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I thought it was well known and publicized that OVH got a significant investment or loan from the French govt a couple years ago. Not saying that's a subsidy since that's up to you to decide.
Obama's intervention with General Motors was a rescue of an old company having trouble, to prevent a lot of negative externality in the surrounding economic ecosystem if GM went under. Whether that intervention was right or wrong is still a matter of debate, but either way, it wasn't an exact mirror of the OVH investment. Closer would have been if Obama had given a big US govt investment to Tesla to help a new and growing company expand.
I haven't heard of Hetzner getting government investments. Maybe they did but I don't remeber seeing any announcements.
Just saying that the success of OVH, Hetzner, netcup, etc. isn't due to public money being used to make/keep them competitive.
@willie:
I don't know about the significant investment or loan from the French government in/to OVH -- I would have to look.
Completely agree that Obama's intervention to save GM was different, but in a way, this was my point. (Weren't there also bank bailouts?)
It was not exactly a loan or investment from government, it was more of very cheap energy: reduced taxes on energy costs and cheap energy due to nuclear power. OVH (and partially Online.net) did receive funds from private equity funds (the same way DO, Amazon and other big companies or even promising startups do receive), but this is how economy works. And of course, some funding from the EU.
As of Hetzner (mostly), they did receive some funding from EU funding programs as a lot of business in European Union. IIRC, they did receive some government funding also for the investments on undersea cable connectivity with America.
I now think the loan I remembered might have come from private sources rather than the French govt. I looked for further info but now only see something about a "syndicated loan" of 140 million euros in 2013. I thought there was something more recent.
9 private banks, including JP Morgan Chase... I wouldn't call that government money!
There is another investment from a fund (several Banks) of 400 million on 2017 and another 250 in 2016
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Kinda like the $535 million Solyndra got as a loan guarantee from the American Government ? Plus the $25 million tax break --- which itself would be a generous gift to most small businesses --- from California ?
Not that I care, it's a good thing when governments support national companies. Probably even better if they nominated the board of directors and ran them.
Certainly in Solyndra's case.
Just to add that Solyndra wasn't a national company and that they went bankrupt in 2011 anyway, not to mention that the company was marred by scandals. Hard to see how the government support of Solyndra was a good thing at all, but least of all for the US taxpayers.
Didn't say it was a national company. But even direct nationalization would have given a better outcome.
Point is the American government too plays favourites.
Possibly, but in a free market economy a government isn't supposed to go around nationalising private companies when they're about to go under.
My original point was that the French government and the German government haven't done anything comparable in the case of OVH and Hetzner & netcup, respectively. (That is, anything comparable to the US government's subsidies to/bailouts of companies and banks under Obama.)
The question is " is hosting that much profitable in scale while keeping the price so low "
No idea. Gigantic companies like OVH play with gigantic numbers, so even 1% profit of the pie could be good enough.