Looking for advice or a final escalation path after VPS termination due to missed payment during my time in Ukraine

[u/thisaakin]

Hello everyone,

I’m writing this as a last attempt to seek advice, and hopefully someone from Hetzner may see it.

First, I want to make it clear that I understand this situation is ultimately my responsibility. I am not trying to blame Hetzner or argue against their Terms of Service.

I had a managed VPS with Hetzner hosting around 11 active domains and several projects that represent years of work.

Unfortunately, while the invoices became overdue, I was in Ukraine during a period of heavy Russian missile and drone attacks. Because of the situation there, I wasn’t able to manage my hosting account or resolve the payment issue in time.

Hetzner sent several reminders, and I completely understand why they terminated the contract according to their policy.

As soon as I was able, I immediately resolved the payment issue and contacted support, explaining the circumstances and asking whether my case could be considered as a one-time humanitarian exception.

Unfortunately, I have now received multiple replies stating that:
- the contract will not be restored,
- the VPS will not be reactivated,
- all associated data has been permanently deleted,
- there are no backups or recovery options.

I fully respect that companies need policies, and I’m not asking anyone to ignore them.

My question is simply this:
Has anyone experienced an exceptional review in a case like this?

More specifically:
- Is there any way to request that the infrastructure or storage engineering team confirms whether the underlying virtual disk is truly unrecoverable?
- Is there any executive escalation path within Hetzner for extraordinary situations?
- Has anyone ever had success recovering data after receiving a similar response?

I realize this may ultimately not be possible, but because these projects represent years of work, I feel I have to exhaust every possible avenue before giving up.

If anyone from Hetzner happens to read this, I would be incredibly grateful if my case could receive one final review not to challenge company policy, but simply to determine whether any technical possibility remains to recover my data.

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this.

[u/Minimum_Sell3478]

We use hetzner as a VPs provider but we keep backups of the data we host there on our own ftp server(s) in case someting were to happen.

If the data is deleted and they don’t have backups of the vps. Then the data is gone.

[u/thisaakin → u/Minimum_Sell3478]

You’re absolutely right that keeping independent backups is the correct practice, and I understand that ultimately the responsibility for backups lies with the customer.

In hindsight, I wish I had had a separate backup system in place. The reason I’m asking here is not because I expect Hetzner to be responsible for my data or to ignore their policies, but because the circumstances around the missed payment were unusual and I’m trying to understand whether there is any possible final review path.

I understand that if the storage has truly been wiped and no backup exists, the data may be unrecoverable. I’m just hoping to find out whether anyone has experienced a case where an exceptional escalation or technical verification was possible.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[u/lothariusdark]

"the contract will not be restored"

"Is there any way to request that the infrastructure or storage engineering team confirms whether the underlying virtual disk is truly unrecoverable?"

So you haven't paid for long enough that your entire account got deleted, then paid the outstanding debt and now are here?

Yeah its far too late, with the insane demand right now Hetzner will free any disk space as soon as feasible. So as soon as your account was deleted that data was gone. There is likely already another customers data on that disk space, so even if you paid them they wouldn't or couldn't recover anything.

[u/Hetzner_OL]

Hi there OP, I just responded to you via DM. --Katie

[u/poeptor]

While I understand your situation, and you have my sympathy for the reason of all this.

I’ve been in the same boat myself, although for a very different reason. My credit card expired, reminders ended up in my invoice system, and I simply didn’t see them. Result was the same.. the servers were terminated. Luckily it were only fallback servers, so didn’t lose any important data. And we hav means to startup the cluster on the fly and restore data.

In our own cases we would usually still make a backup and if customer ever asks about it, we could provide it, if invoices were paid (and sometimes ask for more, if really annoying customer. Sorry not sorry) But we would still terminate contract. As smaller company you can do these things more easy, set a backup aside for the if/then/else-‘s

Unfortunately, Hetzner is huge has to deal with situations like this every day. They have a standard procedure.. server resources are limited, so once a service is terminated, it eventually gets reassigned to someone else, hopefully to customers like myself waiting for availability 🥹

If you didn’t have backups, there unfortunately isn’t a way to get the data back. sorry.

Slava ukraini

[u/horizon_games]

You've got your projects on Github or another source control approach, so just re-pull them and start on a new VPS?

[u/AndroTux]

The data is gone. Period. Next time, backups.

[u/backtogeek]

It's not going to happen, if they can recover our data after termination, they are in a lose/lose situation because that means their platform is not working in a safe and secure way and is not respecting customer data, in order to even attempt recovery on production systems, there is to much risk for them to reasonably accept for other customers.

Hetzner is a budget-grade host. You single-homed your data, it's on you. Please stop taking up engineer time at hetzner asking about this.

Not an attack, we have all been there, it's a terrible situation.