Two years with a host that doesn't exist anymore

Experience report two years with a host that doesnt exist anymore

I was with Hetzner from 2022 until they shut down in late 2024 and I stayed until the final weekend because I thought migrating would be harder than waiting and I was wrong but not entirely wrong because the prices never went up and the support got slower and slower and then it was just a ticket system that auto replied and then the control panel cert expired and then the whole thing went dark and I lost three days of backups because I trusted their automated system and I learned that cheap hosts die quietly and nobody tells you until the DNS stops responding

The email angle on dying hosts is often worse than the compute loss. For what it's worth, when Hetzner started having delivery issues in early 2024, I noticed their IP ranges appearing on multiple blocklists with no delisting requests filed. A host that stops managing its network reputation is a host that has already stopped operating in any meaningful sense. The SPF records pointing to their infrastructure became liabilities before the servers went dark. I corrected several misconceptions in their documentation in 2023 and received no response, which was the real signal.

How do you know when to leave before it gets bad? I am on a small host now for my shop and I worry about this. I dont know how to check if they are healthy. 😬 I dont want to break things by moving but I also dont want to wake up to nothing