Hetzner is terminating contracts with all users who had a Russian postal address

76 points by cybice 2 years ago | 125 comments

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.

jacquesm 2 years ago |

Two years + 6 weeks of notice, that would seem to be enough to make a move. This was in the cards for a long time and I noted in the first weeks of the war that anybody from Russia with assets in the West would be smart to move them because sooner or later they'd be at risk. Note that the real artery isn't hosting but DNS and if there are more similar actions at registrars or even at ICANN (see the 'NameCheap' thread) then that will have as much or more impact. Hosting is usually manageable (unless you are tied into hosting provider unique services, such as AWS).

throwaway4good 2 years ago | |

Is the two years referring to the start of the Ukraine war?

Or did Hetzner announce their termination of Russian customers back in 2021?

jacquesm 2 years ago | | |

Yes. Because it was quite clear that there would be consequences. I think the consensus at the time was that you should get moving if you might be affected, and I also think that the consensus was that by now the war would be over one way or the other. But that hasn't happened and authorities have been coming down ever harder on companies that are still doing business with Russia, Hetzner likely has made an internal re-evaluation of what their exposure is and the legal department has flagged a number of accounts as problematic. This is the kind of thing that got people get jailed for so it isn't surprising that they take it serious. Frankly I'm a bit surprised it took them this long, they should have reacted earlier but with a longer grace period.

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.

Dudester230602 2 years ago |

A lot of confusion there, so let me chime in and clarify:

1. The war is not an inconvenience, it's a disaster.

2. You had at least 1 year to move elsewhere.

buserror 2 years ago |

I hope this is not going to be a massive hit for them financially -- I like Hetzner. On the flip side they might have some cheap 'server auction' on the block soon, I've been pondering a cross/upgrade for a little while already :-)

justinclift 2 years ago | |

In the times I've checked, their "server auction" things don't really seem any obviously better than their standard options.

What sort of stuff do you look for that seems good?

buserror 2 years ago | | |

Last time I checked, their new server are way more than the typical 35 euros mark, which is what I pay at the minute for ~3TB RAID1 quad core with 16GB ram... The current gen of server auction seems already to be quite a nice upgrade to my hardware, if I'm willing to ditch hardware raid...

libertine 2 years ago | |

Why do you hope they take a massive financial hit, while liking them?

Edit: missed the "not"

ziddoap 2 years ago | | |

Perhaps parent edited, but there is a "not" in the sentence.

"I hope this is not going to be a massive hit"

FinnKuhn 2 years ago | | |

Did you overlook the "not"?

CAP_NET_ADMIN 2 years ago |

Good, maybe Hetzner IP ranges will become a little cleaner :)

red-iron-pine 2 years ago | |

good luck. it'll take ages of scrubbing and inactivity for that to happen.

spamhaus doesn't forgive or forget.

byyll 2 years ago |

So big enough companies that have the resources to relocate elsewhere are safe but random citizens aren't. I understand they did it because they were forced to. Sad to see them go.

severino 2 years ago |

Probably Russia is ok with this too. Russian money that was going to the EU (and later used against Russian interests) will now go to somewhere else, maybe to friendlier countries.

benterix 2 years ago | |

> Russian money that was going to the EU (and later used against Russian interests)

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.

BAHKA 2 years ago | | |

What a surprise... I am sure in contrast American money going to EU are used to support EU's interest, not American's

gizmo 2 years ago |

Does any company fire their American customers because of the calamitous Iraq war and related war crimes? Do companies fire their Israeli customers because of the current bombing campaign? What about Argentinian customers? Melei has contempt for European style democracy. Should Chinese customers get the boot because of the horrific treatment of Uyghurs by the Chinese Party? Should Hetzner also fire their German customers while they're at it because of German arms exports to oppressive regimes?

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.

throwaway4good 2 years ago |

So why now? Almost 2 years after the invasion.

My guess is that Hetzner got tired helping intelligence services bug their customers:

https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident

avaika 2 years ago | |

There is nothing to do with intelligence. They got on radar of Russian government. Which wanted Hetzner to follow Russian law and move all Russian data to Russia in order to operate with Russian citizens. Means literally Russian government expects companies to open data centers within borders and keep all the data inside the country (they even issued a law for that). Obviously Hetzner doesn't want to do so.

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).

sam_lowry_ 2 years ago | |

Thanks for mentioning, this is fascinating. The original report is a masterpiece of forensics investigation. Worth a read: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/

dijit 2 years ago |

1 month to migrate is pretty dire.

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?

jon-wood 2 years ago | |

Whatever legal change happened says they can’t do business with Russians. I doubt there’s a get out clause saying “unless you got a year up front out of them” in that law.

oxfordmale 2 years ago | | |

OFAC(Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions are clear-cut and they can issue very large fines for non-compliance. These sanctions have been in place for a while now. It sounds like someone flagged this to their legal department, who then advised to go nuclear, given the threat of large fines.

eps 2 years ago |

> We recommend that you take appropriate measures now.

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.

hurflmurfl 2 years ago | |

With luck this would work. I think a lot of people who emigrated would not necesarily bother updating the postal address details, so this email might just remind them to do the update.

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.

yread 2 years ago |

Unfortunately, a lot of russian companies (especially the dodgy ones) are registered in Cyprus

jacquesm 2 years ago | |

Yes, that's true, and likely it will be one of the last safe-havens for many reasons. Cyprus has been a problem for decades but it's a very hard nut to crack on account of Turkish and Greek relations with the EU as well as the fact that if it ever does get rolled up it will make the Panama Papers look like a boy scout outing.

KomoD 2 years ago | |

And UAE

KomoD 2 years ago |

I mean yeah... that was kind of expected.

Semel 2 years ago |

Quite a few of Russians have been using Hetzner's servers to host VPN services for personal use, for their family members, friends...

/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..

babelthuap 2 years ago |

Much sympathy. My spouse had a 401K with a portion of it in "Mediterranean assets". She got a letter saying those were Russian assets in reality. All gone, sorry.

It 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.

jacquesm 2 years ago | |

Ouch, that sucks. But you may well have cause to go after whoever sold you that bill of goods. Props to you for how you handled it, I hope it wasn't too much money. Over the years I've become more and more conservative as an investor, in part on account of stories like yours. If it's a REIT I want to see an assets list. Note that the fact that it is 'all gone' may well be an indication that you are being defrauded, it's not 'gone' nor is the asset manager off the hook. So I'd definitely look into recovery options and if you are the only one or one of a few to do that there is some chance you'll see some of your money back. Best of luck!!

walterbell 2 years ago | |

Some assets were traded by US buyers in 2022, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/russian-bonds...

Moldoteck 2 years ago |

so even if postal address is changed, it will still mean termination, why?

jacquesm 2 years ago | |

Because they're not idiots? Hetzner doesn't want to end up in the cross hairs of authorities coming down on companies doing business with sanctioned entities. This is their legal department speaking, not the technicians and a change in postal address is so transparent that it will not work.

Moldoteck 2 years ago | | |

They're some ppl that moved to germany/baltics and are legal residents there. Does this mean their account will be terminated? That's what I meant

expertentipp 2 years ago | | |

> Because they're not idiots?

Corporations are simultaneously sophisticated and idiots. Sometimes the output of sophisticated compliance pipeline is plainly idiotic.

genesem 2 years ago | | |

they're are, they're.

reacharavindh 2 years ago | |

I think Hetzner asks for a real ID and address proof when you create an account. So, may be if a user could provide a change of address proof, then they might be able to save their account..

arp242 2 years ago | | |

> I think Hetzner asks for a real ID and address proof when you create an account.

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.