Comment by Traubenfuchs
3 years ago
High visibility customer support via hacker news is not a feature, it‘s a failure.
And those failed communications between provider and customer are why everyone is frustrated with the big corpos (google, cloudflare, stripe, etc.) which Hetzner is apparently bound to become.
At least you have someone speaking for Hetzner officially here. Contrast that with Google, where Matt Cutts was kind of used as unofficial backchannel for customer complaints, up until he left Google, and now all we have are prayers that some unknown reader will be moved by our plights.
This is not to excuse bad support experiences. I just think we should appreciate it when there is still a channel to a real human being willing to be helpful and engage constructively, because it's getting increasingly rare these days.
Support is a very hard issue to solve when you have volume. It doesn't help that 99.9% companies regard support as a cost center so salaries are low and there's a lot of churn and disregard for supportpeople tools.
Isn't it great that they recognize this failure and are attempting to fix it?
Being the lucky winner of ones complaint being found by personal, C-suite, marketing (Hetzner) or top-engineer (Stripe) accounts on online forums and getting one time only high priority support is not a fix for the systemic failures that led to the complaint.
We recently had a mission- and time-critical issue with play store and our first reaction was to contact our gcp account manager and old google friends because we knew play store communication sucks. It should not be this way.
It's not the first time I read a feedback about unprofessional customer support from Hetzner. Here or on Reddit. I admit that nearly every time someone from Hetzner shows up, says it might me a language/cultural issue or something of this kind and offer direct help to look into it.
Hetzner is on my radar for a long time as an alternative to simpler deployments on AWS. It's great they are monitoring internet forums and try to be helpful, but also very frustrating to read such problems apparently still occur.
I think it's pretty cool of this person to come and try to help.