So I use Hetzner a lot for my machines, I’ve about 10 to 15 of their machines now across various clients and am mostly quite happy with them. They provide a service that matches the price – ie. good enough.
One area of their service though really grates me, they give you old machines, when those machines fail they replace them with other old machines similarly for drives etc.
On more than one occasion now have I had hard drives fail only to see them replaced with other shitty drives. Each time they claim the drives are well tested and each time they pull the old ‘it could be the cable’ trick and then replace the machine and the drive.
Since this has happened to me every single time I’ve changed a disk so far I have to wonder if this is everyones experience?
From where I sit its simple. They made a choice to take out drives reported broken by someone, they then test it and put it back when their tests fail to find any problem, they do this to save them money knowing full well that drives will fail and all they’re doing is shifting the risk onto their clients, while the clients keep subsidizing their expansion.
So given this is the quality of service they’re aiming at, surely once this policy bites a good long standing user offering some kind of payback for the inconvenience would be good business practice? Apparently not.
This is pretty poor, even after complaining to them they swapped my chassis and again put a disk with > 6000 hours under its belt in my machine.
So I guess you need to be pretty sure your softraids are setup properly when you want to use this company, their support stand is clear:
I’m sorry but we don’t promise anywhere that we built always new hardware into our servers. I can only ensure you that all hardware is always well tested and without any problem before we build it into a server.
Ie., screw you, we don’t care for any evidence and repeated failures, and we take zero responsibility for our equipment, we’ll just keep taking your money.
