[moooo99]

I think they announced their IP plans yesterday [1], which is probably the worst timing one can have (if there even is a good timing for a datacenter burning down, probably there isn't).

If they have a good insurance I'm confident this will have little impact on their operations, I really hope they do. I host a few components on OVH/SoYouStart dedicated servers, luckily not mission critical, but still had rather good experience with them, especially in terms of price to performance.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2B01FM

[toyg]

The publicity damage alone will be on par with (if not bigger) their replacement costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rebrand.

The timing is so bad that it becomes almost suspicious. When is the best time to sabotage your competitor? When they are the most visible.

[brmgb]

> The publicity damage alone will be on par with (if not bigger) their replacement costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rebrand.

Honest question: which publicity damage?

A fire in a datacenter is very much part of the things you should expect to see happen when you operate a large number of datacenters and will obviously cause some disruption to your customers hosting physical servers there.

Provided the disruption doesn't significantly extend to their cloud customers and doesn't affect people paying for guaranteed availability (which it shouldn't - OVH operates datacenters throughout the world), this seems to me to be an unfortunate incident but not a business threatening one.

[marcinzm]

Most people I feel would expect fire suppression to kick in and prevent the whole data center (and the adjacent ones) from catching on fire. The fact that it didn't is concerning regarding their operations since they build their own custom data centers. The fire isn't the issue, how much damage it did is the issue. So one can ask if there was there a systematic set of planning mistakes of which this is just the first to surface?

[karambahh]

SBG is a small part of their operations. I doubt it will have a lasting issue on their image