On the night of March 9, 2021, OVH’s Strasbourg datacenter was ravaged by fire. Of the 4 sectors, 2 were spared, 1 was partially destroyed, while the last was completely destroyed.

What’s the impact on hosted sites?

A real tragedy for the French web, with almost ⅔ of sites hosted by OVH. Although the whole of France was not affected, 3.6 million sites were paralyzed for varying lengths of time, up to a full day. In addition to this forced shutdown, OVH announced thatsome of the data stored on the site was irretrievable and would be permanently lost.
This was a particularly damaging event for online retailers, who not only had to temporarily halt their activity, but also lost their customers’ data. The same applies to orders placed but not yet prepared: their status has disappeared, making it impossible to dispatch them to the buyer; a real nightmare for after-sales management and customer satisfaction.
For an e-tailer, this kind of incident not only affects its sales capacity or its store, it also brings its entire business to a halt, including warehouse logistics.
Even once the site has been restarted, the seller is still impacted by the drop in customer satisfaction, which is why it ‘ s vital to take precautions against this kind of incident in order to stem the problems upstream.

We interviewed Guillaume LESEUR, CTO of ShippingBo, to find out how to keep his site running smoothly, even in the event of an incident with his hosting provider.

For ShippingBo users, in the event of an incident of this type with their host, can they continue to use their e-commerce site?

There is still the temporary loss of the sales channel, i.e. his site is down, but he doesn’t lose any data and can continue to prepare his orders, as they are fed back into ShippingBo in real time, before the crash. In addition, orders from its other still-functional sales sources, such as marketplaces (Amazon, Rakuten, Cdiscount…), continue to arrive in the order-picking interface even with the site down; business is therefore running at 100%, with the exception of the online store, which is not bringing in any new orders.
When the site is back up and running, sales naturally resume, and there has been no interruption of activity or loss of orders, which greatly limits the negative impact of the outage on the e-merchant.

This seems to mitigate the damage, but only if ShippingBo’s servers are reliable. What would happen if ShippingBo’s main host went down? Would another one take over?

Yes, that’s right, the data is stored in 2 different datacenters in Frankfurt, but they’re linked up so that if one goes down, the other takes over immediately, and the change is invisible to the user.

How is ShippingBo data stored? Can data be restored in the event of a server failure?

In the event of a simultaneous failure of the two Frankfurt servers, it is still possible to recover the data, since it is stored in a database in Ireland and can be restored by a procedure performed by our technical team.

Conclusion

Even so, this event will have made many realize the importance of having a good business recovery plan in place before committing to e-commerce or any other digital activity.

Centralizing your orders with ShippingBo means limiting these risks, as well as taking advantage of the solution’s many features to optimize e-commerce logistics.

Find out more about our logistics solutions.