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Non-hosting guy guess: power costs are lower there due to France's preference to nuclear.
Yes, cheap nuclear power.
I'd say government subsidized nuclear power but I don't know for sure. Germany has a lot of reasonably cheap VPS providers but they are not very popular due to contract lock-ins and written cancellation requirement and due to most websites being only available in German. Then there's strict abuse handling (even DMCA requests without court order, which is required in Germany), often no support on weekends,..
I looked up colocation with contabo recently (Germany). Their pricing:
8€ rent
10€ unmetered 100 mbit/s
20€ electricity
facepalms
I didn't realise Nuclear Powered electricity was so much cheaper. I thought it was just more future proof.
Is the French ambivalence to DMCA a cultural thing stemming from their historic dislike/mistrust of the US?
France has about 52 (I guess ) Nuclear Stations that make the electricity there required for the servers and datacentres pretty cheap not so sure though.
Historic? Don't tell Lafayette, Clemenceau, or de Gaulle.
Way to apply 19th century geo-politics to DCMA.
Given their history, it's quite surprising they don't surrender to DCMA requests.
DMCA is not a thing in France
There must be more to it than cheap electricity and Gallic shrugging at what people are doing with their servers?
Relative political stability, cheaper recurring costs and in Western Europe... yes there'll be more to it but a naive conclusion could perhaps be that 'conditions are generally more favourable to conduct business in the hosting industry in France'.
Perhaps the EU common market would be a positive too. Whatever it is, it's going to boil down to cost and availability.
Wild guess. Tax structure. Perhaps the government would like to encourage internet development.
I'm surprised nobody from France has been on (maybe they have) to tell me about forward thinking investment in technology, tax breaks for IT companies etc.
As a UK citizen there is a lot to be proud of here, but I do find myself looking enviously across the channel at their car industry, the investment in railways and their government backed utility companies amongst other things.
I'm not particularly surprised that we don't have an OVH or an Online here but I am a little surprised that there isn't one in Germany or Holland.
Hetzner is close, depending what aspects your looking at.
Germany said byebye to nuclear power, that's probably why.
UK having to get French to build our new Nuclear power station(s) and buy electricity of them at a guaranteed (high) price. No doubt the profits will help to keep electricity prices down in FR and encourage more OVHs !
Buy Online.net Limited Edition servers as revenge to recover your losses
Actually, France has one of the strongest laws against copyright violation (i.e. Hadopi).
It's not just about electricity; France is a country very technologically driven and has amongst the best tech universities (l'école polytechnique de Paris is an example) and engineers.
Very true, and also very good at making commercial use of that technology.
Not something that the UK is always very good at.
I thought they dropped the HADOPI law back in 2013?
(Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/09/france-hadopi-law-anti-piracy)
Not really, as Hadopi is more an institution than a law. They are still operating.
So, big companies go to hadopi to take action,single point authority ? rather than dmca style scare tactics in the US ?
Hadopi is an indipendent authority. It doens't work for big (or small) companies. It scans for illegal downloads and with the collaboration of ISPs finds IP address and relative users.
Cheap electricity, cheap internet and decent market competition does the trick
have you ever owned a french car? they like their tech, but the stuff in their cars just doesn't work. will never buy renault ever again
Your experience is totally subjective. Would you expect no faulty models in a car manufacturer? I'm having big time issues with a German car right now. I owned two French cars and they were doing great. Also owned a Japanese and an Italian car, great too.
In my experience French cars are very innovative. They're great until they go wrong, and then (at least in the UK) they can be awkward and pricey to fix,
Unlimited bandwidth.
Cheap electricity in France is a propaganda of the French government to avoid having to think of renewable energies because Areva is a multinational company and a very powerful lobby.
The main reason of cheap prices is because there was a time when France had a network called Minitel, it was a centralized network of terminals completely under the control of France Telecom which dictated what could be or not be on the network. Of course the Internet made it totally obsolete. France Telecom became a private company and did everything it could to prevent the expansion of the Internet.
France became underconnected and in order to fix this issue the government lowered tax to 6% to boost development. This measure lasted until a few years ago.
Mixing this with companies doing sometimes extreme overselling on impacting the quality (eg. free.fr) allow low prices.
As for OVH, prices started very low because servers were home made and used watercooling which significantly reduced power consumption.
But electricity is cheaper there, no...?
You make it sound like electricity is actually very expensive but the perception that it's cheap is due to clever government hoodwinking.
And nuclear energy is very renewable for all intents and purposes because we won't run out of the source materials for thousands of years...by which time we can probably mine them on the moon or the asteroid belt (unlike oil).