4 ms·

> That's how they remain so low cost, they skimp on everything they can, like Ryanair. Ryanair has arguably the best safety record of any airline in the world

> That's how they remain so low cost, they skimp on everything they can, like Ryanair. Ryanair has arguably the best safety record of any airline in the world (with no fatal accidents or incidents in their history, and an order of magnitude more flights/PAX PA than the other contenders such as Hawaiian), so they definitely don't skimp on everything.

derefr 4y ago
"Everything they can" isn't the same as "everything." "Everything they can" means "everything they can get away with as a long-term-viable business strategy." For an airline, safety is not one of those things. For OVH, though, the "safety" of their servers (i.e. availability/durability) is one of those things they can skimp on — because unlike for people, for servers, "safety" is just another fungible thing to optimize as part of OpEx. One of the fundamental tenets of IT operations is that hardware can just fail, datacenters can just catch fire(!), backhoes can just cut cables, etc. — and so businesses that care, architect their stacks to be resilient to these failure modes, using multi-AZ replication and so forth. And if everybody who actually cares is already doing that... then it really doesn't matter if your DC goes up in smoke. (And also, to these same companies, low cost can have a "safety" all its own. Rather than lowering OpEx, you can instead see the calculus as: for the price of one vertically-scaled AWS instance, you can get four equivalent OVH boxes in different regions, and replicate between them. Which one of those options is "safer"?) Mind you, if anything got burnt up that had real SLAs on it — for example, if they were offering an DBaaS service out of that datacenter — they'd be in trouble. But some leased bare-metal boxes? Nah.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> Ryanair has arguably the best safety record of any airline in the world (with no fatal accidents or incidents in their history, and an order of magnitude more flights/PAX PA than the other contenders such as Hawaiian), so they definitely don't skimp on everything. Ryanair is also a relatively young company compared to other air companies, and flights are mostly within Europe, not inter continents. I took a Ryanair plane once, that plane was a complete wreck and I thought I'd die. No more. And all things considered they aren't even that cheap since they often fly from remote airports in the middle of nowhere, so you need to get there first, wasting money and time.
usr1106 4y ago
Ryanair had incidents from dangerously little fuel on board for the conditons at the destination to risk of controlled flight into ground. Directly caused by aggressive cost saving. Blaming pilots for carrying extra fuel or being late. In such an incident it is often luck what the outcome is. So far they have been lucky, but their history as a mass carrier is much shorter than that of other airlines. I seriously doubt that they have systematically better safety than many other European companies.
- dx034 4y ago
  Fuel was too low for regulation, but from all I read there was never a realistic risk of an accident due to low fuel. The consequence rather was that these flights then had to be prioritized at the destination airport, affecting schedules and other airlines.
  - usr1106 4y ago
    Safety is about redundancy. One company reducing the redundancy and relying on that they can get priority over others is criminal.

derefr 4y ago

"Everything they can" isn't the same as "everything." "Everything they can" means "everything they can get away with as a long-term-viable business strategy." For an airline, safety is not one of those things. For OVH, though, the "safety" of their servers (i.e. availability/durability) is one of those things they can skimp on — because unlike for people, for servers, "safety" is just another fungible thing to optimize as part of OpEx. One of the fundamental tenets of IT operations is that hardware can just fail, datacenters can just catch fire(!), backhoes can just cut cables, etc. — and so businesses that care, architect their stacks to be resilient to these failure modes, using multi-AZ replication and so forth. And if everybody who actually cares is already doing that... then it really doesn't matter if your DC goes up in smoke. (And also, to these same companies, low cost can have a "safety" all its own. Rather than lowering OpEx, you can instead see the calculus as: for the price of one vertically-scaled AWS instance, you can get four equivalent OVH boxes in different regions, and replicate between them. Which one of those options is "safer"?) Mind you, if anything got burnt up that had real SLAs on it — for example, if they were offering an DBaaS service out of that datacenter — they'd be in trouble. But some leased bare-metal boxes? Nah.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> Ryanair has arguably the best safety record of any airline in the world (with no fatal accidents or incidents in their history, and an order of magnitude more flights/PAX PA than the other contenders such as Hawaiian), so they definitely don't skimp on everything. Ryanair is also a relatively young company compared to other air companies, and flights are mostly within Europe, not inter continents. I took a Ryanair plane once, that plane was a complete wreck and I thought I'd die. No more. And all things considered they aren't even that cheap since they often fly from remote airports in the middle of nowhere, so you need to get there first, wasting money and time.

usr1106 4y ago

Ryanair had incidents from dangerously little fuel on board for the conditons at the destination to risk of controlled flight into ground. Directly caused by aggressive cost saving. Blaming pilots for carrying extra fuel or being late. In such an incident it is often luck what the outcome is. So far they have been lucky, but their history as a mass carrier is much shorter than that of other airlines. I seriously doubt that they have systematically better safety than many other European companies.

dx034 4y ago
Fuel was too low for regulation, but from all I read there was never a realistic risk of an accident due to low fuel. The consequence rather was that these flights then had to be prioritized at the destination airport, affecting schedules and other airlines.
- usr1106 4y ago
  Safety is about redundancy. One company reducing the redundancy and relying on that they can get priority over others is criminal.