4 ms·

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

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.

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.