15 ms·

OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

288 points by krn 9y ago

adamnemecek 9y ago
I used to have a server with them however the UI was ...beyond words. It was impossible for me to renew my subscription because the site was throwing a JS error. Has this improved? Their offering was very good bang for buck I've seen.
- Fizzadar 9y ago
  The "OVH Manager" is still pretty bad, although it has improved a lot since they switched over a year (or two?) ago. At that price point there's really not much alternative, only Hetzner come to mind, certainly nothing in the US.
- thejosh 9y ago
  Yeah their UI is beyond useless. Their support is beyond useless. Can't even cancel my servers, but everything else was great. Ended up having to use their API to cancel the server, since support wouldn't cancel the server for me - here is an actual email they sent me: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Oh yeah, the support was lol. And I have seen a fair share of terrible customer support.
  - meowface 9y ago
    OVH is also notorious for being very slow to respond to abuse reports. They've been one of the favorite VPS providers for botnets, exploit kits, and other cybercrime activities as of a few years ago, and may still be.
    - notafxn 9y ago
      As a client of them, that's good. And they are so big that nobody would blacklist them.
    - tscs37 9y ago
      They forward a lot of abuse reports because it is assumed the customer is doing something and that something is being abused rather than the customer abusing OVH. Which is a big plus because when using AWS or DO there is always that small question in the back of my mind "what if somebody gets angry at me and fires abuse reports to shutdown my server" I don't have that on OVH. Getting good IP reputation is fairly easy too compared to AWS or DO.
  - IntelMiner 9y ago
    +1 to their support being useless Bought a block of extra IP's. IP's assigned would not route to anything OVH gave me a barrage of tests and kept insisting I'd fucked up Eventually they asked if they could directly connect to my server (with my consent) Immediately declared the issue "Closed" because I wasn't using VMware ESXi!
  - freehunter 9y ago
    It's weird because in every article I see about DigitalOcean, there's people saying "DO is stupid, they're overpriced, everyone should use OVH", yet in every article I see about OVH there are people complaining that OVH has some serious customer support and UX problems.
    - thejosh 9y ago
      I want to love OVH, they just need to spend some time overhauling their terrible management UI.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      It probably depends on how much you interact with them (by choice or luck). My interactions (via Kimsufi) have been: creating a server once, then paying them four times a year. So far that's been flawless :)
    - isatty 9y ago
      I'm a long time OVH customer (also kumsufi) - if you don't need the support you can't find a better bang for your buck provider anywhere else. Especially in the storage department.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I tried to delete my account back in 2012 or so and back then they were asking me to send a letter to their lawyers for that. OVH has left an atrocious taste in my mouth since.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Check out online.net. It's what I am using since a few months and I have a lot of OVH flashbacks when using their website. However, their support and their interface are good.
- neurostimulant 9y ago
  I recently set up a small cluster and can't figure out how to enable vrack (private networking) to the servers. The option is there in the UI, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Not sure if that was a bug or you're supposed to contact support to set them up.
arenaninja 9y ago
I think it's safe to say that Amazon's ambition is unlimited at this point in time. I fully expect them to jump into commercial banking in the near future
- dmoy 9y ago
  So there are fairly strong regulations on what other things a bank can do. I can't remember exactly what it entails. It's possible Amazon could get around that with holding company structure or something, but I'm not sure. I agree with your general point though, maybe just not the bank part. Edit1: It's not reg W, damn I cannot remember which section describes this. There's too many bank regs in the US. Edit2: ok 12 CFR 225.21 &238.51 we're closer: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21 Bank or bank holding can't own anything other than other fin, ag, or family stuff. I'm still at sure to what extent this would stop Amazon from starting their own bank. (IANAL, but this was explained to me years ago by an expert on us federal banking regulation so I have hazy memories of it) Aaaand I just wasted 15 minutes of my morning looking through the CFR on banking regulation, time to stop reading hackernews.
  - arenaninja 9y ago
    There's a lot of banking regulations but Amazon has enough money to either buy an existing online solution or develop their own
    - dmoy 9y ago
      Sure I'm not saying Amazon lacks the capacity, but rather that the CFR might actually prohibit a company owning both a bank and a massive commercial retail structure, etc etc.
    - valenciarose 9y ago
      In the US, owning a bank changes the regulatory status of the entire legal entity structure. This cannot be evaded with shell companies, etc. Specifically, “any company that controls a bank” is a Bank Holding Company and is regulated by the Federal Reserve (regardless of where the controlled bank is chartered). Being regulated by the Fed is a big deal and they can and will poke around in your non-bank subsidiaries (which are, after all, assets of the Bank holding company).
wpietri 9y ago
This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual keyboard and made a great product. So great that Google added the feature to their own Android keyboard. And then released it for free on iOS, too.) But I'm not worried at all about using their infrastructure services, because it doesn't give them much in way of competitive advantage. Netflix, for example, has a lot of their stuff running in AWS. Amazon has Prime Movies + TV as a direct competitor, but I don't think Netflix really cares. I as a consumer sure don't; from my perspective Netflix and Amazon are completely separate.
- ddorian43 9y ago
  Netflix used other things for CDN($$$), and is doing shows themself($$$). Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.
  - xstartup 9y ago
    They also use S3.
  - cthalupa 9y ago
    >Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte. This doesn't seem true, based on all of the things they talked about using at Re:Invent last year. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent-2017-79384f525367 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent...
- gav 9y ago
  > This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? Over the last year I've seen a huge push to move away from AWS from retail clients. Azure is a lot more appealing because Microsoft doesn't compete with them.
ddorian43 9y ago
I thought the sentence would be "we'll never charge for bandwidth" which is equally important. *charge until a point. I don't expect them to go cloudflare.
kim0 9y ago
Any such (low cost) provider offers a great hosted kubernetes experience?
- tyingq 9y ago
  Maybe OpenShift online? https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html
QUFB 9y ago
I run https://wtfismyip.com https://wtfismyip.com on OVH. Egress bandwidth exceeds 8TB a month, which on AWS could cost ~$1000/month, not including the cost of the beefy EC2 instance I would need. For some bandwidth heavy use cases, OVH makes a lot more sense than AWS. In my case it was $150/month versus $2000/month (bandwidth + EC2).
- beamatronic 9y ago
  It’s plain text, how do you get to 8TB per month! Congrats on your site!
  - QUFB 9y ago
    2M hits per hour, 1M uniques. It's crazy!
    - eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
      Why no gzip/brotli the content? Does it not help because html is small?
    - zorked 9y ago
      I'm guessing it's mostly automated. Are you being used by a popular software package that you know of?
      - ehsankia 9y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if the plain-text ip was used somewhere. Anecdotal evidence but I myself use that for most of my scripts to get my own ip. A github search shows over 1000 code results.
    - djhworld 9y ago
      Are you able to at least break even in terms of costs?
- api 9y ago
  We run a chunk on OVH too. It is over 100X cheaper than AWS. We have had some issues though. OVH had two major outages in the last two years. Our strategy has been to build a more robust distributed architecture and use these issues to be "antifragile," which improves our product while as still saving money. Over time I expect OVH to become more solid as they mature.
jasonlingx 9y ago
I’ve been a customer of theirs for years. Till now I still have to manually key in my credit card details to renew my servers every few months. So yeh, their CEO’s probably right.
- melkhior 9y ago
  OVH has auto-renew though?
  - zifnab06 9y ago
    Up until early this year autorenew existed in the UI for Canadian servers but didn't do anything.
- flas9sd 9y ago
  to their credit, they do the auto-renew on european IBAN accounts
- leetbulb 9y ago
  They've recently (within the past couple months) enabled automatic renew for credit cards.
jpswade 9y ago
So what can we gleam from this? OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise. Having AWS in the hosting market means that right now, it's become a cottage industry for anyone else other than the big names in tech. Meanwhile these big names in tech know that they can make money from their platforms. They simply can't compete on the same level and now they've decided that's what makes them unique in the industry... What should a hosting business to do in 2018?
- djhworld 9y ago
  > OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise. I think they're more talking about companies hosting on AWS, e.g. Amazon Video is a competitor to Netflix
truetraveller 9y ago
Important notes about OVH: -I'm a customer for about ~2 years. -I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services. -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap" -OVH is super-cheap, which is good. -I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because.. -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything. -website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. -feels as if they went the extra mile to make it confusing. Defies belief! -they have separate websites for different countries, which use different login credentials. -they have "OVH credits". Why??? -they use OpenStack (Yay!). Unforuntely, they have a confusing implementation of OpenStack dashboard, AND on a separate site, with separate credentials. Bottom line: I'm a tech-savvy guy who can absorb some pretty bad UX, but OVH made me cringe. Seriously, I do not exaggerate. Anytime I need to log on to OVH, I get an uneasy feeling. So, I gladly paid extra and switched. I use DigitalOcean now. It's not as cheap. Digital Oceans's UX is good, but not amazing. But believe you me, it is BREATHE OF FRESH AIR compared to OVH. Update: may post a video if you guys want me to. Let me know!
- pzduniak 9y ago
  The UI is good enough to set up the storage once and then not ever touch it again. I also enjoy when it randomly switches to French.
  - truetraveller 9y ago
    That is correct. But it's those times when you need to interact with the dashboard or billing that makes you cringe. I run a business, I can't "afford" that headache. And true about the random French switching.
    - merinowool 9y ago
      I only use dashboard when I buy a server and perform installation. It is pretty good these days and automatic renewal also works. In my opinion it is much better than AWS - as in simpler.
    - t1o5 9y ago
Vrains 9y ago
That's what they all say at first.
- icebraining 9y ago
  OVH has existed for almost twenty years.
grumpwagon 9y ago
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCrWMA4J:www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/99939.fullarticle+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCr...
julienmarie 9y ago
Indeed, OVH UI is slow and bulky. I moved to Hetzner for a lot of things. Even cheaper, had one server issue, but quickly fixed by their support ( a bios to upgrade ), their UX is simple but efficient. Any other opinion on them?
- stevekemp 9y ago
  I use Hetzner, I like their server range and prices, but I am annoyed I pay almost as much for a block of IPs as I do a single server. (I run a bunch of virtual machines, each with a real public IP exposed.)
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    For IPv4? This really does reflect reality - IPV4 addresses should cost WAY more than things like servers we can just keep making.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Hetzner is the best if you care about value. If you look at the hardware they offer you can tell it is designed by people who know what they are doing and really care about getting the best bang for buck.
- zifnab06 9y ago
  +1 for hetzner. For Lineage, we run our mirror and (as of next weekend) our code review platform there. I had a server go offline last night. A fuse broke. It took support all of 30s to fix it. OVH this would have been at least Monday before someone looked.
k__ 9y ago
Just yesterday I looked into some performance articles about cloud providers and OVH wasn't in the top tier
kelukelugames 9y ago
I wish there was a website that collected all of the times a company promised to "never do x" and then changed their word. Companies break promises all of the time. It's impossible to predict what they or anyone else will do in a few years.
xstartup 9y ago
We run 1K node ClickHouse cluster on top of OVH. In BigQuery, we had a latency of 10-50s per query and it was costing us 400K per month. ClickHouse costs us 100K per month, all deployed on OVH. 100-200ms query latency.
- manigandham 9y ago
  Why $400k for BigQuery? It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for unlimited queries. Also your other comment mentioned 50TB across 1000 Clickhouse nodes, why so little data per node?
  - riku_iki 9y ago
    > It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for unlimited queries. plus storage costs?
    - manigandham 9y ago
      50TB of data is about $500/month on BigQuery. $0.02/GB for new data, then $0.01 after 90 days of being unchanged.
kunthar 9y ago
I’m not going to do anything you can do. Better? because i have no budget to compete with these giants yet.!
fierro 9y ago
title gore
ironjunkie 9y ago
As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH. AWS, Azure and GCloud are all so good at Marketing themselves that a lot of people don't even hear about alternatives. I used a lot OVH both for private reasons and pushed it into my company. It is by far the cheapest (by a factor of 3-4* in my case), and it is shockingly easy to get to talk to core engineers in case you have any real issue. The founder Octave Klaba is also a character. A Huge geek, that lives for OVH.
- adventured 9y ago
  > As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH. Where would you get that impression? OVH is clearly well known in the tech world of the bay area / SV. They've been regularly discussed on HN for at least ~5+ years that I'm aware of. One problem has been that they only have one North America location and it's in Canada (not necessarily ideal depending on what you're doing and where you're located in the US).
- briandear 9y ago
  UX matters, that's why. And AWS, Azure, Google aren't even the incumbents. We have Rackspace, Softlayer and several others I'm forgetting. I'd be afraid to use OVH simply because it's French. What happens if I need serious support on August 15? Is the entire company going to be on vacation? Also, my fear of needing support on a weekend or a holiday or after 7pm on a weekday or at lunch time. I don't know if OVH operates like a real French business, but if my experience with Orange, EDF or any other French business is any indication, it would be highly frustrating and risky to build a business around any French company. Then there's the risk of France deciding to heavily tax your business because data might cross through French territory. Suddenly, if you're a non French business but you have a datacenter in France or data transiting through France, now you're going to be subject to the whims of French politicians. Considering how France is suing Apple over the iOS developer program and how they threaten and complain about pretty much any non-EU tech company -- it wouldn't take much for the government to order OVH to shut down your servers or attempt to extort payments. I'm more afraid of the EU than Amazon.
manishsharan 9y ago
I work for a very large bank and our management refuses to use AWS as we see it as a potential competitor. So we ended up using a cloud provider that sucks. So it seems that this opinion expressed by OVH CEO is shared by a lot of senior management.
merinowool 9y ago
With Kubernetes now being mature and fairly easy to install, you can have essentially your own AWS for peanuts using OVH. I absolutely see no reason why paying such a premium to use "conventional" cloud providers when you can have your own portable infrastructure nowadays.
- zenlikethat 9y ago
  Trying to duplicate things like SQS, RDS, and Lambda on Kubernetes could easily crush you on operator costs.
  - merinowool 9y ago
    It still has a learning curve, but it isn't too bad. You have Rook, OpenFAAS etc. and once you write your own recipes it is easy to spin up your own databases, queues etc.
    - freeone3000 9y ago
      Yes, once you have an experienced systems administrator you'd be amazed at what you save for that $200k salary... AWS hits a "pay what you use" price point for services that previously required the human equivalent of a large capital outlay.
- paxys 9y ago
  Kubernetes only does service orchestration, which is a very small part of what AWS offers overall. You still have to manage servers/NAS/networking hardware, ISP contracts, CDN, edge caches, geo-distribution and more.
  - merinowool 9y ago
    I think there is a niche where it is too expensive to use AWS and it is impossible to do with traditional hosting. You can do well with Flannel, Rook and edge servers as nginx reverse proxies with caching. You need to write scripts once (or use ready made recipes) and management isn't too hard - definitely doable for one man project if you set your expectations right.
segmondy 9y ago
This will be the undoing of the Giants. Lack of trust.
xmichael99 9y ago
OVH won't do anything even slightly advanced, no BGP support, no firewall beyond the very basic stuff and everything about OVH is super confusing. It is like they got together and decided to make up nonconventional names to common network terms to piss everyone off. OVH is pretty cheap, but very basic. Plus good luck trying to understand an overage bill.
StreamBright 9y ago
Hi is right, but for different reasons he thinks. :)
scarface74 9y ago
I was just listening to a Software Engineering Radio podcast from 2015 where they were interviewing the guy who moved Netflix to AWS. He said that by being on the best cloud provider (AWS), Netflix was neutralizing the advantage that Amazon Prime Video had by being on the best cloud provider. On the other hand, Dropbox had to leave AWS because they would never be able to be a storage solution at a lower price and pay AWS fees...

288 points by krn 9y ago

I used to have a server with them however the UI was ...beyond words. It was impossible for me to renew my subscription because the site was throwing a JS error. Has this improved? Their offering was very good bang for buck I've seen.

Fizzadar 9y ago
The "OVH Manager" is still pretty bad, although it has improved a lot since they switched over a year (or two?) ago. At that price point there's really not much alternative, only Hetzner come to mind, certainly nothing in the US.
thejosh 9y ago
Yeah their UI is beyond useless. Their support is beyond useless. Can't even cancel my servers, but everything else was great. Ended up having to use their API to cancel the server, since support wouldn't cancel the server for me - here is an actual email they sent me: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Oh yeah, the support was lol. And I have seen a fair share of terrible customer support.
- meowface 9y ago
  OVH is also notorious for being very slow to respond to abuse reports. They've been one of the favorite VPS providers for botnets, exploit kits, and other cybercrime activities as of a few years ago, and may still be.
  - notafxn 9y ago
    As a client of them, that's good. And they are so big that nobody would blacklist them.
  - tscs37 9y ago
    They forward a lot of abuse reports because it is assumed the customer is doing something and that something is being abused rather than the customer abusing OVH. Which is a big plus because when using AWS or DO there is always that small question in the back of my mind "what if somebody gets angry at me and fires abuse reports to shutdown my server" I don't have that on OVH. Getting good IP reputation is fairly easy too compared to AWS or DO.
- IntelMiner 9y ago
  +1 to their support being useless Bought a block of extra IP's. IP's assigned would not route to anything OVH gave me a barrage of tests and kept insisting I'd fucked up Eventually they asked if they could directly connect to my server (with my consent) Immediately declared the issue "Closed" because I wasn't using VMware ESXi!
- freehunter 9y ago
  It's weird because in every article I see about DigitalOcean, there's people saying "DO is stupid, they're overpriced, everyone should use OVH", yet in every article I see about OVH there are people complaining that OVH has some serious customer support and UX problems.
  - thejosh 9y ago
    I want to love OVH, they just need to spend some time overhauling their terrible management UI.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    It probably depends on how much you interact with them (by choice or luck). My interactions (via Kimsufi) have been: creating a server once, then paying them four times a year. So far that's been flawless :)
  - isatty 9y ago
    I'm a long time OVH customer (also kumsufi) - if you don't need the support you can't find a better bang for your buck provider anywhere else. Especially in the storage department.
scrollaway 9y ago
I tried to delete my account back in 2012 or so and back then they were asking me to send a letter to their lawyers for that. OVH has left an atrocious taste in my mouth since.
chrisper 9y ago
Check out online.net. It's what I am using since a few months and I have a lot of OVH flashbacks when using their website. However, their support and their interface are good.
neurostimulant 9y ago
I recently set up a small cluster and can't figure out how to enable vrack (private networking) to the servers. The option is there in the UI, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Not sure if that was a bug or you're supposed to contact support to set them up.

arenaninja 9y ago

I think it's safe to say that Amazon's ambition is unlimited at this point in time. I fully expect them to jump into commercial banking in the near future

dmoy 9y ago
So there are fairly strong regulations on what other things a bank can do. I can't remember exactly what it entails. It's possible Amazon could get around that with holding company structure or something, but I'm not sure. I agree with your general point though, maybe just not the bank part. Edit1: It's not reg W, damn I cannot remember which section describes this. There's too many bank regs in the US. Edit2: ok 12 CFR 225.21 &238.51 we're closer: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21 Bank or bank holding can't own anything other than other fin, ag, or family stuff. I'm still at sure to what extent this would stop Amazon from starting their own bank. (IANAL, but this was explained to me years ago by an expert on us federal banking regulation so I have hazy memories of it) Aaaand I just wasted 15 minutes of my morning looking through the CFR on banking regulation, time to stop reading hackernews.
- arenaninja 9y ago
  There's a lot of banking regulations but Amazon has enough money to either buy an existing online solution or develop their own
  - dmoy 9y ago
    Sure I'm not saying Amazon lacks the capacity, but rather that the CFR might actually prohibit a company owning both a bank and a massive commercial retail structure, etc etc.
  - valenciarose 9y ago
    In the US, owning a bank changes the regulatory status of the entire legal entity structure. This cannot be evaded with shell companies, etc. Specifically, “any company that controls a bank” is a Bank Holding Company and is regulated by the Federal Reserve (regardless of where the controlled bank is chartered). Being regulated by the Fed is a big deal and they can and will poke around in your non-bank subsidiaries (which are, after all, assets of the Bank holding company).

wpietri 9y ago

This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual keyboard and made a great product. So great that Google added the feature to their own Android keyboard. And then released it for free on iOS, too.) But I'm not worried at all about using their infrastructure services, because it doesn't give them much in way of competitive advantage. Netflix, for example, has a lot of their stuff running in AWS. Amazon has Prime Movies + TV as a direct competitor, but I don't think Netflix really cares. I as a consumer sure don't; from my perspective Netflix and Amazon are completely separate.

ddorian43 9y ago
Netflix used other things for CDN($$$), and is doing shows themself($$$). Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.
- xstartup 9y ago
  They also use S3.
- cthalupa 9y ago
  >Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte. This doesn't seem true, based on all of the things they talked about using at Re:Invent last year. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent-2017-79384f525367 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent...
gav 9y ago
> This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? Over the last year I've seen a huge push to move away from AWS from retail clients. Azure is a lot more appealing because Microsoft doesn't compete with them.

ddorian43 9y ago

I thought the sentence would be "we'll never charge for bandwidth" which is equally important. *charge until a point. I don't expect them to go cloudflare.

kim0 9y ago

Any such (low cost) provider offers a great hosted kubernetes experience?

tyingq 9y ago
Maybe OpenShift online? https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html

QUFB 9y ago

I run https://wtfismyip.com https://wtfismyip.com on OVH. Egress bandwidth exceeds 8TB a month, which on AWS could cost ~$1000/month, not including the cost of the beefy EC2 instance I would need. For some bandwidth heavy use cases, OVH makes a lot more sense than AWS. In my case it was $150/month versus $2000/month (bandwidth + EC2).

beamatronic 9y ago
It’s plain text, how do you get to 8TB per month! Congrats on your site!
- QUFB 9y ago
  2M hits per hour, 1M uniques. It's crazy!
  - eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
    Why no gzip/brotli the content? Does it not help because html is small?
  - zorked 9y ago
    I'm guessing it's mostly automated. Are you being used by a popular software package that you know of?
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if the plain-text ip was used somewhere. Anecdotal evidence but I myself use that for most of my scripts to get my own ip. A github search shows over 1000 code results.
  - djhworld 9y ago
    Are you able to at least break even in terms of costs?
api 9y ago
We run a chunk on OVH too. It is over 100X cheaper than AWS. We have had some issues though. OVH had two major outages in the last two years. Our strategy has been to build a more robust distributed architecture and use these issues to be "antifragile," which improves our product while as still saving money. Over time I expect OVH to become more solid as they mature.

jasonlingx 9y ago

I’ve been a customer of theirs for years. Till now I still have to manually key in my credit card details to renew my servers every few months. So yeh, their CEO’s probably right.

melkhior 9y ago
OVH has auto-renew though?
- zifnab06 9y ago
  Up until early this year autorenew existed in the UI for Canadian servers but didn't do anything.
flas9sd 9y ago
to their credit, they do the auto-renew on european IBAN accounts
leetbulb 9y ago
They've recently (within the past couple months) enabled automatic renew for credit cards.

jpswade 9y ago

So what can we gleam from this? OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise. Having AWS in the hosting market means that right now, it's become a cottage industry for anyone else other than the big names in tech. Meanwhile these big names in tech know that they can make money from their platforms. They simply can't compete on the same level and now they've decided that's what makes them unique in the industry... What should a hosting business to do in 2018?

djhworld 9y ago
> OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise. I think they're more talking about companies hosting on AWS, e.g. Amazon Video is a competitor to Netflix

truetraveller 9y ago

Important notes about OVH: -I'm a customer for about ~2 years. -I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services. -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap" -OVH is super-cheap, which is good. -I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because.. -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything. -website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. -feels as if they went the extra mile to make it confusing. Defies belief! -they have separate websites for different countries, which use different login credentials. -they have "OVH credits". Why??? -they use OpenStack (Yay!). Unforuntely, they have a confusing implementation of OpenStack dashboard, AND on a separate site, with separate credentials. Bottom line: I'm a tech-savvy guy who can absorb some pretty bad UX, but OVH made me cringe. Seriously, I do not exaggerate. Anytime I need to log on to OVH, I get an uneasy feeling. So, I gladly paid extra and switched. I use DigitalOcean now. It's not as cheap. Digital Oceans's UX is good, but not amazing. But believe you me, it is BREATHE OF FRESH AIR compared to OVH. Update: may post a video if you guys want me to. Let me know!

pzduniak 9y ago
The UI is good enough to set up the storage once and then not ever touch it again. I also enjoy when it randomly switches to French.
- truetraveller 9y ago
  That is correct. But it's those times when you need to interact with the dashboard or billing that makes you cringe. I run a business, I can't "afford" that headache. And true about the random French switching.
  - merinowool 9y ago
    I only use dashboard when I buy a server and perform installation. It is pretty good these days and automatic renewal also works. In my opinion it is much better than AWS - as in simpler.
  - t1o5 9y ago

Vrains 9y ago

That's what they all say at first.

icebraining 9y ago
OVH has existed for almost twenty years.

grumpwagon 9y ago

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCrWMA4J:www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/99939.fullarticle+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCr...

julienmarie 9y ago

Indeed, OVH UI is slow and bulky. I moved to Hetzner for a lot of things. Even cheaper, had one server issue, but quickly fixed by their support ( a bios to upgrade ), their UX is simple but efficient. Any other opinion on them?

stevekemp 9y ago
I use Hetzner, I like their server range and prices, but I am annoyed I pay almost as much for a block of IPs as I do a single server. (I run a bunch of virtual machines, each with a real public IP exposed.)
- freeone3000 9y ago
  For IPv4? This really does reflect reality - IPV4 addresses should cost WAY more than things like servers we can just keep making.
saas_co_de 9y ago
Hetzner is the best if you care about value. If you look at the hardware they offer you can tell it is designed by people who know what they are doing and really care about getting the best bang for buck.
zifnab06 9y ago
+1 for hetzner. For Lineage, we run our mirror and (as of next weekend) our code review platform there. I had a server go offline last night. A fuse broke. It took support all of 30s to fix it. OVH this would have been at least Monday before someone looked.

k__ 9y ago

Just yesterday I looked into some performance articles about cloud providers and OVH wasn't in the top tier

kelukelugames 9y ago

I wish there was a website that collected all of the times a company promised to "never do x" and then changed their word. Companies break promises all of the time. It's impossible to predict what they or anyone else will do in a few years.

xstartup 9y ago

We run 1K node ClickHouse cluster on top of OVH. In BigQuery, we had a latency of 10-50s per query and it was costing us 400K per month. ClickHouse costs us 100K per month, all deployed on OVH. 100-200ms query latency.

manigandham 9y ago
Why $400k for BigQuery? It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for unlimited queries. Also your other comment mentioned 50TB across 1000 Clickhouse nodes, why so little data per node?
- riku_iki 9y ago
  > It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for unlimited queries. plus storage costs?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    50TB of data is about $500/month on BigQuery. $0.02/GB for new data, then $0.01 after 90 days of being unchanged.

kunthar 9y ago

I’m not going to do anything you can do. Better? because i have no budget to compete with these giants yet.!

fierro 9y ago

title gore

ironjunkie 9y ago

As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH. AWS, Azure and GCloud are all so good at Marketing themselves that a lot of people don't even hear about alternatives. I used a lot OVH both for private reasons and pushed it into my company. It is by far the cheapest (by a factor of 3-4* in my case), and it is shockingly easy to get to talk to core engineers in case you have any real issue. The founder Octave Klaba is also a character. A Huge geek, that lives for OVH.

adventured 9y ago
> As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH. Where would you get that impression? OVH is clearly well known in the tech world of the bay area / SV. They've been regularly discussed on HN for at least ~5+ years that I'm aware of. One problem has been that they only have one North America location and it's in Canada (not necessarily ideal depending on what you're doing and where you're located in the US).
briandear 9y ago
UX matters, that's why. And AWS, Azure, Google aren't even the incumbents. We have Rackspace, Softlayer and several others I'm forgetting. I'd be afraid to use OVH simply because it's French. What happens if I need serious support on August 15? Is the entire company going to be on vacation? Also, my fear of needing support on a weekend or a holiday or after 7pm on a weekday or at lunch time. I don't know if OVH operates like a real French business, but if my experience with Orange, EDF or any other French business is any indication, it would be highly frustrating and risky to build a business around any French company. Then there's the risk of France deciding to heavily tax your business because data might cross through French territory. Suddenly, if you're a non French business but you have a datacenter in France or data transiting through France, now you're going to be subject to the whims of French politicians. Considering how France is suing Apple over the iOS developer program and how they threaten and complain about pretty much any non-EU tech company -- it wouldn't take much for the government to order OVH to shut down your servers or attempt to extort payments. I'm more afraid of the EU than Amazon.

manishsharan 9y ago

I work for a very large bank and our management refuses to use AWS as we see it as a potential competitor. So we ended up using a cloud provider that sucks. So it seems that this opinion expressed by OVH CEO is shared by a lot of senior management.

merinowool 9y ago

With Kubernetes now being mature and fairly easy to install, you can have essentially your own AWS for peanuts using OVH. I absolutely see no reason why paying such a premium to use "conventional" cloud providers when you can have your own portable infrastructure nowadays.

zenlikethat 9y ago
Trying to duplicate things like SQS, RDS, and Lambda on Kubernetes could easily crush you on operator costs.
- merinowool 9y ago
  It still has a learning curve, but it isn't too bad. You have Rook, OpenFAAS etc. and once you write your own recipes it is easy to spin up your own databases, queues etc.
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    Yes, once you have an experienced systems administrator you'd be amazed at what you save for that $200k salary... AWS hits a "pay what you use" price point for services that previously required the human equivalent of a large capital outlay.
paxys 9y ago
Kubernetes only does service orchestration, which is a very small part of what AWS offers overall. You still have to manage servers/NAS/networking hardware, ISP contracts, CDN, edge caches, geo-distribution and more.
- merinowool 9y ago
  I think there is a niche where it is too expensive to use AWS and it is impossible to do with traditional hosting. You can do well with Flannel, Rook and edge servers as nginx reverse proxies with caching. You need to write scripts once (or use ready made recipes) and management isn't too hard - definitely doable for one man project if you set your expectations right.

segmondy 9y ago

This will be the undoing of the Giants. Lack of trust.

xmichael99 9y ago

OVH won't do anything even slightly advanced, no BGP support, no firewall beyond the very basic stuff and everything about OVH is super confusing. It is like they got together and decided to make up nonconventional names to common network terms to piss everyone off. OVH is pretty cheap, but very basic. Plus good luck trying to understand an overage bill.

StreamBright 9y ago

Hi is right, but for different reasons he thinks. :)

scarface74 9y ago

I was just listening to a Software Engineering Radio podcast from 2015 where they were interviewing the guy who moved Netflix to AWS. He said that by being on the best cloud provider (AWS), Netflix was neutralizing the advantage that Amazon Prime Video had by being on the best cloud provider. On the other hand, Dropbox had to leave AWS because they would never be able to be a storage solution at a lower price and pay AWS fees...