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note: question has been reviewed after suggestions it could be opinion based

We recently suffered an outage due to a popular big provider's datacenter fire.

Our public cloud instances hosted in that datacenter disappeared from the hosting panel.

The backup snapshots of our instances disappeared from the backups panel.

What I would like to know is, is the provider fair and genuine advertising this product as a cloud?

For such a disastrous event, ok to have outage and downtime but I was surprised to have both instances and backups only available at the same site, and disappear all at once. This wasn't something I expected unless meteorites or tsunamis involved.

Disclaimer: I don't want to blame anyone. I have no doubt the provider is right at contract terms. And if SLA was violated, there will be compensation. No, I didn't read the contract terms. I'm not willing to sue anybody. Also, I'very glad no humans where injured. I just want to know if you think this product is into or out of the cloud definition.

We had full daily off-site backups taken at 4 am each day. By that time the datacenter was offline yesterday. That's what the customer could afford and the possibility of loosing 24h of history was definitely accepted. Not expected.

Marco
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    All cloud providers are, eventually, located at datacenters. Even the largest, Amazon, encourages you to host in more than one region if your business can't sustain this sort of downtime from the loss or temporary unavailability of a region's datacenters. "Cloud" has no formal definition, but OVH was not lying in the slightest by calling themselves a cloud provider. – ceejayoz Mar 11 '21 at 13:32
  • "We have lost ~24 hours history forever, we've lost over 18 hours uptime" This seems to mean that daily backups are not enough for your needs. Besides your immediate problem at hand at least this unfortunate even for both you and your provider should prompt you to review your backup policies and possibly 1) spend money on better guarantees for your backups (like having multiple ones in various locations) and/or 2) other backup strategies, like something built on replication if you have a DB so that you have near "real-time" backups (but with other drawbacks if hit by a malware for example) – Patrick Mevzek Mar 11 '21 at 14:48
  • Just completed edit. TY – Marco Mar 11 '21 at 14:49

2 Answers2

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Please restate your question in a way that's not opinion based.

Most cynics will tell you that a cloud service only means you're dependent on somebody else's computers. It's always up to you as a company to maintain and test your own disaster recovery plan - and that's especially true if you've chosen to pay for a plan that doesn't fulfill your actual business requirements.

As you've experienced now, off-site backups every 24 hours means you've accepted losing two days of data as a business risk, since, as you experienced, your main datacenter may become unavailable right before or even during the last backup run.

Mikael H
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Certainly your backups and your disaster recovery plan are your responsibility, not the responsibility of the cloud provider, right? Cloud doesn't imply that they will take care of those things for you. What is your SLA with this provider? Did they meet the SLA? Did they fail to meet the SLA? If they failed to meet the SLA then you have recourse for recompense related to that.

Could you sue them because you didn't have a valid and tested disaster recovery plan? Probably not.

Cloud simply means that you are not self-hosting. It's up to you to determine if the cloud provider meets your needs and it's up to you to manage your own backups and DR plan.

joeqwerty
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  • Thank you very much for your contribution. Obviously all considerations have been done already. I didn't expect that loosing instances could happen contemporary to loosing backups. Not without meteorites or tsunami. And that's the most epic fail, I guess. Because with backups available many customers would've just respin their instances in different datacenter, and they would even earn from it (probably money they would've returned later). – Marco Mar 11 '21 at 13:37