I was running a Solana Testnet Proof of Stake validator for work and they decided to shut the host down at the network layer and refused to give us access to the host. After my employer's legal threatened them, they offered to give us access back, but to be a pain in the butt, they only gave us console login access. Luckily, it was just our Testnet validator, and we keep the keys in cold storage which we were able to recover from.
Their nodes are cheap, but beware of Hetzner. Something that they didn't mind hosting for almost 4 years they suddenly changed their minds on and shut the host down.
See: https://www.theblock.co/post/182283/1000-solana-validators-g...
https://www.hetzner.com/de/legal/terms-and-conditions/ number 8.1 in the German version, number 4 in the English one: "Furthermore, the operation of applications for mining cryptocurrencies is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, mining, farming and plotting of cryptocurrencies. In the case of non-compliance, we are entitled to lock your access to the Service and/or to your account."
Lots of hosters and cloud providers have this and similar exclusions, to keep out the typically shady cryptocurrency crowd, their excessive resource usage, high payment risk and reputation damage.
E.g. Google Cloud also doesn't allow cryptocurrency stuff without prior approval, 3.3 iv: https://cloud.google.com/terms , same for AWS, 1.25: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ So I hope you got your written approval first, otherwise AWS might be equally nasty to you.
Google actually offers blockchain rpc. Fwiw, Solana nodes run poorly in the cloud and generally only make sense on bare metal. As far as slow distributed databases go (aka blockchains), it’s 1000x+ faster than the ethereum style blockchains.
(On a more serious note, I imagine the reason Hetzner does not want crypto-related stuff is for the same reasons most hosting companies are not very fond of porn-related sites: High rates of fraud, charge-backs and other potential legal liability).
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/comment/ilf...
For me, who’s worked in 50,000+ bare metal Linux environments before, it was just so surprising how sudden and violent it was. Their customer support was amazing until it wasn’t.
Just let it be a lesson, they will arbitrarily change their mind and put your nodes running your business at risk. Even if you’ve broken no laws and are operating in good faith. We were not running and proof of work nonsense that breaks the hardware or uses excess electricity.
Kind of comical!
Despite that I wouldn't have minded using them again, but never for something which I don't have redundancy with some other provider I can fall back to. AWS can go wrong too, but I think the risk of getting booted before even starting is very low with them.
(Disclaimer: I love Hetzner and their business model/customer service.)
We rent a 4090 for about EUR300/month on vast.ai, for reference.
1. https://technical.city/en/video/GeForce-RTX-4090-vs-RTX-4000...
RTX™ 4000 SFF Ada Generation (20GB GDDR6 ECC)
64 GB DDR4
1.92 TB (Gen4)
Intel® Core™ i5-13500
30.9 TBit total bandwidth
Time used to setup and maintenance makes this valuable. Otherwise you can just buy similar system and pay for electricity.
And by "can" I mean:
- Does the ToS allows it?
- Does the GPU allows it?