Hetzner & Contabo - How is support during North America Business
Hours?
reddit / selfhosted

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BeingBalanced · 2023-11-15 12:48

My understanding is the support staff for these companies are in
Europe and may not offer the same response times 24/7 as they may
reduced staff outside European Business Hours.

Can any customer of Contabo or Hetzner residing in the United States
comment on what the ticket response times are on average during
business hours in the United States and if you know whether or not
there is a difference between between daytime and late night when it's
business hours in Europe?

Also wondering if in general one has better support in general over
the other, as in, will go the extra mile to check into something for
you.

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cdemi · 2023-11-15 12:50

In my opinion if support is critical to you I'd go with one of the big
clouds with a support contract.

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bufandatl · 2023-11-15 14:46

Depends on the support case you got. If it’s technical you have
basically 24/7. I am in Germany but had once a hard drive failure in a
server at 1am contacted technical support and it took about 30 minutes
overall and the new drive was resilvering and the server back online.
Takes a bit as the NOC needs to go to the data center and so on.

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from-nibly · 2023-11-15 15:04

Didn't hetzner just get caught installing a fraudulent certificate in
a mitm attack on someone?  That sounds like a non starter for me.

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LoV432 · 2023-11-15 19:52

>Didn't hetzner just get caught installing a fraudulent certificate in
a mitm attack on someone?

Yup...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961166

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BeingBalanced · 2023-11-15 20:32

I have no experience with them but the phrase "no one's perfect" comes
to mind LOL as their reputation otherwise is appears golden.  But I
need to maybe once or twice a year submit a ticket when it's 2AM in
the morning in Europe and get a response in less than 20 minutes and
my understanding is that's probably not going to happen with Hetzener
or Contabo?

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BeingBalanced · 2023-11-15 20:42

That's good to know as I've never run into that level of failure
without the provider migrating the instance without me requesting.
But I'd say 1-4 times a year I might have an urgent technical issue
like a network slowdown issue or a sudden runaway disk space usage
issue that I'm having trouble pinpointing the cause and with company's
I've used like Vultr and Ramnode, they responded at all times of day
to my ticket within 15 minutes and helped me pinpoint the issue and if
it was their responsibility quickly take action.  I'd like to get a
little bit more bang for the buck on specs though than Vultr or
Ramnode without sacrificing support level.

Granted I never use phone support but any hosting provider that
doesn't offer 24/7 phone support gives me pause and Hetzner doesn't
offer 24/7 phone support so obviously their staff is reduced outside
European Business hours.

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bufandatl · 2023-11-15 20:45

I only used e-mail support and had contacted them because smart began
to email me the drive was failing. So I asked them to change the drive
as it is included when renting hardware.

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blizznwins · 2023-11-15 23:17

I thought it is assumed that they were forced to do so from law
enforcement?

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from-nibly · 2023-11-18 02:23

Does that matter?

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blizznwins · 2023-11-18 09:09

Of course. It is the difference between them following the law or
breaking it.