During the night of March 10th, 2021, a fire damaged
the data centre of OVHCloud, one of the largest cloud providers in
the world. The company owns 17 data centres with a total of 250,000
servers. It offers its services in 17 countries, including Canada,
Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, the United
Kingdom, and the United States. The fire took tens of thousands of
web pages offline.
This event prompted expert to ponder on the many legal problems
related to web hosting contracts: transparency in data management,
adequacy of measures, liability of the hosting provider, both
contractually and for the actions of the services users.
The starting point is necessarily the definition of the legal
framework of this very special type of contract. The web hosting
contract consists in the provision by a party, the hosting
provider, of a virtual space on one or more servers to another
party, in order to host web pages (or other digital content).
