Comment by zelphirkalt
3 years ago
I hope they created an offspring company with no access to the Hetzner main infrastructure. It would be very inconvenient to lose the "hosted in Germany" - a.k.a. "not accessible data for the US" - aspect in terms of GDPR.
To the best of my knowledge, this is already too late. I remember reading through their FAQ and seeing that hence they now have a US-based owner, they are then within reach of US 3-letter agencies.
Hetzner Online GmbH and Hetzner Cloud GmbH are fully owned (resp. majority-owned) by ENSoXX Holding AG of which Martin Hetzner is the CEO and which seems to be the parent company[0]. I cannot find any indication in the publicly available documents that any US company (or any other company for that matter) holds more than a 25% share in ENSoXX Holding AG. (25% is the reporting threshold.)
In the 2022 annual financial statement they do mention expanding to the US, though they don't go into the legal details. As the link posted in the cousin comment mentions, though:
> Hetzner US LLC, as a subsidiary of Hetzner Online GmbH, provides data center services within the USA for the parent company, Hetzner Online.[2]
So there is no US owner.
[0]: https://www.northdata.de/Hetzner+Online+GmbH,+Gunzenhausen/A...
[1]: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ (enter "ENSoXX Holding AG" in the text field)
[2]: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/general-terms-and-condition...
Quite impressive the numbers they're doing
78M profit on 290M revenue
(See [0] above)
_ edited figures _
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I can't find any info that they are owned by a US company. Can you link to a source?
From here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/general-terms-and-condition...
Conclusion:
In summary, you as a customer do have influence - to a certain extent - on shaping who has access to the data on your servers. EU and US authorities do have to follow the laws and legal procedures in requesting data. However, this may give you a false sense of security since some authorities have been known to stretch or violate agreements. If you require a web hosting company that has absolutely no connections to the USA, then unfortunately, we may no longer be the best choice for you. Since Hetzner US LLC is part of the Hetzner Group, there certainly is a connection. We hope that we have explained things clearly from our point of view using the two above case studies.
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Hetzner is owned by a holding company owned by Ensoxx and Ensoxx is Martin Hetzner's company as far as I can tell.
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It is because of this, I had to move four of my customers away from Hetzner. Since they just did not want to be in the "sphere of US influence".
Choices for EU only companies are getting smaller, and this is a real let-down.
Some choices: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
Non of them deliver equivalence of big cloud providers.
Also, track record of at least some of them is not the best, if we are to believe, for example, comments on HN. I've made initial research about most of them. Just to give some examples about Scaleaway: prices moving up by 75% without notice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923413).
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This is becoming ridiculous. Sure, I may deploy to EU based provider, but then they will get bought or, like Hetzner, expand to USA, and now my business is at a legal risk all of a sudden.
Same... hope to see a response from Hetzner on this!
Yes, very important to understand the corporate structure and legal implications wrt to GDPR and the Schrems II decison.
How can AWS claim they are GDPR compliant?
They can't really, since the Schrems II decision.