OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas (github.com)
122 points by nwalters512 3 hours ago
arionmiles 2 hours ago
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)
chaps 2 hours ago
Free stuff has a way of short circuiting things.
eduction 2 hours ago
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.)
GrayShade 2 hours ago
That's not a shell, it's a Python interpreter compiled to WASM and running in the browser.
folkhack 2 hours ago
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.
jon-wood an hour ago
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.
utopiah 2 hours ago
> 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.
hinkley an hour ago
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.
everfrustrated an hour ago
ge96 2 hours ago
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".
JohnTHaller 2 hours ago
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?
leca 2 hours ago
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.
wiether 2 hours ago
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.
iberator 2 hours ago
DO is amazing. Easy to use and clean
Taek 2 hours ago
Isn't Hetzner strongly associated with OVH? I thought they were under the same umbrella.
liotier 2 hours ago
Competitors on the same market segment - France vs. Germany.
quesera an hour ago
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.
alephnerd 2 hours ago
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.
everfrustrated an hour ago
hjouneau 2 hours ago
wiether 2 hours ago
bombcar 2 hours ago
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.)
lucb1e 2 hours ago
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?
lovelearning 2 hours ago
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.
idoubtit 2 hours ago
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.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago
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...
m132 an hour ago
Man, the spam this issue has been getting since getting posted here though... GitHub has literally become Facebook with code hosting
jon-wood an hour ago
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.
wiether 2 hours ago
Billing is definitely the worst thing for OVH customers.
It's far from perfect otherwise, but billing is just awful.
Robdel12 2 hours ago
Does it really need a VPS? Can’t throw it onto a cloudflare page for free?
messe 2 hours ago
Please don't encourage MITM-ing even more of the web by a US company.
someotherperson 2 hours ago
They're already throwing cloudflare in front of it
messe 2 hours ago
shipstatic an hour ago
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hypeatei 2 hours ago
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.
vova_hn2 2 hours ago
Vibecoders messed with billing service again