> Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason.
Frankly, your service looks a bit suspicious (free and cheap file sharing). You seem to be aware of the potential for abuse - your DMCA/abuse page even says there are a "large number of abuse reports pixeldrain receives every day".
It sucks that Hetzner is closing your account. But, they are known to be pretty conservative and your users have almost certainly violated their T&C many times even if you are making a good faith effort to prevent and respond to abuse.
I have not used Hetzner to serve user facing traffic for many years. Users never connect directly to the storage servers, it's all going through custom caching nodes hosted by a different provider. That shields the hetzner servers from all abuse and also reduces traffic by about 75%. There is no risk for hetzner here.
I concede that my service has been abused a lot. I am working very hard to clean up my act. I have been implementing better content moderation, content scanning and streamlining my dmca handling process. If hetzner has a problem with any of that they should have just contacted me instead of pulling the plug like this. Very unreliable company.
You must have done something really wrong if they don’t even want to resolve this with you. Normally, you would receive an abuse notice from them — we did many times with one of the services I worked on.
I guess your service is somehow connected to other Hetzner servers (not storage), or you are somehow leaking Hetzner IPs. Your servers were probably used to host CSAM or similar content, which is likely why they don’t want to communicate with you. Someone must have reported this to them.
I suspect that what is happening here is that Hetzner received a lot of orders for storage node snapshots and/or evidence preservation from law enforcement (you probably won’t even be notified).
Frankly, your service looks a bit suspicious (free and cheap file sharing). You seem to be aware of the potential for abuse - your DMCA/abuse page even says there are a "large number of abuse reports pixeldrain receives every day".
It sucks that Hetzner is closing your account. But, they are known to be pretty conservative and your users have almost certainly violated their T&C many times even if you are making a good faith effort to prevent and respond to abuse.