making this multi threaded simultaneous discussions lol but as we were talking about contact pages, I think that the best discussion that we can have in my opinion with my ideals and etc. too is if a company is active on mastodon. Like we were talking how IM's etc. can be ghosted etc. which is fair too (one of my issues on OVH discord was solved, the other wasnt and I was ghosted yes)

Having a frequent mastodon presence can be huge for such a company then. Maybe that can be a compromise I am willing to do if they mention in their website that they are active on mastodon or similar. I think it might be the best way then.

Like imagine a company's contact page said that "we are active on mastodon and you can (ping?) us on there regarding any issues/support inqueries"

Fediverse definitely needs an private dm features similar to twitter then I guess too but this might be outside of the scope of this discussion which might I say I enjoyed so have a nice day sir!

Hi again, Yes, it is fine to resell our services in the form of a PaaS. However, you as the customer are ultimately responsible for everything that happens on the server. If you use our infrastructure to run your own business, you need to be responsible for what your business does. That entails monitoring your systems, vetting your customers, securing your server, and of course, communicating quickly and openly with our Abuse Team if you receive a report. We also have managed services (web hosting, managed vServers, managed servers) if you feel less confident with the sysadmin side of things and need more technical support. --Katie

Hi there, We have our own forum https://forum.hetzner.com/ for people who are already customers. We are also active on: reddit, mastodon, X, YouTube, facebook, instagram, linkedin, and LowEndTalk. --Katie

Thank you for your response which I really appreciate but I have still some doubts regarding it which I hope you can clear.

Basically Katie, I am not worried about the sysadmin confidence side of things which are actually an delight for me to work with but rather that to me the problem feels as if even if I vet some of my customers, if someone truly wants to shut down my business lets say, all they need to do is create an account and be faithful if I vet them and then just run malicious servers basically to gain a lot of abuse reports, maybe given directly to hetzner who from what I've heard can shut down your whole account if done.

Can you understand the dilemma I am presented with? I am willing to cooperate with hetzer team a lot and I am a single person team right now so I am interested in what are some response times that you want from me if I someday report abuse regarding this situation.

So my questions are:

1. Can an account be suspended if abuse reports come in, if so, is there any way to strike a mutual deal of understanding where I can cooperate to literally any amount with hetzner team for them to understand my use case perhaps

2. How early do you expect a response from lets say any abuse report, would 24 hours be an reasonable amount?

I just want, Katie, the ability where if any issues/report come, you might transfer it to me and I can fix them but the ability of deleting my server becomes hard as I am worried about that a single bad apple can ruin it for all my other customers basically and its this worry which is making me worry if hetzner can be the right choice because maybe hetzner team might not understand my use case and it might hurt the business and I am waiting for your response basically, if hetzner can be the right choice for me (which I genuinely want it to, hetzner feels so good and I would love to be your customer!)

Have a nice day Katie! And I hope that we can come to an understanding from both sides (I am willing to cooperate and go a long way as much as I can as a single person) and I hope hetzner team can cooperate too so that we can build something together!