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I moved away from OVH after I paid 3 months advance (~$300) for a server which burned down after 1 1/2 months. They did not issue any refunds (data, blood, swea

I moved away from OVH after I paid 3 months advance (~$300) for a server which burned down after 1 1/2 months. They did not issue any refunds (data, blood, sweat and tears were lost that day). I have been an OVH customer for 12 years. Today, I'm glad to have moved away all my production environments as well.

dx034 9y ago
I'm still at OVH (support is reasonable and prices cheap) but would never trust one provider with all my infrastructure. In the end it always turns out that there is a single point of failure and if it's just the billing department. Using two providers protects you from that and if you chose some with good peering and free traffic, keeping both in sync is relatively easy. That's just the problem with services as AWS, traffic is too costly to have production live with another provider as well.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  Spot on. Having one AWS account scares the crap out of me as well. It’s never a good thing if all your eggs are in one basket. My money is on stuff spread across Bytemark, Linode and DigitalOcean with a DR plan involving mostly automatic recovery. AWS doesn’t get a look in as it is extremely costly to port away from anything that isn’t bare metal and pipes.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    How do you do fail-over ?
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      Mirror your data onto another provider continuously (log shipping/rsync), Switch DNS. Ansible works for this stuff as it allows you to can the task of “quick get me a production environment up on Linode!” If you can afford some downtime you don’t need a hot standby just roll out everything into new provider and you’re done. I’ve done this on very large scale environments and small ones and it’s achievable for even small organisations. The killer is avoid anything you can’t run on bare metal servers.
      - therealmarv 9y ago
        I also do this approach. Get a decent, from your infrastructure independent DNS provider and take care of your Ansible scripts. This way in emergency you do a one liner, have a new production server running and change DNS settings.
        mschuster91 9y ago
        In addition I'd suggest getting a second domain in a TLD operated by another company in another country than the primary TLD is, and teaching your customers/users that both are valid. This protects you from three things: 1) your DNS provider having issues (even Route53 sometimes has them, https://mwork.io/2017/03/14/aws-route53-dns-outage-impacts-last-almost-a-full-day/ https://mwork.io/2017/03/14/aws-route53-dns-outage-impacts-l...) 2) legal issues, when one of your domains gets seized or the provider gets pressured into cancelling, just as has happened with Pirate bay, SciHub and friends, gambling or sites with user generated content that may be illegal or frowned upon in some countries or for the latter to the Nazi site Daily Stormer (although I'm glad for it being down, it's a perfect example what can happen in a very short time frame) 3) (edit, after suggestion below) the entire TLD going down because the TLD DNS provider has issues, which also happens from time to time.
        cjsuk 9y ago
        Good advice. We had some serious trouble when .io went down a few weeks back.
therealmarv 9y ago
Just an good advice: Never ever trust a single point/server without backups. Do backups, do snapshots (check if and how you can do that), store them somewhere else. Try to do automated reinstall with e.g. Ansible so that you can move easily. It's an investment at the beginning and during running the server but if the stuff is critical you should always do that.
pmontra 9y ago
My experience with OVH VPSes is that they are cheap and reasonably reliable. But when one starts failing support never helped me to get it fixed. Just fire up another one, install everything on there, switch off the old one and forget about it. This means never paying for more than one month in advance.
nkkollaw 9y ago
Whatever. Servers break. Providers go down. It happens to all of them. Whenever I read comments like yours I wonder where you moved your servers to, and if you'll move them again when that goes down too.

dx034 9y ago

I'm still at OVH (support is reasonable and prices cheap) but would never trust one provider with all my infrastructure. In the end it always turns out that there is a single point of failure and if it's just the billing department. Using two providers protects you from that and if you chose some with good peering and free traffic, keeping both in sync is relatively easy. That's just the problem with services as AWS, traffic is too costly to have production live with another provider as well.

cjsuk 9y ago
Spot on. Having one AWS account scares the crap out of me as well. It’s never a good thing if all your eggs are in one basket. My money is on stuff spread across Bytemark, Linode and DigitalOcean with a DR plan involving mostly automatic recovery. AWS doesn’t get a look in as it is extremely costly to port away from anything that isn’t bare metal and pipes.
- z3t4 9y ago
  How do you do fail-over ?
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    Mirror your data onto another provider continuously (log shipping/rsync), Switch DNS. Ansible works for this stuff as it allows you to can the task of “quick get me a production environment up on Linode!” If you can afford some downtime you don’t need a hot standby just roll out everything into new provider and you’re done. I’ve done this on very large scale environments and small ones and it’s achievable for even small organisations. The killer is avoid anything you can’t run on bare metal servers.
    - therealmarv 9y ago
      I also do this approach. Get a decent, from your infrastructure independent DNS provider and take care of your Ansible scripts. This way in emergency you do a one liner, have a new production server running and change DNS settings.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        In addition I'd suggest getting a second domain in a TLD operated by another company in another country than the primary TLD is, and teaching your customers/users that both are valid. This protects you from three things: 1) your DNS provider having issues (even Route53 sometimes has them, https://mwork.io/2017/03/14/aws-route53-dns-outage-impacts-last-almost-a-full-day/ https://mwork.io/2017/03/14/aws-route53-dns-outage-impacts-l...) 2) legal issues, when one of your domains gets seized or the provider gets pressured into cancelling, just as has happened with Pirate bay, SciHub and friends, gambling or sites with user generated content that may be illegal or frowned upon in some countries or for the latter to the Nazi site Daily Stormer (although I'm glad for it being down, it's a perfect example what can happen in a very short time frame) 3) (edit, after suggestion below) the entire TLD going down because the TLD DNS provider has issues, which also happens from time to time.
        cjsuk 9y ago
        Good advice. We had some serious trouble when .io went down a few weeks back.

therealmarv 9y ago

Just an good advice: Never ever trust a single point/server without backups. Do backups, do snapshots (check if and how you can do that), store them somewhere else. Try to do automated reinstall with e.g. Ansible so that you can move easily. It's an investment at the beginning and during running the server but if the stuff is critical you should always do that.

pmontra 9y ago

My experience with OVH VPSes is that they are cheap and reasonably reliable. But when one starts failing support never helped me to get it fixed. Just fire up another one, install everything on there, switch off the old one and forget about it. This means never paying for more than one month in advance.

nkkollaw 9y ago

Whatever. Servers break. Providers go down. It happens to all of them. Whenever I read comments like yours I wonder where you moved your servers to, and if you'll move them again when that goes down too.