I’m personally wary of uploading too much private data to any host. I am also a customer of Hetzner, and rent a couple of bare metal servers. But I mostly use it to store data that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it was stolen by someone.

I’ve previously experimented a bit with encrypted volumes that I manually decrypt over ssh, and even full disk encryption that I manually decrypt over ssh.

My experience with Hetzner has been good. It is really rare that the servers go down on their own. Reboots are usually my own doing, so I am already “around” to decrypt encrypted volumes.

I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years. But I’ve had offsite backups in place since day one, so I never ultimately lost any important data. Had to deprovision the broken server, reprovision a new one and restore from my offsite backup. Which is a bit of a hassle, but no biggie because the only one that relies on my servers is mostly myself. A few days of downtime because I am too busy to set up a new server right away is therefore also ok for me, with how infrequently it has happened.

A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos or other data you cannot afford to lose. But that applies to any host really. Not unique to Hetzner.

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thehamkercat 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos

Hetzner (or any vps provider) should not be a place at all to store ANY copy of your photos, unencrypted.

I agree that they respect privacy a lot, they're probably the best of all the service providers when it comes to your data and that there are data protection laws in place etc etc

but in the end, it's your personal photos, I wouldn't be willing to upload it to any provider unencrypted, good that you're encrypting

Also, check this out (not my project): https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs

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n4bz0r 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years

How do they handle such situations?

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QuantumNomad_ 2 days ago | parent [-]

I took care of it myself by cancelling my rental of the server and renting a different one. And then setting up that one the way I wanted it and restoring data from my offsite backup.

I think there was a form asking for reason for cancelling the server and I ticked something like “other” and left a note for them saying that there was hardware problems. So I would assume they have a look at it, replace the bad components and then rent it out to someone else.

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n4bz0r 2 days ago | parent [-]

Huh. Was curious what kind of discount they provide in case of downtime caused by hardware failure, but it sounds like they didn't even notice. Shouldn't they monitor the basic vitals? Or you simply reacted too quickly?

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clan 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not OP. But with an unmanaged server it is on you. You are in full control and can leave it powered off if you so desire.

Monitorering is then your responsibility. They have no login/account on your host.

For any hardware issues I have had I have simply created a support ticket. They have always been really fast at responding and fixing for me. If you report a disk and serial number it gets swapped in no time.

They have managed offerings as well. I have never used those.

	▲	Hetzner_OL 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Hi there, I hope that it's okay that I respond here since you all mentioned Hetzner. What "clan" wrote here is correct. For our dedicated servers, which are un-managed, customers are responsible for monitoring. And naturally, if something comes up, our team will be happy to investigate it and replace the hardware (or even entire server) free of cost. It helps to speed up the process if you can document the failure as clearly as possible for our team by logging onto your account, navigating to the correct server, and opening a support ticket. You can also ask the team to run a full hardware check for you. For customers who don't want to spend as much time or effort on sysadmin, we have managed servers, where monitoring and other support is included. --Katie, Hetzner