hubiC

» see hubic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

OVH launched hubiC in December 2011 with a French argument attached. The company already ran some of the largest datacenters in Europe, so the storage was cheap for them in a way it was not for a startup renting capacity from Amazon, and they priced it accordingly. Twenty five gigabytes free. Unlimited storage for eighty four euros a year.

The uptake was immediate and the numbers OVH published in that first stretch describe a company slightly alarmed at its own success, up to three thousand new accounts an hour and forty terabytes arriving every week. Your files lived in Roubaix or Gravelines, on French soil under French law, which mattered to a certain kind of European customer and did not register at all with everyone else.

Early in 2013 the unlimited tier went away and prices rose, then in February 2014 they came back down with a ten terabyte plan replacing the old one terabyte one. On 28 May 2018 OVH closed registrations permanently and told existing customers they could stay for an indefinite period under the same terms, with nothing deleted. That promise held for almost exactly four years. The end came on 3 May 2022 as an announcement and on 30 September 2022 as a switch, with unretrieved data deleted.

OVH reached me from the other end of the business. If you were doing anything technical in Turkey in the late 2000s the name meant cheap dedicated boxes in a French datacenter, the sort of machine a forum or a small site ran on. I never once thought of them as a company that would sell my mother a photo drive, and going by how this ended, neither did they for very long.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the offer ~

The pitch was a sync folder on your desktop and the same files reachable from a phone or a browser. A hundred gigabytes cost under twelve euros a year at launch. Nothing about the product was novel and it did not need to be. hubiC was competing on the one number Dropbox could not match, because Dropbox was buying its storage and OVH was building it, and for a few years that gap was large enough to be a business plan on its own.

What it never bought was the thing Dropbox actually sold, which was reliability of the boring kind. Sync clients are hard, the desktop app had a reputation, and transfer speeds outside France were the recurring complaint in every review of it. A cheaper terabyte is only cheaper if the files go up.

~ where the money went wrong ~

Unlimited storage for eighty four euros a year is a promise with a specific failure mode. Most people put twenty gigabytes in it and cost nothing. A small number treat it as an offsite backup for everything they have ever owned, and those users cost more than the entire tier collects. Every consumer storage company of that decade discovered this and every one of them responded the same way, by quietly retiring the word unlimited.

OVH's version of the retreat was slower and more honest than most. They did not delete anything or force a migration. They just stopped selling it, and then ran it as a service with no new customers for four years while the company went public and rebuilt itself around enterprise cloud. A product with a closed door on the front is already dead. The 2022 date is when they admitted it.

~ the wind-down ~

The May 2022 notice gave users five months and two options, take the files or lose them. hubiC.com now points at Shadow Drive, a consumer storage service OVH assembled with Nextcloud, which is the same idea being tried again by a company that decided the first attempt was the wrong shape rather than the wrong market.

What hubiC proves is narrow and holds up. Owning the datacenter lets you win on price and it does not let you win on anything else. The consumer storage graveyard is full of companies with better economics than Dropbox, and Dropbox is still there.

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