I fully lost three small VPS there, and their response was poor: they didn't even refund time lost, they didn't compensate for time lost (e.g. a couple of months of free VPS), I got better updates from the news than from them (news were saying "almost total loss", while them were trying to convince me that I had the incredible bad luck that my three VPS were in the very small zone affected by the fire). The only way I had to recover what I lost was backups in local machines.

When someone point out how safe are cloud providers, as if they have multiple levels of redundancy and are fully protected against even an alien invasion, I remember the OVH fire.

contingency plan: Don't build your data center out of wood.

What's the line from Contact?

why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

But, if you're building a datacenter for $5M, spending $10-15M for redundant datacenters (even with extra networking costs), would still be cheaper than their estimated $25M cloud costs.