OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas

vova_hn2

Vibecoders messed with billing service again

Robdel12

Does it really need a VPS? Can’t throw it onto a cloudflare page for free?

folkhack

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.

lucb1e

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?

bombcar

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.)

hypeatei

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.

idoubtit

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.

arionmiles

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)

lovelearning

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.

wiether

Billing is definitely the worst thing for OVH customers. It's far from perfect otherwise, but billing is just awful.

m132

Man, the spam this issue has been getting since getting posted here though... GitHub has literally become Facebook with code hosting

shipstatic

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sloped

I would be curious what a $5 hetzner or equal vps could handle. Is pandas docs that busy? That said, free is no longer free if you have to worry this much about it.