Comment by 202508042147 a day ago
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
Depends on which data center you're hosted.
The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC must comply, while the German ones are operating under the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny or challenge the request.
It's not that guaranteed.
The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.
Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).
Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).
You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?
https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-to-resolve-blocks-o...
Still don't comply ?
You are added to sanctions list, end of the game.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185
Even Microsoft acknowledges that these cross-border requests cannot be avoided.
https://www.convotis.com/es/en/news/microsoft-access-eu-data
The same way that EU can force fetching data from the US entity.
Now on the EU side:
GDPR fine of 4% of your worldwide income. Well, too bad, your US entity refused, we will have to punish your EU entity very strongly.
If small provider, oh right you refuse ? Well, we will notify your bank that you do not respect the court orders, etc.
The law is one of the way of enforcement, but there are multiple stages of pressure.
Still refuse ? Well, let's come to you at 6am then.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/10/57...
There are EU alternatives to Stripe.
I know what you meant, but I think that there are alternatives, even if they are maybe not as good as the ones made in US.
Also, if the goal is to go all in on data sovereignty, so be it - put the companies in the sanctions list. It will only grow.
Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new company:
"Storm" -> "the European end to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"
He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?
Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
do you use FDE on your hetzner instances? I couldn't find a guarantee that they properly dispose of block storage so I ended up developing a utility for this https://github.com/mvelbaum/hetzner-fde-toolkit
Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.