511–520 of 613 posts
I don't know whether my 10+ year side project with 225,000 users(www.webminal.org) gone forever! :( I have backup snapshots but its stored in ovh itself :( hoping for a miracle!
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Also, 3 years ago they had an outage in Strasbourg, and the status page was down apparently as a result of the outage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661218 They are not the only ones though. All too common. Well, it's tricky to set this up properly. The only proper way would be to use external infra for the status page.
It's not difficult to make a status page with minimal false negatives. Throw up a server on another host that shows red when it doesn't get a heartbeat. But then instead you end up with false positives. And people will use false positives against you to claim refunds against your SLA. So nobody chooses to make an honest status page.
But, they're usually manual affairs because sometimes the system is broken even when the healthcheck looks ok, and sometimes writing the healthcheck is tricky, and always you want the status page disconnected from the rest of the system as much as possible.
It is a challenge to get 'update the status page' into the runbook. Especially for runbooks you don't review often (like the one for the building is on fire, probably).
Luckily my status page was not quite public; we could show a note when people were trying to write a customer service email in the app; if you forget to update that, you get more email, but nobody posts the system is down and the status page says everything is ok.
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Hence the "final layer" statement. Bankruptcy when dealt with correctly is a process not an end. If everything else fail it's better to fill for bankruptcy when there is still something to recover with help of others than to burn everything to ashes because of your vanity. At least that's how I understood parent's comment.
As a quick interlude, since this may be confusing to non-US readers: bankruptcy in the United States in the context of business usually refers to two concepts, whereas in many other countries it refers to just one. There are two types of bankruptcies in the US used most often by insolvent businesses: Chapter 7, and Chapter 11. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy is what most people in other countries think of when they hear "bank…
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There are photos of the fire suppression system in one of their data centres in this (French) forum thread: https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/ovh-et-la-protection-inc... . They have sprinklers, with the reasoning being that the burning racks' data is gone anyway if there's a fire, and at least sprinklers don't accidentally kill the technicians.
Sprinklers are only present in OVH Canada datacenter ! There are no sprinklers in Europe ones.
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Newly constructed datacenters in the US tend to be all metal with a full building clean suppression agent. https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-supp... I used to work for a provider whose 2 main datacenters of 8k+ sq ft could pull all oxygen out of the building in 60 seconds.
Data centres I used to work in back in the early 2000s had argonite gas dumps in place (prior to argonite, halon used to be popular but is an ozone depleting gas so was phased out) In the case of a fire, it would dump a lot of argonite gas in and consume a large amount of the oxygen in the room, depriving the fire of fuel. It's also safe and leaves minimal clean-up work afterwards, doesn't harm electronics etc. unlik…
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In my work life I am a professional investor, so I've been through the debate on insure/prepare or not many times. It's always an economic debate when you get into "very expensive" territory (cheap and easy is different obviously). The big example of this which springs to mind is business interruption cover - it's ruinously expensive so it's extremely unusual to have the max cover the market might be prepared to offe…
Yes, but it is an informed decision and typically taken at the board level, very few CEO's that are not 100% owners would be comfortable with the decision to leave an existential risk uncovered without full approval of all those involved, which is kind of logical. Usually you'd have to show your homework (offers from insurance companies proving that it really is unaffordable). I totally get the trade-off, and the fac…
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I can think of a lot of big differences. For one you can get much larger machines at OVH and Hetzner with fancy storage configurations for your database if desired (e.g. Optane for your indices, magnetic drives for your transaction log, and raided SSDs for the tables) They also don't charge for bandwidth, although some of those other providers have a generous free bandwidth and cheap overage.
So you are saying they might be even better than DO depinding on requirements. I didnt know.
I see several people talking about advanced backup systems for businesses. I do not have a company, I work as a freelancer, I am Brazilian and the current 70 euros of tuition I was paying was already compromising my income, since my local currency is quite devalued against the dollar. Then imagine the situation. my websites are down, the only backup I have was a copy of the vps that i made in november last year becau…
I had my server in SBG2 and sadly the backup failed since the end of january. Yep it is my mistake for not checking the backups. Now I lost about 1 month of data. The only good thing is that my backup was offsite. Does OVH offer automatic snapshots for VPS? I know Hetzner does it for 20% addidation of the cost of the server. If they do the next question would be if they are destroyed too?
Here's more information on them: https://docs.ovh.com/gb/en/vps/using-automated-backups-on-a-...
With OVH the price can depending on the situation double your cost, if you've got a 3€ VPS and a 3€ backup configuration (as the price depends on size)
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Yes, but it is an informed decision and typically taken at the board level, very few CEO's that are not 100% owners would be comfortable with the decision to leave an existential risk uncovered without full approval of all those involved, which is kind of logical. Usually you'd have to show your homework (offers from insurance companies proving that it really is unaffordable). I totally get the trade-off, and the fac…
Absolutely - but that's kind of my point. You should make the decision consciously. The corporate governance that goes around that is the company making that decision consciously.
This has killed quite a few otherwise very viable companies, it is fine to take risks as long as you do so consciously and with full approval of all stakeholders (or at least: a majority of all stakeholders). Interesting effects can result: a smaller investor may demand indemnification, then one by one the others also want that indemnification and ultimately the decision is made that the risk is unacceptable anyway (I've seen this play out), other variations are that one shareholder ends up being bought out because they have a different risk appetite than the others.