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.
Or did Hetzner announce their termination of Russian customers back in 2021?
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.
1. The war is not an inconvenience, it's a disaster.
2. You had at least 1 year to move elsewhere.
What sort of stuff do you look for that seems good?
spamhaus doesn't forgive or forget.
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.
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.
The original message from Hetzner suggests that this is also some kind of compliance issue rather than being driven by some kind of individual opposition to the war.
Specifically due to FATCA and related regulations that require foreign banks to report US citizens and potentially open the kimono if the IRS demands more about what they're up to.
No one outside of the middle east gave a shit about Iraq or Afghanistan enough to take the financial hit from pulling out of the US.
Even with moral shortcomings the US market was too big and too stable to walk away from. The Russian market was marginally stable, corrupt as hell, and mostly a source of raw materials and simple value-adds. For the EU that meant cheap gas, at the cost of funding people who hate you, and not taking steps to better nuclear or renewables.
There's a lot of room to criticize the sanctions and what countries they get applied to, but that isn't something that's up to Hetzner.
Russian government added Hetzner to the list of companies who must move their infrastructure within Russian borders in order to operate with Russian citizens. Few years ago they introduced a law on how companies have to process personal data. (It is kinda similar to GDPR, but the government might abuse it in the way to get access to data government needs). Obviously Hetzner doesn't want to create infrastructure on Russian soil. It was quite risky even before the war.
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).
My guess is that Hetzner got tired helping intelligence services bug their customers:
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).
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?
However it could also be "Just easier" or that Hetzner doesn't want to deal with Russians anyway.
Normally the way these financial sanctions go is that you are permitted to give service if it has already been paid for but you cannot take new service. Annual contracts are a normal thing but I don't see the option in Hetzner right now, so it could easily be an oversight.
It could easily be that they take monthly billing only (normally) and have no desire to introduce this to bypass the "russians cannot purchase services" style sanction.
that's under 6 (working) weeks from today.
I'm trying to read where you got 2 years from, but I can't find it.
Was there an additional warning from before? or are you suggesting that when the Russian military invaded Ukraine that every Russian business and citizen should have pulled out of using European services?
I assume you mean T + 6 weeks, where T is the time since the invasion and T is approximately 2 years, even though T + 6 weeks is still less than 2 years?
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.
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.
/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..
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.
Corporations are simultaneously sophisticated and idiots. Sometimes the output of sophisticated compliance pipeline is plainly idiotic.
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.
