Server brand meets Berlin start-up

Last week, two servers of the cloud provider OVH burned down. The start-up 19Grams was also an OVH customer, and the stored customer and website data is probably lost.

Even storage, no matter how digital, has a physical location. Customers of cloud provider OVH felt that painfully last week when two of its four data centers near Amsterdam burned down. One of the 1.5 million customers worldwide is the Berlin-based start-up 19Grams, which sells coffee: "On the night of March 10, we lost our website and our entire webshop in a fire at our online service provider," the company wrote on a temporary website.

The loss is especially dramatic in Corona times, as the coffee start-up's revenue comes primarily from online shipping. At the beginning of the pandemic, 19Grams adjusted its concept, the share of online sales grew from 15 to 35 percent in 2020, as founder Gerrit Peters told Berliner Morgenpost . Peters estimates the loss for the company at half a million euros. This is because the lost data has different consequences: for example, the website and the approximately 25,000 customer records are gone, who receive news from the start-up or have coffee delivered to their homes in the subscription model. But also the ranking on Google, which was created over the years, is now gone. An emergency website has been up since Thursday.

Peters is now in talks with payment providers to draw conclusions about orders. Shortly after the fire, customers received an email with the text "We got roasted." So the start-up hasn't lost its sense of humor yet.