I don’t like playing multiplayer or online games anyways. So I’m good.

Starcraft, the OG, with Broodwars on the PC

Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, or some tycoon game.

Super Mario World on the SNES

I also used them for years, then everything blocked and deleted instantly. I have other homelab type friends, same thing happened. Again more anecdote vs anecdote. But if you google about hetzner and this type of activity there are bagillions of reddit threads.

After paying them about a grand a month forever, losing all my “safe data” and having to wait a week for even a response that just says “account has suspicious activity. Disabled”. Not a single response after that. And they had the nerve to charge my credit card again at the next payment period. Overall, truly scummy. And I will prevent everyone I can from ever engaging with them.

When hiccups happen, you would hope to be able to at least talk to someone and figure out what’s going on. If they don’t want to keep your business, fine let me get it out privately. But they don’t play that way.

I use World Stream for many of my storage VPSs. They have pretty cheap servers that can take 14x or 18x drives. So I use their super powerful Epycs plus storage and then they can do an internal LAN only network for your boxes at 10G. 140TB to 200TB per box, connected to the rest of my stuff at 10G.

Their support is opposite of Hetzner. Everything is communicated. It’s almost too much. You get emails that they’re updating the air conditioning unit in a different building. Your downtime is zero. I’ve had some questions on setting up my rack space with them, and engineers respond back, not sales.

You know what sucks? Getting your VPS shut off or account suspended. All your data gone in an instant, not recoverable. You don’t have access to the metal, and the metal no longer has access to you.

Hetzner is known for randomly boinking accounts. You update billing info? Whoops maybe shutoff. You login via a VPN, account disabled. Just randomly for no reason, account locked and VPS down.

You have basically zero recourse. Their support staff suck and the immediate reaction is suspend and delete. NEVER use them for anything you don’t consider temporary.

A cheap USB-C hub can only output so many power and voltage levels at once. Looking at that device it’s only a single USB C PD in and a single USB C PD out. Not a bad device, but not really a real charging hub if that is your goal.

Anker uses pretty good controllers. It’s of course possible you got a bad one, but it’s highly unlikely this is systemic.

I have all my houses completely smart outfitted. Except the bedrooms. Yes you can have a wireless switch control a wireless light. I do that everywhere because then nobody gets confused and flips a switch.

I haven’t touched a light switch in years. Every room has mmWave sensors either in the ceiling or on a shelf or both. You walk in, lights go on. Leave the room for a minute, lights go off.

The problem is a bedroom where that doesn’t work. When are lights on? When you’re in the room and not in bed? Ok. That’s a lot more complicated. Get up in the middle of the night to pee, now the whole room is blasting light and waking up your partner. Reach for your phone, detected as motion outside the bed, inter of a tip lights come on. It never seems to work because too many variations.

Because of that I keep a remote by the bed. The light switch works, the phone apps work, the voice assistants work, all as usual just no automatic sensor. Then in addition the remote by the bed can turn the lights on full, one bulb dim, or off. One for each side.

Not just unaffordable, just not available.

That house where I needed to transfer data was in a neighbourhood only had copper phone lines from the 1960’s for DSL and then coax cable. The maximum possible was 400Mbps down and 25Mbps up. Over the years it was increased to 800Mbps down, still 25Mbps down. I paid over $1000 USD a month for that shit internet. Because the only alternative was 4Mbps to 8Mbps upload.

This is a major metro area, 700k people. Starlink was a game changer. Not symmetric, but waaaay better.

There’s only so much bandwidth on the cable line and they’ve spent ages marketing download speeds as the measure. If they go from 400/25 to 400/50, 99.9999% of people wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t pay extra. But make it 425/25 and people will buy. Bigger number more better.

Just start the backup and wait 3 months. That’s not that bad. Are you losing access to the data soon? If not, just let your auto sync take care of it piece by piece.

I had an emergency situation where I needed to move the data and upload was 25mbps. Stupid cable companies not understanding why people need symmetry. It would take approximately a year of continuous upload and I didn’t have that. So I use 4 Starlinks, aggregated them to the cloud server with a VPN and now I had 225Mbps to 425Mbps upload. It took about 3 weeks but all the data was moved.