The account deletion when not having any services is a result of their privacy policy. Most European companies should do that but I think it's rare in practice. What they didn't do very well is that it's of course better to email you before deleting.

The HDD thing is (was?) definitely an issue with Hetzner. I had the same experience some years ago. Best option was to get hardware raid and SAS disks, those were datacenter quality instead of consumer and worked great.