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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

Years ago there was a fire in OVH who I always trusted as reliable and stable, never needed to worry.. Lost a lot that day. Probably I could have had offsite backup managed myself though. I see no difference here, you can manage your own disaster recovery.

From what I see, this actually might be a great backup/recovery solution for S3 in my case at least.

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Maybe if OVH had installed an automatic fire extinguishing system or an electric mains cut-off switch, the firefighters wouldn't have struggled with meter-long electrical arcs and could put out the fire quicker.

Yes, that hosting center was unsafe as hell. All of OVH's early year featured a lot of duct-tape and daring corner-cutting - that is how they were incredibly cheap. But nowadays they are just as mainstream industrial as their competitors and the 2021 fire marked the end of an era... It is sad that it happened as they were already turning the company around to being an established player.

A great writeup of the incident and its context, three years afterwards: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...

> But nowadays they are just as mainstream industrial as their competitors

Shame their control panel is massively behind their competitors, it's the worst cloud control panel I've had the experience of using, even worse than Azure and Google.

It's slow slow slow slow slow and horribly buggy, did I mention it's slow?

People seem to have this misconception that "cloud computing" is some kind of magic bullet that guarantees 100% durability. News flash, your data is still being stored on physical hard drives, in some data center. If the building burns down in a fire, of course your data will be gone, the hard drives are hosed, it's not magic. You really have no one to be mad at other than yourself...

> If the building burns down in a fire, of course your data will be gone

From https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu... :

> S3 Standard, [...] redundantly store objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. Availability Zones are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other Availability Zone, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.

Most of the "big" cloud providers aren't as negligent as OVH though. That entire datacenter was just one blunder after the other (wood structures, barely functional fire suppression, no proper power shut down, insane replication strategy that caused most of the replicas to burn in the very same fire in the same building...)

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