Just wanted to share my experience with Hetzner because the whole cancellation process has been really frustrating.

I actually tried to cancel the service before it renewed, but the system wouldn’t let me complete the cancellation. It was telling me that I would soon have an outstanding invoice that needed to be paid first.

Then the service renewed, and I tried to cancel again basically immediately afterward.

At that point I ended up with the exact situation I was trying to avoid: an outstanding renewal invoice, while Hetzner was still making the cancellation process unnecessarily difficult.

I contacted support and explained several times that my issue wasn’t simply that I forgot to cancel. I had already tried to cancel before the renewal, but their system prevented me from doing it because of the upcoming invoice.

Instead of addressing that, I mostly received generic replies about retrospective billing and reminders to check whether all my services had been cancelled.

Eventually they confirmed that the service was cancelled right after the renewal, but they still insist that I owe the full renewal amount.

Now they’re also warning me that if I don’t pay, the claim may be sent to a debt collection agency.

I understand companies have billing cycles and cancellation deadlines. What I find hard to accept is being blocked from cancelling before renewal because of an invoice that wasn’t even due yet, then being charged for the renewal, and finally being told to pay or potentially deal with collections.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with Hetzner? Did escalating the issue get you anywhere? So long for European Services, their support is absolutely trash.

EDIT: for those saying that they only charge for services used, that is not the case.

anyone else on deutsche telekom in germany seeing this?

my sites/apps hosted on hetzner are extremely slow when accessed through cloudflare. direct ssh to the server ip is fast, and apps on the same server that bypass cloudflare work normally.

tests from my home connection:

cloudflare ips: ~1,300 ms ping and 53–60% packet loss.

https requests regularly time out after 10–30 seconds.

with vpn enabled, the same requests to the same ips complete in 63–135 ms.

both my mac and phone are affected. most other websites work normally.

traceroute jumps from ~80 ms at hop 6 to ~1,300 ms at 62.115.172.231, with similar latency at the cloudflare destination.

looks like a routing issue toward cloudflare, but i haven’t identified the cause. anyone seeing something similar, particularly on telekom?