Why does documentation require hosting it on a server? My assumption is that it's a static site, and as such, even GitHub Pages would be sufficient.
I know... all content has to be served via a "server" but in case of OVH it's a full-blown hosting solution isn't it?
Besides, I'm sure GitHub wouldn't mind supporting Pandas documentation. They do it for a million other projects for free (even though they're not popular among the HN crowd these days)
As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability.
Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
I rent a dedicated server from OVH for various self hosted services and for the price I really can't complain. If there's been any outages they happened at times when I wasn't interacting with it so I didn't notice. I'm not entirely sure I'd trust a server that mattered to them but for what I'm doing they're fine.
How many data centers have had a server room burn to the ground?
We had a halon system in an on-prem data center twice the size of my bedroom. We had to knock out a wall because the volume was too small for the smallest cooling system we could get installed in the building. That was 20 years ago, and we had to do it for insurance reasons. In the United States, which I know you Europeans like to make fun of for being sooo amusingly Neanderthal.
I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread.
OVH is about cheap, not quality.
Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.
I'm pro OVH granted I've not used Hetzner before and only used DO briefly. I too remember the burn but they gave credit. I like the emails saying "your service is under DDOS attack".
I'm using OVH for downloads from PortableApps.com as their un-metered VPS was one of the better and affordable options. Haven't noticed any issues (knock wood). Is there something else I should look at?
Man I used PortableApps.com so much back when I was in high school to get around the "you can't install anything on this computer" rule... Thank you for your service.
OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].
Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.
HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.
In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).
I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, entrepreneurs, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.
>Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France
While started by two French founders, Datadog was always an American company. It was only post IPO they started hiring in France (for more than local sales roles).
The comment says "again". I'm not too surprised agreements like this are not the normal procedure and can get forgotten about (it shouldn't... but if this isn't automated, humans can make mistakes), but more than once?
I wonder why they didn't use readthedocs.com. Their community plan promises free hosting for docs of open-source projects. I thought most Python packages prefer it. Surprised to see pandas outside of it.
Before cutting a service, OVH sends several warnings. In my opinion, the worrying point is not that OVH made a mistake, it's that important messages to the "infrastructure mailing list" of Pandas were ignored for weeks... until the post-mortem.
To be fair, if I had an agreement with a hosting provider and started to get "Your balance is too low", I'd also chalk it up to their payment/metering systems not knowing about the deal, not for the entire platform and organization to have forgotten about it.
Still I'd look into it at that point and send them an email about "Billing system not agreeing with what we've agreed on" or similar, rather than just ignoring it...
A lot of it looks like people trying to be helpful but it must be infuriating handling issues for a big project like this. I'm going to guess that the infrastructure team for Pandas don't actually need random men on the internet informing them that such obscure hosting options as Vercel and Netlify exist.
I've always wondered how these types of "waived" accounts are coded in the backend. Are there flags in a table (i.e. first class support) or is it hacked together with duct tape? Seems like OVH is using the latter solution.
Why does documentation require hosting it on a server? My assumption is that it's a static site, and as such, even GitHub Pages would be sufficient.
I know... all content has to be served via a "server" but in case of OVH it's a full-blown hosting solution isn't it?
Besides, I'm sure GitHub wouldn't mind supporting Pandas documentation. They do it for a million other projects for free (even though they're not popular among the HN crowd these days)
Free stuff has a way of short circuiting things.
Probably because your assumption is wrong - they host a live shell and documentation search.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260220092649/https://pandas.py...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260225185816/https://pandas.py...
(I don't know anything about pandas, incidentaly, I just did some basic research before posting.)
That's not a shell, it's a Python interpreter compiled to WASM and running in the browser.
As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability.
Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
I rent a dedicated server from OVH for various self hosted services and for the price I really can't complain. If there's been any outages they happened at times when I wasn't interacting with it so I didn't notice. I'm not entirely sure I'd trust a server that mattered to them but for what I'm doing they're fine.
> They never had any major downtime for me
One of my server was lost to a fire so...
That being said, only happen one and I had no data on it so I didn't mind.
I switched to Hetzner too.
How many data centers have had a server room burn to the ground?
We had a halon system in an on-prem data center twice the size of my bedroom. We had to knock out a wall because the volume was too small for the smallest cooling system we could get installed in the building. That was 20 years ago, and we had to do it for insurance reasons. In the United States, which I know you Europeans like to make fun of for being sooo amusingly Neanderthal.
What the absolute fuck, OVH.
I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread.
OVH is about cheap, not quality.
Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.
And I will say again, we couldn’t get insurance without the halon system.
I'm pro OVH granted I've not used Hetzner before and only used DO briefly. I too remember the burn but they gave credit. I like the emails saying "your service is under DDOS attack".
I'm using OVH for downloads from PortableApps.com as their un-metered VPS was one of the better and affordable options. Haven't noticed any issues (knock wood). Is there something else I should look at?
Man I used PortableApps.com so much back when I was in high school to get around the "you can't install anything on this computer" rule... Thank you for your service.
First, thanks for PortableApps!
Still use it as soon as I'm forced to use a Windows computer.
Otherwise, as long as you make sure that no billing issue can arise from your side (like an expired card...), you should be fine.
DO is amazing. Easy to use and clean
Isn't Hetzner strongly associated with OVH? I thought they were under the same umbrella.
Competitors on the same market segment - France vs. Germany.
OVH operates three hosting brands:
OVH, SYS (So You Start), and KimSufi. It's a bit confusing!
IIRC they bring the newest hardware into OVH and push it down the line to SYS and KS as it ages.
Nope.
OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].
Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.
HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.
In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).
I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, entrepreneurs, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.
>Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France
While started by two French founders, Datadog was always an American company. It was only post IPO they started hiring in France (for more than local sales roles).
OVH is not backed by Xavier Niel. Niel is behind Scaleway, which is OVH’s main French competitor.
Xavier Niel is behind Scaleway, not OVH
The pertinent comment is "again" - apparently this has already happened once.
(OVH should either have a special type of free account they can use for donations, or just bill themselves for it as "internal" usage.)
The comment says "again". I'm not too surprised agreements like this are not the normal procedure and can get forgotten about (it shouldn't... but if this isn't automated, humans can make mistakes), but more than once?
I wonder why they didn't use readthedocs.com. Their community plan promises free hosting for docs of open-source projects. I thought most Python packages prefer it. Surprised to see pandas outside of it.
Before cutting a service, OVH sends several warnings. In my opinion, the worrying point is not that OVH made a mistake, it's that important messages to the "infrastructure mailing list" of Pandas were ignored for weeks... until the post-mortem.
To be fair, if I had an agreement with a hosting provider and started to get "Your balance is too low", I'd also chalk it up to their payment/metering systems not knowing about the deal, not for the entire platform and organization to have forgotten about it.
Still I'd look into it at that point and send them an email about "Billing system not agreeing with what we've agreed on" or similar, rather than just ignoring it...
Man, the spam this issue has been getting since getting posted here though... GitHub has literally become Facebook with code hosting
A lot of it looks like people trying to be helpful but it must be infuriating handling issues for a big project like this. I'm going to guess that the infrastructure team for Pandas don't actually need random men on the internet informing them that such obscure hosting options as Vercel and Netlify exist.
Billing is definitely the worst thing for OVH customers.
It's far from perfect otherwise, but billing is just awful.
Does it really need a VPS? Can’t throw it onto a cloudflare page for free?
Please don't encourage MITM-ing even more of the web by a US company.
They're already throwing cloudflare in front of it
Ah, dammit.
we would love to offer you early access to our static hosting platform and a free Pro subscription
PM if you are interested
I've always wondered how these types of "waived" accounts are coded in the backend. Are there flags in a table (i.e. first class support) or is it hacked together with duct tape? Seems like OVH is using the latter solution.
Vibecoders messed with billing service again