Hetzner is terminating contracts with all users who had a Russian postal address
Just received: We regret to inform you that due to the tense geopolitical situation with Russia, we will be ending our contractual relationship with customers from Russia.
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.
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1 month to migrate is pretty dire.
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?
Quite a few of Russians have been using Hetzner's servers to host VPN services for personal use, for their family members, friends...
/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..
Two years + 6 weeks of notice, that would seem to be enough to make a move. This was in the cards for a long time and I noted in the first weeks of the war that anybody from Russia with assets in the West would be smart to move them because sooner or later they'd be at risk. Note that the real artery isn't hosting but DNS and if there are more similar actions at registrars or even at ICANN (see the 'NameCheap' thread) then that will have as much or more impact. Hosting is usually manageable (unless you are tied into hosting provider unique services, such as AWS).
Much sympathy. My spouse had a 401K with a portion of it in "Mediterranean assets". She got a letter saying those were Russian assets in reality. All gone, sorry.
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.
So why now? Almost 2 years after the invasion.
My guess is that Hetzner got tired helping intelligence services bug their customers:
https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident ↗