Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
(OVH should either have a special type of free account they can use for donations, or just bill themselves for it as "internal" usage.)
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...
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)
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.)
It's far from perfect otherwise, but billing is just awful.
PM if you are interested
vova_hn2•1h ago