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 has probably been lost.

Even digital storage has a physical storage location. Customers of cloud provider OVH were made painfully aware of this 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 web store in a fire at our online service provider," the company writes on a temporary website.

The loss is particularly dramatic in times of coronavirus, as the coffee start-up's turnover is primarily generated through online sales. At the beginning of the pandemic, 19Grams adapted its concept and the share of online sales grew from 15% to 35% in 2020, as founder Gerrit Peters told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper. Peters estimates the loss for the company at half a million euros. This is because the lost data has various consequences: the website and the approximately 25,000 customer records that receive news from the start-up or get coffee delivered to their homes as part of the subscription model are gone. But the Google ranking that has been built up over the years has also disappeared. An emergency website has been up and running since Thursday.

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