Yesterday evening I realized that I couldn't reach my PieFed instance anymore, that actually never happens other than if the load on the server gets unbearable so that it can't respond anymore. I checked this website and it also was not available anymore. From this happening before I knew that I won't be able to log in via SSH either and the best is to just reboot the server and then look around what happened afterwards in the logs.
So I went to hetzner.com on my phone in Firefox and clicked on login and was greeted by this verification if I'm a human or a robot. That took a long time and than just stayed on verified without forwarding me to the login page. That's weird, perhaps Hetzner is down? I searching online and some websites said it was fine but then I found Status Gator which said that hetzner had "Major Hetzner outage", it was already midnight and I thought I can't do anything about that anyway that night and went to bed with the hope that Hetzner fixes their stuff until the morning.
Next day I woke up and everything was still the same. I thought that perhaps I need to try Chrome with the Hetzner login page, just in case, and the Status Gator also changed that it's only a "Minor Hetzner outage". In Chrome I was able to log in to the Hetzner console, and there it greeted me with a big red box with the text which explained to me that they had to block my IP and a link to the documentation. In the documentation they explained that there are many different reasons why they would need to block one or several IPs (I only have one), and one of them is if you don't pay your bills.
Luckily I'm not self hosting my email on the same server but use MXRoute and I don't host my domain at Hetzner but in Sweden at Websupport so email still worked. I looked in Thunderbird for any Hetzner emails and there was one from "Hetzner Accounting", somehow the Thunderbird UI deemphisizes the title of the email so I didn't see it but just read the "Attached you will find your latest reminder as PDF file.", a reminder, hm ok, I opened the PDF which said:
We have already sent you two reminders. Since you have not paid your invoices, we have blocked your access to our services. Please pay all your open invoices by 15 January 2026. If you do not pay your invoices, three things will happen: 1. We will cancel all your products, services, and your account. 2. You will lose all data, including backups. 3. We will send your debt to our debt collection agency.
Here my panic mode started, I have been paying Hetzner for the last 10 years or so with my credit card automatically, and it's not expired or anything, and it worked for November but somehow not for December. I checked the billing and invoices on Hetzners website and it said that they send an invoice the 18. th of December which was not paid. I paid it immediately with PayPal which is connected to the same credit card and after half an hour the IP was unblocked and everything works again.
How to keep things online in the long term?
I have my website online since 2003 and normally it doesn't take much work to keep it online, just pay the bills and update the server, that's kind of it. Sometimes the technology gets outdated so I have to make it work with a new version of PHP or Rails, but for long term there is a solution just to convert it into static HTML which will be able to be read for the next hundred years probably.
But there are those two bills which it seems can bring your stuff offline within weeks. The domain and the server bill. I was thinking what to do with my website once I die, I like the idea that it would just be available after that for some time at least, like 10 or more years, until most of the people forget about me. But it's impossible to pre-pay the domain and the server at all and it's always a reaction with a threat that they will delete everything within a couple of days if you're not able to pay.
Say I was in the hospital for two weeks and wouldn't have access to email, in this situation my server would have been deleted already permanently, and all because of 30 EUR.
Actually I kind of like how Vultr does it' they let you pre-pay an amount of money and then they keep your stuff online until this money runs out. I'm storing my PeerTube videos there and just pay once a year or so in advance.
Anyway I didn't quite realize how fragile the whole situation is, and yeah I understand that for others my website might not be that important, but for me I had it for more than 20 years and it survived me emigrating to different countries twice already. For me it's a sentimental thing, it is one of the few constants in my life and I'd like it to survive at least for a little bit after I'm gone. I guess the only way is to teach my son to do it, but he's only 3 years old :D