Hetzner

Hetzner Online GmbH is a company and data center operator based in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, in Germany.

Not to be confused with xneelo, a South African company formerly known as Hetzner (Ply) Ltd.
Hetzner Online GmbH
Type of businessGesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Founded1997
HeadquartersGunzenhausen, Bavaria, Germany
Founder(s)Martin Hetzner
IndustryWeb hosting, SSL certificates, Colocation, Domain registration
Revenue€290M (2020)[1]
Net income€78M (2020)[1]
Employees201-500[2]
URLOfficial website Edit this at Wikidata

History

Hetzner Online GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) began operations in Germany in 1997[3] under the name Hetzner Online Services. Between 2000 and 2015, Hetzner Online in Germany operated under the legal status AG ("Aktiengesellschaft"). In 2015, it changed its legal status to GmbH. In addition, Hetzner Online expanded its chief executive team with Stephan Konvickova and Günther Müller at the beginning of the year 2019.[4]

The company is named after its founder Martin Hetzner. Hetzner Online owns and operates four data center parks in Nuremberg[5] and Falkenstein (Germany), Tuusula (Finland),[6][7][8] and Ashburn, Virginia (United States).[9] In addition, Hetzner Online is a co-investor in the Cinia C-Lion1 project, which connected Helsinki and Rostock, Germany together with a 1,100 km long submarine fiberglass cable. The cable provides a high-speed connection between Hetzner's German and Finnish data centers.[10][11]

Services

Hetzner Online provides dedicated hosting, shared web hosting, virtual private servers, managed servers, domain names, SSL certificates, storage boxes,[12] and cloud. At the data center parks located in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Tuusula/Finland, customers can also connect their hardware to Hetzner Online's infrastructure and network with the company's colocation services.[13] The company operates a server auction site online where the chance to rent older dedicated servers (not purchase or colocate) are auctioned off in the form of a Dutch auction.[14]

Hetzner Online has a domain name registrar arrangement with ICANN (for registering domains under .com, .net and .org and others),[15] DENIC (for .de),[16] and nic.at (for .at).[17]

Infrastructure

Hetzner Online's datacenter projects are coordinated and implemented in-house with as little outsourcing as possible. Data center units served by multiple redundant uplinks, including 1300 Gbit/s to DE-CIX and fiber optic links to Nuremberg and Frankfurt. Colocation facilities are sited at all data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein (Vogtland) in Germany and Helsinki in Finland.[18] In 2021, a datacenter in Ashburn, Virginia, was opened, marking Hetzner's first American server.[19]

Network

The backbone is set up in the form of a ring network between the datacenter locations Nuremberg and Falkenstein as well as the most important Internet location, Frankfurt. All locations are connected to central exchange nodes such as DE-CIX, AMS-IX, DATA-IX and V-IX via the company's own fiber optic network.[20] All Hetzner's dedicated servers had a minimum 20 TB monthly cap for full speed on their servers with the option for an extra fee for full speed past that point, however, have lifted the bandwidth cap on 1 Gbit/s connection speeds as of October 1, 2018.[21][22][23]

Incidents

Hacking

In June 2013, Hetzner Online suffered from a security breach where customer information was exposed to attackers who had compromised Hetzner Online's monitoring systems.[24][25]

Russian complaints about Glavcom.ua

In early August 2014, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) sent a demand to many news agencies, including BBC, prohibiting any mention of the demonstration that was being arranged in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in support of the federalization of Siberia.[26][27] A number of such messages were sent to Ukraine, which was in the midst of undeclared war with Russian paramilitary in Donetsk region.[28] Since the Ukrainian online newspapers did not remove the article, Roskomnadzor sent letters to their Internet providers demanding removal of the news item. Hetzner Online complied with the demands and sent a notice to glavcom.ua, saying "Please solve the problem and reply within the next 24 hours to avoid suspension. This is the final deadline."[29]

This story was widely reprinted in news sources.[30] Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement expressing solidarity with glavcom.ua owners and journalists. Vassily Zvarych, vice-head of Communications Department of Foreign Ministry, gave a press conference saying that he was surprised by Hetzner Online's compliance with the Russian complaint.[31] Also, a German chapter of Reporters Without Borders issued a statement condemning Roskomnadzor.[32]

The notices to suspend Glavcom.ua were issued by Hetzner Online August 6, 2014; on August 10 Hetzner Online issued apologies, denying that any censorship was planned and that their technical support made a wrong decision, which they regret.[33] However, by that time the story was widely published in German mass-media,[34] and Glavcom.ua already migrated from Hetzner Online to another hosting provider.[35][36]

no.spam.ee lawsuit

In 2013, an Estonian anti-spam activist Tõnu Samuel posted a blog entry about an alleged spammer Silver Teede on his website no.spam.ee. In retaliation, Teede wrote a complaint to the blog's service provider, Hetzner Online, who decided to terminate services for the blog. In an ensuing court case, Estonian courts found the complaints to be baseless and awarded Samuel damages from Silver Teede for the loss of Samuel's servers.[37][38][39]

Duplicate Ed25519 SSH keys

From April 2015 to December 2015, many of the OS images used by Hetzner's installation program installimage had used duplicate Ed25519 SSH keys. This could potentially mean that an attacker could use a man-in-the-middle attack to compromise an SSH connection that was using Ed25519 keys. Hetzner sent an email to all affected customers with any potentially affected servers on information about the issue, and how to fix it.[40][41]

Blocking "Novaya Gazeta"

On January 11, 2016, Hetzner blocked the St. Petersburg site of Novaya Gazeta, the leading oppositional, non-governmental newspaper in Russia.[42] The newspaper marked the act as political censorship without any legal procedure.[43]

Blocking Ukraine War information

On March 7, 2022, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Hetzner allegedly blocked servers belonging to a Ukrainian state-affiliated war information website (war.ukraine.ua), which was posted by the official Ukraine Twitter account.[44] Hetzner initially denied blocking the website in question, stating that Cloudflare informed them that the IP does not belong to their network. Two days later, Hetzner confirmed via a press release that they had erroneously suspended the servers due to "anomalies" found in the account by an employee, which came from a not yet fully developed "plausibility check" and stated that their actions were not politically-motivated.[45] The press release has since been deleted from the Hetzner website.

References
  1. "Hetzner Online GMBH, Gunzenhausen, Germany".
  2. "Hetzner | LinkedIn".
  3. "Company Overview of Hetzner Online AG". Businessweek. Archived from the original on June 19, 2014. Retrieved 19 June 2014.
  4. "Hetzner Online expands management team". Hetzner Online GmbH. Archived from the original on 23 November 2021. Retrieved 6 May 2019.
  5. Beatrix Taggart (17 May 2013). "Hetzner Online shortlisted as "New Datacentre of the Year" at the 6th International Datacentre Awards". Daily Host News.
  6. Nicole Henderson (1 February 2013). "Web Host Hetzner Online Adds Colocation Services to Two German Data Centers". Web Host Industry Review.
  7. "Hetzner sets foot in Finland". Good News from Finland/Finnfacts. Archived from the original on 2 September 2019. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  8. "Hetzner constructs a data center park in Tuusula, Finland". Finpro. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  9. "Data centers - Hetzner Online GmbH". www.hetzner.com. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
  10. "Submarine Data Cable to Link Germany and Finland". eco. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  11. "Cinia Completes Submarine Data Cable to Link Germany and Finland". Cinea. Archived from the original on 20 September 2018. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  12. "Storage Boxes".
  13. "About us".
  14. "Server auction - Hetzner Online GmbH". www.hetzner.com. Retrieved 2020-03-24.
  15. "ICANN-Accredited Registrars".
  16. "List of DENIC Members". Archived from the original on 2015-09-05. Retrieved 2014-09-11.
  17. "Registrar-Liste". nic.at. Archived from the original on 2017-01-18. Retrieved 2014-09-11.
  18. "Data centers". 2017-11-21.
  19. "Truly thrifty cloud hosting - Hetzner Online GmbH". Hetzner Online GmbH. Retrieved 17 November 2021.
  20. "Secure Modern Network Infrastructure". 21 November 2017.
  21. "ALL HETZNER DEDICATED SERVERS NOW HAVE REAL UNLIMITED TRAFFIC". PlexGuide.com. 2018-10-01. Archived from the original on 2020-11-09. Retrieved 2018-12-24.
  22. "Hetzner Dedicated Servers now with real unlimited traffic". LowEndTalk. 2018-10-01. Retrieved 2018-12-24.
  23. "Traffic/en - Hetzner DokuWiki". Hetzner.de. Retrieved 2018-12-24.
  24. Fabian Scherschel (7 June 2013). "Hetzner web hosting service hacked, customer data copied". The H.
  25. Nicole Henderson (7 June 2013). "Hetzner Security Breach Exposes Customer Passwords, Payment Information". Web Host Industry Review.
  26. BBC: "Блог редактора: Артем Лоскутов и "федерализация Сибири"
  27. BBC World Service statement regarding interview with Artem Loskutov
  28. Bloomberg: Ukraine in ‘Undeclared War’ With Russia as Rebels Unite
  29. Немцы заблокируют «Главком» за то, что он не удалил статью по требованию Роскомнадзора
  30. Webhoster Hetzner: Deutsche Firma hilft russischer Medienaufsicht bei Zensur
  31. "МИД Украины удивлен позицией немецкого хостера, согласившегося с Роскомнадзором". Archived from the original on 2014-08-09. Retrieved 2014-08-09.
  32. Russische Zensurversuche im Ausland
  33. Human rights in Ukraine: Russian censor will not be allowed to block Glavkom
  34. "The Truth About Hetzner Censoring Glavcom". root-services.net. 9 August 2014. Archived from the original on 2014-09-03.
  35. Роскомсвобода: Немецкий хостер хотел заблокировать украинский сайт по требованию Роскомнадзора, но извинился
  36. Glavcom.ua: Немецкий хостер отказался блокировать «Главком» и извинился перед редакцией
  37. Hans Lõugas (29 October 2013). "Laimaja peab sotsiaalmeedias vabandust paluma". Eesti Päevaleht. Archived from the original on 10 August 2014. Retrieved 7 August 2014.
  38. Sander Silm (28 October 2013). "Netilaimaja peab maksma Tõnu Samuelile 11 150 eurot". Õhtuleht.
  39. Silver Meikar (17 June 2013). "Silver Meikar: avatus ja läbipaistvus taastaks usalduse". Postimees.
  40. "Ed25519/en – Hetzner DokuWiki". wiki.hetzner.de. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  41. "Duplicate ED25519 SSH Host Keys at Hetzner". blogs.intevation.de. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  42. Немецкий провайдер заблокировал сайт «Новой газеты в Петербурге»
  43. Осторожно, цензура!
  44. "Ukraine / Україна on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  45. "Statement Concerning The Website war.ukraine.ua". www.hetzner.com. Archived from the original on 2022-03-09. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
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