The fuck off contact page

As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.

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.

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?

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.