I don't quite get the mean and accusatory tone of this article.<p>It's obvious to everyone that stuff went seriously wrong and that they lost a lot of money when their hardware caught fire. And OVH was way more transparent about what happened and why than what you usually hear from Amazon/Google/Microsoft about their outages. They quickly provided internal documents, video footage, and their own theory as to why a power supply caught fire. (And their info matched up with later-released firefighter heat camera footage.) Most likely, their own legal battle with their supplier of the USP that first received maintenance and then a day later caused the fire is still ongoing, so they probably aren't allowed to say much anymore, or else it would be considered interference with their own lawsuit.<p>They refunded customers for the downtime and, additionally, also granted extra refunds to customers who did not have proper backups. That's more generous than my experience with AWS & GCloud, who just categorically refused any data-loss-related refunds even though we followed their best practices with a multi-AZ RDS deployment and automated snapshots to S3. When I saw data loss with a cloud storage provider that claimed to be more durable than an atomic bunker, they just shrugged it off and since it wasn't viable to sue them for it, they just got away with not paying. OVH tried the same with a customer where automated backups turned out badly, and then lost in court and were ordered to pay up. In my experience, OVH is behaving like everyone else, they don't stand out as especially bad here.<p>The article then gets accusatory with "Neither OVHcloud nor Klaba will talk about the SBG2 fire now, but they are both using the experience in surprising ways, having seen that national champions get special treatment." and "being a European tech champion makes you fireproof." but I just don't see that. They paid for the damages caused, changed their datacenter design to prevent these issues in the future, and then rebuilt the whole thing on their own costs. How is that "special treatment"? What could they have done better?<p>And then the article complains about datacenter operators not sharing enough details publicly. But if this is the treatment you get for being even mildly transparent, I can totally understand why everyone now keeps their lips sealed.
Others already commented about the accusatory tone of the article, but I want to focus on:<p>>But public sector agencies were selecting it as a way to support Europe’s native tech sector, and also to take a step towards digital sovereignty<p>I care about neither, but I did -and still do - use OVH. They were never good, but they were always cheap. They provide good VPS and dedicated bare metal servers. They were not a "cloud" like DigitalOcean or AWS, with things happening magically in the background.<p>Therefore, there are no backups included, by default servers come with RAID but I dismantle mine for more disk space (and do offsite backups).<p>Also, they are bigger than the article suggests. Even if they're not well known outside of Europe:<p>>As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area.[3] As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe,[4][5] and the third largest in the world based on physical servers.[6] According to W3Techs, OVH has 3.4% of website data center market share in 2024
I stopped reading at "Never before or since has a complete data center burnt down." What other wild, easily refutable claims await? Offsite backups are a scam?