Hetzner Connectivity Issues Due to Sanction Busting Activities
In this technical retrospective (2024), @ksajadi shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 73 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 18 comments
I was just having a chat with some friends yesterday about sanctions in general, and how wildly ineffective they are most of the time. I believe they often have a negative effect: they hurt regular citizens while the leaders who they're meant to target suffer little, and instead of achieving their intended goals, they turn citizens in the target country -- even those who are not happy with their government -- against the countries imposing the sanctions.
I do expect that sanctions make inroads toward their stated goals. Sure, less money means less weapons, probably, and the choice of suppliers becomes more limited, meaning costs are higher, and quality might suffer.
But Iranian sanctions have been in place for decades, with little to no changes in their government that the West would consider favorable. Cuban sanctions didn't do much "good". Russian sanctions haven't ended their war in Ukraine.
Sure, sanctions can serve to contain adversaries to some degree, and slow things down, but they don't seem to really do much positive. And their negative effect on goodwill and relations really sours longer-term diplomatic efforts. I do tend to feel like they have a net negative effect, most of the time.
This feels like it could be related to the Iran IP address thing.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585249 ↗
Original article: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/8121#note_1237201726 ↗
I had a similar issue with Hetzner. I host my downloads on a Hetzner cloud machine, and one of my customers reported that they couldn't download updates. Turns out their company used some enterprise security product named "Zscaler" that mis-identified the IP of my Hetzner VM as Iranian and blocked it.
My customer contacted Zscaler, and after a few days they unblocked it.
Good. More people should have a taste of these absurd IP range blocking practices (and hopefully they get to experience more of IP range inconveniencing practices like endless CAPTCHAs as well). People who have never experienced these tend to have a very naive view of the freedom of the Internet in 2024.
Do sanctions really require blocking all access from Iranian IPs to sites hosted by a US provider? Don't they usually just require not doing business with people from sanctioned countries?