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
@kiwix Sorry you had to go through that. Please do keep us updated if they do provide any sort of explanation/apology/recourse.
Hetzner is currently set as the first supported hosting provider for the Small Web in Domain and this makes me *very* anxious.
Any thoughts/could you possibly look into this and find out what happened, @lenzgr?
@aral @kiwix @lenzgr When it's fedi, the issue is usually the anti-porn rule in their TOS.
In some cases, it's in good faith. For example, with the tenforward.social, they cited a lot of hardcore porn posted/boosted by the admin, on the admin's main account.
In other cases, it seems like they don't really pay attention and are vulnerable to fake reports. For example, a series of small transfem instances were taken down over an anime picture of two clothed girls kissing.
@aral @kiwix @lenzgr Here's a Bluesky thread on the latter example.
https://bsky.app/profile/makai.chaotic.ninja/post/3kofrm3pcvc2p