Hetzner has banned crypto mining and Chia farming
In this technical retrospective (2021), @CharlesW 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 114 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 136 comments
Not sure if this is of use (since submissions should link to english content in the first place), but here is a rough translation:
Joshua:
Hetzner Online GmbH:
Joshua:
I don't know what the German tweets are saying, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
If all the major cloud vendors were to make it so regular consumers are unable to spin up a server and participate in mining, then what makes it 'distributed' and fair?
I don't even know to what extent mining is prevalent on Hetzner. Is this more of a statement or are they having shortages for non-crypto applications?
A similar case could occur with GPUs where the ones effective for mining are not generally accessible to the public and only those who can get them, a small subset of people in some position of power, isn't that different than a non-crypto-distributed currency. The 51% is really being tested by China. How many countries have governments/citizens with the capacity to be represented at that scale?
I've never had AWS block me from S3 - they just charge more for more tx.
I've never had AWS block me from compute - they just charge more if I want more.
I used to chase the "unlimited" services various of the cheaper providers offered - partly because HN always suggests that. But there are often weird limits. Ie, unlimited but... at some point its not worth dealing with. Either peering and latency is garbage, there is some fine print, or they just can't actually deliver the traffic volume. AWS same availability zone latency / bandwidth is really pretty OK between most nodes I've found.
My only issue with this is it seems like they've secretly changed the terms and conditions without telling anyone and that people haven't agreed to and then put them into force.
I got bit by this before with a hoster when I was much younger and starting out where I put a webproxy on a web host. The web host then changed their terms and conditions and blocked my account without informing me. Then to add insult to injury they said they would unblock it for 3 hours a certain day for me to remove. I'm still salty about that to this day.
Translation:
"Yes, it's true, we expanded the ToS and banned crypto mining. We received many orders for servers with large disks. Large storage boxes (?) are also increasingly often rented. With storage boxes 1/2"
"this leads to bandwidth problems on the host systems. With Chia mining, there is the additional problem that the many read and write accesses put a lot of strain on the drives which will lead to failure. 2/2"