6 ms·

Not done any research into it, but I always thought OVH was supposed to be a very budget VPS service primarily for personal use rather than business. Although t

by 7ewis 6y ago

Not done any research into it, but I always thought OVH was supposed to be a very budget VPS service primarily for personal use rather than business. Although thought it was akin to having a Raspberry Pi plugged in at home. Again, I may be completely wrong but why would you not use AWS/GCP? Even if it's complexity, Amazon have Lightsail, or if it's cost I thought DigitalOcean was one of the only reputable business-grade VPS providers. I just can't imagine many situations where a VPS would be superior to embracing the cloud and using cloud functions, containers, instances with autoscaling/load balancers etc.

Symbiote 6y ago
OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean. It has twice the revenue, and is the third largest hosting provider in the world.
- nixgeek 6y ago
  Twice the revenue of DigitalOcean still puts it < $1B ARR, or am I missing something? I can’t see how that’s the third largest in the world, or does your definition of “hosting provider” exclude clouds?
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    I took it from the top of their Wikipedia page. In any case, they aren't "primarily for personal use". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH
- Thaxll 6y ago
  I would call it the EU Rackspace version. Except that it's not like insane Rackspace price.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  > OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean. I've been making this point for a long time. Both of those AS spaces are legendary for the volume of dodgy packets they barf at the rest of us. drop drop drop
olivierduval 6y ago
OVH STARTED as a budget VPS service some 20 years ago... but they grew a lot since 6-7 years, adding more "cloud" services and capabilities, even not on par with the main players... Why not use AWS/GCP? From my personal point of view: as a French citizen, I'm more and more convinced that I can't completly trust the (US) big boys for my own safety. Trump showed that "US interest" is far more important than "customer interest" or even "ally interest". And moreover, Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner (AWS look better for this).
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  > Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner Interesting, any examples?
  - sergiosgc 6y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I'd imagine it is the combination of no support line and algorithmic suspension of business accounts. It is a relevant risk.
    - olivierduval 6y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking about all the horror stories that can be found on this site. As a customer (or maybe an "involontary data provider"), I do as much as I can to avoid Google to be my SPOF, not technically (it's really technically reliable) but on the business side. I had to setup my own mail server just to avoid any risk of google-ban for example... just in case. I won't use Google authentificator for the same reason. I'm happy to have left Google Photos some years ago, to avoid problems of Google shutting it down. And the list could go on... As a business, I like to program Android apps but the Google Store is really a risk too. Risk to have any Google account blacklisted because some algorithm thought I did something wrong. And no appeal. Maybe all this doesn't apply to GCP customers. Maybe GCP customers have a human direct line, with someone to really help and the capacity to do it. Or maybe it's just Google: as long as it work, enjoy. If it doesn't, go to (algorithmic) hell.
ev1 6y ago
OVH is one of the largest providers in the world. They run a sub brand for personal use (bare metal for $5/m, hardware replacements in 30 min or less usually). ..and they do support all of those things you just listed, not just API-backed bare metal.
- treesknees 6y ago
  Is that a typo? I only see OVH bare metal starting at >$50. How could a provider offer a bare metal server for $5?
  - ev1 6y ago
    OVH has new servers. Their sub-brand soyoustart has older servers (that are still perfectly fine), roughly E3 Xeon/16-32GB/3x2TB to 4x2TB for $40/m ex vat. Their other sub brand kimsufi for personal servers has Atom low-power bare metal with 2TB HDD (in reality it is advertised 500GB/1TB, but they don't really have any of those in stock left, if your drive fails they replace it with a 2T - so far this has been my exp) for $5. All of this is powered by automation, you don't really get any support and you are expected to be competent. If your server is hacked you get PXE-rebooted into a rescue system and can scp/rsync off your contents before your server is reinstalled. OS installs, reboots, provisioning are all automated, there's essentially no human contact. PS: Scaleway, in Paris, used to offer $2 bare metal (ultra low voltage, weaker than an Atom, 2GB ram), but pulled all their cheap machines, raised prices on existing users, and rebranded as enterprisey. The offer was called 'kidechire' -- It is kind of interesting that on the US side everyone is in disbelief, or like "why not use AWS" - while most of the European market knows of OVH, Hetzner, etc. My own reason for using OVH? It's affordable and I would not have gotten many projects (and the gaming community I help out with) off the ground otherwise. I can rent bare metal with NVMe, and several terabytes of RAM for less than my daily wage for the whole month, and not worry about per-GB billing or attacks. In the gaming world you generally do not ever want to use usage based billing - made the mistake of using Cloudfront and S3 once and banned script kiddies would wget-loop the largest possible file from the most expensive region botnet repeatedly in a money-DoS. I legitimately wouldn't have been able to do my "for-fun-and-learning" side projects (no funding, no accelerator credits, ...) without someone like them. The equivalent of a digitalocean $1000/m VM is about $100 on OVH.
veeti 6y ago
AWS is a total and utter ripoff compared to the price/performance, DDoS protection & unmetered bandwidth provided by OVH.
- api 6y ago
  If all you need is compute, storage, and a pipe, all the big cloud providers are a total ripoff and you should look elsewhere. The big ones only make sense if you are leveraging their managed features or if you need extreme elasticity with little chance of a problem scaling up in real time. OVH is one of the better deals for bare metal, but there are even better ones for bandwidth. You have to shop around a lot. Also be sure you have a recovery plan... even with the big providers. These days risks include not only physical stuff but some stupid bot shutting you off because it thinks you violated TOS or is reacting to a possibly malicious complaint. We had a bot at AWS gank some test systems once because it thought we were cryptocurrency mining with free credits. We weren’t, but we were doing very CPU intensive testing. I’ve heard of this and worse happening elsewhere. DDOS detector and IDS bots are particularly notorious.
omnimus 6y ago
You cant imagine it yet big chunk of the independent internet runs on small vps servers. There isnt much difference between DO and OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode... not sure why DO would be better. I mean its US company doing marketing right. Thats the difference. Plus ovh/hetzner have only EU locations. I think small bussinesses like smaller simple providers instead of bigclouds. Its different philosophy if you are afraid of extreme centralisation of internet it makes sense.
- eloff 6y ago
  I can think of a lot of big differences. For one you can get much larger machines at OVH and Hetzner with fancy storage configurations for your database if desired (e.g. Optane for your indices, magnetic drives for your transaction log, and raided SSDs for the tables) They also don't charge for bandwidth, although some of those other providers have a generous free bandwidth and cheap overage.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    > Optane for your indices At OVH? If so, their US data centers don't seem to have that option. Not that I need it. The largest database I run could easily fit in RAM on a reasonably sized dedicated box.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I didn't realize they had US datacenters before now. It's possible that's no longer an option. It was on the largest servers in the Montreal datacenter when I specced that out.
      - extrasolar 6y ago
        they have 2 data centers in the US
  - omnimus 6y ago
    So you are saying they might be even better than DO depinding on requirements. I didnt know.
extrasolar 6y ago
no, OVH has dedicated servers, lot of big companies use it to build out private clouds, much cheaper then amazon or google

by 7ewis 6y ago

Symbiote 6y ago

OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean. It has twice the revenue, and is the third largest hosting provider in the world.

nixgeek 6y ago
Twice the revenue of DigitalOcean still puts it < $1B ARR, or am I missing something? I can’t see how that’s the third largest in the world, or does your definition of “hosting provider” exclude clouds?
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I took it from the top of their Wikipedia page. In any case, they aren't "primarily for personal use". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH
Thaxll 6y ago
I would call it the EU Rackspace version. Except that it's not like insane Rackspace price.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
> OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean. I've been making this point for a long time. Both of those AS spaces are legendary for the volume of dodgy packets they barf at the rest of us. drop drop drop

olivierduval 6y ago

OVH STARTED as a budget VPS service some 20 years ago... but they grew a lot since 6-7 years, adding more "cloud" services and capabilities, even not on par with the main players... Why not use AWS/GCP? From my personal point of view: as a French citizen, I'm more and more convinced that I can't completly trust the (US) big boys for my own safety. Trump showed that "US interest" is far more important than "customer interest" or even "ally interest". And moreover, Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner (AWS look better for this).

posix_me_less 6y ago
> Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner Interesting, any examples?
- sergiosgc 6y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I'd imagine it is the combination of no support line and algorithmic suspension of business accounts. It is a relevant risk.
  - olivierduval 6y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking about all the horror stories that can be found on this site. As a customer (or maybe an "involontary data provider"), I do as much as I can to avoid Google to be my SPOF, not technically (it's really technically reliable) but on the business side. I had to setup my own mail server just to avoid any risk of google-ban for example... just in case. I won't use Google authentificator for the same reason. I'm happy to have left Google Photos some years ago, to avoid problems of Google shutting it down. And the list could go on... As a business, I like to program Android apps but the Google Store is really a risk too. Risk to have any Google account blacklisted because some algorithm thought I did something wrong. And no appeal. Maybe all this doesn't apply to GCP customers. Maybe GCP customers have a human direct line, with someone to really help and the capacity to do it. Or maybe it's just Google: as long as it work, enjoy. If it doesn't, go to (algorithmic) hell.

ev1 6y ago

OVH is one of the largest providers in the world. They run a sub brand for personal use (bare metal for $5/m, hardware replacements in 30 min or less usually). ..and they do support all of those things you just listed, not just API-backed bare metal.

treesknees 6y ago
Is that a typo? I only see OVH bare metal starting at >$50. How could a provider offer a bare metal server for $5?
- ev1 6y ago
  OVH has new servers. Their sub-brand soyoustart has older servers (that are still perfectly fine), roughly E3 Xeon/16-32GB/3x2TB to 4x2TB for $40/m ex vat. Their other sub brand kimsufi for personal servers has Atom low-power bare metal with 2TB HDD (in reality it is advertised 500GB/1TB, but they don't really have any of those in stock left, if your drive fails they replace it with a 2T - so far this has been my exp) for $5. All of this is powered by automation, you don't really get any support and you are expected to be competent. If your server is hacked you get PXE-rebooted into a rescue system and can scp/rsync off your contents before your server is reinstalled. OS installs, reboots, provisioning are all automated, there's essentially no human contact. PS: Scaleway, in Paris, used to offer $2 bare metal (ultra low voltage, weaker than an Atom, 2GB ram), but pulled all their cheap machines, raised prices on existing users, and rebranded as enterprisey. The offer was called 'kidechire' -- It is kind of interesting that on the US side everyone is in disbelief, or like "why not use AWS" - while most of the European market knows of OVH, Hetzner, etc. My own reason for using OVH? It's affordable and I would not have gotten many projects (and the gaming community I help out with) off the ground otherwise. I can rent bare metal with NVMe, and several terabytes of RAM for less than my daily wage for the whole month, and not worry about per-GB billing or attacks. In the gaming world you generally do not ever want to use usage based billing - made the mistake of using Cloudfront and S3 once and banned script kiddies would wget-loop the largest possible file from the most expensive region botnet repeatedly in a money-DoS. I legitimately wouldn't have been able to do my "for-fun-and-learning" side projects (no funding, no accelerator credits, ...) without someone like them. The equivalent of a digitalocean $1000/m VM is about $100 on OVH.

veeti 6y ago

AWS is a total and utter ripoff compared to the price/performance, DDoS protection & unmetered bandwidth provided by OVH.

api 6y ago
If all you need is compute, storage, and a pipe, all the big cloud providers are a total ripoff and you should look elsewhere. The big ones only make sense if you are leveraging their managed features or if you need extreme elasticity with little chance of a problem scaling up in real time. OVH is one of the better deals for bare metal, but there are even better ones for bandwidth. You have to shop around a lot. Also be sure you have a recovery plan... even with the big providers. These days risks include not only physical stuff but some stupid bot shutting you off because it thinks you violated TOS or is reacting to a possibly malicious complaint. We had a bot at AWS gank some test systems once because it thought we were cryptocurrency mining with free credits. We weren’t, but we were doing very CPU intensive testing. I’ve heard of this and worse happening elsewhere. DDOS detector and IDS bots are particularly notorious.

omnimus 6y ago

You cant imagine it yet big chunk of the independent internet runs on small vps servers. There isnt much difference between DO and OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode... not sure why DO would be better. I mean its US company doing marketing right. Thats the difference. Plus ovh/hetzner have only EU locations. I think small bussinesses like smaller simple providers instead of bigclouds. Its different philosophy if you are afraid of extreme centralisation of internet it makes sense.

eloff 6y ago
I can think of a lot of big differences. For one you can get much larger machines at OVH and Hetzner with fancy storage configurations for your database if desired (e.g. Optane for your indices, magnetic drives for your transaction log, and raided SSDs for the tables) They also don't charge for bandwidth, although some of those other providers have a generous free bandwidth and cheap overage.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > Optane for your indices At OVH? If so, their US data centers don't seem to have that option. Not that I need it. The largest database I run could easily fit in RAM on a reasonably sized dedicated box.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I didn't realize they had US datacenters before now. It's possible that's no longer an option. It was on the largest servers in the Montreal datacenter when I specced that out.
    - extrasolar 6y ago
      they have 2 data centers in the US
- omnimus 6y ago
  So you are saying they might be even better than DO depinding on requirements. I didnt know.

extrasolar 6y ago

no, OVH has dedicated servers, lot of big companies use it to build out private clouds, much cheaper then amazon or google