Fire Partially Destroys Largest European Cloud Services Center OVHcloud, Millions of Websites Down

A fire broke up on Wednesday night at one of the OVHcloud data centers in Strasbourg and wreaked havoc among millions of hosted websites. Most of them are French, including some governmental projects, but also there are large European websites affected.

Among them, some big Romanian platforms, such as TERMENE.ro or CONFIDAS.ro are down. Termene.ro displays a message for all the users to have patience until the situation is fixed by the OVHcloud support team.

According to the official communication delivered by the company’s CEO, company is planning to restart the severs gradually, on March 15 and on March 19.

We plan to restart SBG1+SBG4+the network by Monday March,15 and SBG3 by Friday March,19.

In RBX+GRA we have the stock of new servers, pcc, pci ready to be delivered for all the impacted customers. Of course for free. We will add 10K servers in the next 3-4 weeks.

Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 10, 2021

A total of 3,6 million websites are affected and important data is lost.

What do digital marketing specialists tell about this scenario and how you can prevent such a disaster from happening?

In the online industry this is one of the worst case scenarios out there. It’s not the first cloud service provider to lose clients’ data and it’s probably not the last one. You cannot simply prevent such things from happening, not from a position of digital marketer or website master. But what you can do is the following: a) chose your provider carefully and b) always have a local backup.

OVHcloud is the largest European cloud service provider, so let’s say all those millions of clients chose their provider carefully. But, if you really care about the content and optimizations on the websites you administer, you have to create local backups additional to the provider’s backup.

Company announced that some of the servers will be replaced or restarted in a week. Businesses go bankrupt in less if they don’t have their website functional.

Fortunately, none of our clients host their website with OVHcloud, but if any of them did, we would’ve migrate the website’s latest backup version on a different server asap. Local backup is the ultimate solution to mitigate the risks to your online business.

Catalin ADAM, founder at TUYA Digital – SEO & Digital Marketing

It seems that cloud services have their earthly minus points, with servers hosted in data centers. The heat, the hazardous environment, the mechanical malfunctions, the electricity shortages – all these pose risks to any cloud hosting company. Still, it’s very weird how the fire broke out just days after the company announced its intention to enter the IPO procedures.

This section is powered by TUYA Digital – SEO & Digital Marketing agency.

Photo source: SDIS67