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"Millions of websites".... I have not noticed even one going off-line, but I guess France has it's own internet, a bit like North-Korea or China? Anyways, how

"Millions of websites".... I have not noticed even one going off-line, but I guess France has it's own internet, a bit like North-Korea or China? Anyways, how hard is it to spin up another VPS and relocate your website there?

scomp 6y ago
OVH Definitely hosts a lot of seedboxes.
chillfox 6y ago
The article mentions that it’s website’s from across Europe that were hosted there, not just France sites. Also every country has a lot of local websites, think government and small to medium local businesses.
- Fordec 6y ago
  Also, because of the Europe focus, a disproportionate number of those affected won't be in English. They will be in French, German, Italian etc. Part of HN's bias is at times because of the US focus, namely Silicon Valley there is quite a information bubble about what actually goes on in the world of nearly 8B people compared to the "mere" 300M in the US. Starting to lose count of the number of people claiming today they have never even heard of OVH despite it's scale. When I did my European education, the number 1 provider used in university was OVH. If millions of sites are down, and you haven't been impacted by it today, guess what, you are in that bubble. I for one know that a number of Wordpress plugins are currently borked and Lichess was affected.
  - kreelman 6y ago
    Interesting point about the info bubble. Hope people had backup/replication plans. The expensive but good side of this might be that OVH will look carefully at their setup and prevent future versions of fires like this and customers will check over their backup/replication plans. It'd be interesting (though probably impossible to do) to find out how many people didn't have plans setup for this kind of thing.
pmontra 6y ago
I'm not French but I have 6 websites on a server at OVH. Luckily they are in another data center. I didn't remember where they are so I was thinking about how to resurrect them from backups while I was typing the URL to check if they were not burned down.
iagovar 6y ago
OVH is pretty popular in Europe. I particularly didn't notice much, but I have friends pretty angry in my timeline. I want to see the postmortem, because that thing brunt like gasoline. Maybe stacking containers is not that good idea after all? I have more than 10 sites hosted in tiny datacenters here in Spain. I wonder how would they do in an event like this. Judging by maps and images online, you wouldn't tell it's a datacenter. One is from a local telco, the other one is this one, that almost looks cute, doesn't look very sofisticated: https://www.google.es/maps/place/NIXVAL/@39.5196459,-0.4677985,74a,35y,90h,39.54t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0xd605adda456c4af:0xb1a93823740b23ca!8m2!3d39.519582!4d-0.4671618 https://www.google.es/maps/place/NIXVAL/@39.5196459,-0.46779... I have to say It's been about 7 years in Nixval and I don't remember anything happening, but it seems I shouldn't expect much though. Edit: They have videos and photos where you can see batteries, what it looks like pipes for fire supression etc. I stand corrected.
capableweb 6y ago
Where in the world are you from, where people hold such a view of France? Sounds outer-wordly.

scomp 6y ago

OVH Definitely hosts a lot of seedboxes.

chillfox 6y ago

The article mentions that it’s website’s from across Europe that were hosted there, not just France sites. Also every country has a lot of local websites, think government and small to medium local businesses.

Fordec 6y ago
Also, because of the Europe focus, a disproportionate number of those affected won't be in English. They will be in French, German, Italian etc. Part of HN's bias is at times because of the US focus, namely Silicon Valley there is quite a information bubble about what actually goes on in the world of nearly 8B people compared to the "mere" 300M in the US. Starting to lose count of the number of people claiming today they have never even heard of OVH despite it's scale. When I did my European education, the number 1 provider used in university was OVH. If millions of sites are down, and you haven't been impacted by it today, guess what, you are in that bubble. I for one know that a number of Wordpress plugins are currently borked and Lichess was affected.
- kreelman 6y ago
  Interesting point about the info bubble. Hope people had backup/replication plans. The expensive but good side of this might be that OVH will look carefully at their setup and prevent future versions of fires like this and customers will check over their backup/replication plans. It'd be interesting (though probably impossible to do) to find out how many people didn't have plans setup for this kind of thing.

pmontra 6y ago

I'm not French but I have 6 websites on a server at OVH. Luckily they are in another data center. I didn't remember where they are so I was thinking about how to resurrect them from backups while I was typing the URL to check if they were not burned down.

iagovar 6y ago

OVH is pretty popular in Europe. I particularly didn't notice much, but I have friends pretty angry in my timeline. I want to see the postmortem, because that thing brunt like gasoline. Maybe stacking containers is not that good idea after all? I have more than 10 sites hosted in tiny datacenters here in Spain. I wonder how would they do in an event like this. Judging by maps and images online, you wouldn't tell it's a datacenter. One is from a local telco, the other one is this one, that almost looks cute, doesn't look very sofisticated: https://www.google.es/maps/place/NIXVAL/@39.5196459,-0.4677985,74a,35y,90h,39.54t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0xd605adda456c4af:0xb1a93823740b23ca!8m2!3d39.519582!4d-0.4671618 https://www.google.es/maps/place/NIXVAL/@39.5196459,-0.46779... I have to say It's been about 7 years in Nixval and I don't remember anything happening, but it seems I shouldn't expect much though. Edit: They have videos and photos where you can see batteries, what it looks like pipes for fire supression etc. I stand corrected.

capableweb 6y ago

Where in the world are you from, where people hold such a view of France? Sounds outer-wordly.