3 ms·

I've had the opposite experience; OVH are much better, Hetzner support is absolutely awful and unskilled. I'm a big fan of OVH, they've never let me down.

tinco 5y ago
So I take it your datacenter has never burned down? Sorry, had to poke fun a little bit, obviously there's always a chance of having a bad experience. I've only had to interact with Hetzner support once, and it was positive, we determined that a consumer grade CPU was aggressively going into some sleep mode the Linux kernel wasn't waking up from, and the Hetzner support guy agreed that was the problem and determined it was possible to disable that feature in the BIOS, and went ahead and did that for us. And of course the fact that that was necessary was on us for running our production on their consumer grade CPUs. I believe Hetzner and maybe also OVH have a much bigger role to play in the deployments of the future. The big cloud players are overplaying their hands, and it's becoming more and more attractive to run on bare metal as devops tooling improves.
- rmoriz 5y ago
  Fun story: Hetzner lost a colocation due to overheating like almost 20 years ago. Everyone has to learn over time that eventually adds up to deep domain knowledge. Both Hetzner and OVH have built custom solutions for buildings, climate and energy monitoring.
- amenod 5y ago
  Not only that, but for some deployments it is actually preferable to limit the amount of money you can pay. In other words, better for the service to be down than for the company or person to be bankrupt. Last I checked, that simply wasn't possible with AWS (no, alerts are not the same thing).
  - p1necone 5y ago
    Imo that's a must have feature for any cloud hosting provider - I don't want to bankrupt my company/myself because I misconfigure something or write a bug. I recall there being discussion about it on HN before and a lot of people being confused as to why anyone needs it though.
cyral 5y ago
OVH does have great value, but they recently lost an entire DC to a fire: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire/millions-of-websites-offline-after-fire-at-french-cloud-services-firm-idUSKBN2B20NU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire/millions-...
celsoazevedo 5y ago
I recently moved from OVH to Hetzner as I could get better hardware for the same price. No issues so far, but OVH's network seems to be better, especially for people in other continents. Edit to add: - I'm using their Germany DCs, not the Finland one (which is cheaper but peering is worse). - Using a CDN does improve the latency/speed for users outside Europe, but it still influences performance as CDN exit point often connect directly to the origin to fetch uncached content. - I lost a VPS with OVH's DC fire, but I had backups somewhere else and fixed it quickly. A good thing about the lower prices is that I can have backups on multiple services (also cheap - Backblaze B2, for example) and still save money compared to AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
tetha 5y ago
I cannot share that experience with the hetzner support. We currently do have some weird problems with an hcloud-dedicated joined vlan and the network topology and support is a bit weird there. I'm hoping that'll improve, because then hetzner might become a prod leg for us. But besides that, both the cloud and dedicated support are very good. Last 10 - 20 HDDs we needed swapped were swapped in under 30 minutes each, and in some of the more complex issues, they were able to guide our engineer wherever they needed to be quickly. I've dealt with much, much worse hosters at multiples of that price.
cyanydeez 5y ago
ovh changed their login system, froze me out of payment and refused to respond to email. They're as on fire as their datacenters
comboy 5y ago
I tried OVH a few times and ran away every time. Currently have 10+ dedicated boxes at Hetzner and I'm taking time to write this comment because I like them that much. I only contacted support a few times during my 10+ years there but it was immediate response and to the point. I remember waiting 24h+ for OVH support with my service down (it was 5+ years ago though) and for Hetzner it was always in minutes. Can you elaborate why do you think they are unskilled?

tinco 5y ago

So I take it your datacenter has never burned down? Sorry, had to poke fun a little bit, obviously there's always a chance of having a bad experience. I've only had to interact with Hetzner support once, and it was positive, we determined that a consumer grade CPU was aggressively going into some sleep mode the Linux kernel wasn't waking up from, and the Hetzner support guy agreed that was the problem and determined it was possible to disable that feature in the BIOS, and went ahead and did that for us. And of course the fact that that was necessary was on us for running our production on their consumer grade CPUs. I believe Hetzner and maybe also OVH have a much bigger role to play in the deployments of the future. The big cloud players are overplaying their hands, and it's becoming more and more attractive to run on bare metal as devops tooling improves.

rmoriz 5y ago
Fun story: Hetzner lost a colocation due to overheating like almost 20 years ago. Everyone has to learn over time that eventually adds up to deep domain knowledge. Both Hetzner and OVH have built custom solutions for buildings, climate and energy monitoring.
amenod 5y ago
Not only that, but for some deployments it is actually preferable to limit the amount of money you can pay. In other words, better for the service to be down than for the company or person to be bankrupt. Last I checked, that simply wasn't possible with AWS (no, alerts are not the same thing).
- p1necone 5y ago
  Imo that's a must have feature for any cloud hosting provider - I don't want to bankrupt my company/myself because I misconfigure something or write a bug. I recall there being discussion about it on HN before and a lot of people being confused as to why anyone needs it though.

cyral 5y ago

OVH does have great value, but they recently lost an entire DC to a fire: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire/millions-of-websites-offline-after-fire-at-french-cloud-services-firm-idUSKBN2B20NU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire/millions-...

celsoazevedo 5y ago

I recently moved from OVH to Hetzner as I could get better hardware for the same price. No issues so far, but OVH's network seems to be better, especially for people in other continents. Edit to add: - I'm using their Germany DCs, not the Finland one (which is cheaper but peering is worse). - Using a CDN does improve the latency/speed for users outside Europe, but it still influences performance as CDN exit point often connect directly to the origin to fetch uncached content. - I lost a VPS with OVH's DC fire, but I had backups somewhere else and fixed it quickly. A good thing about the lower prices is that I can have backups on multiple services (also cheap - Backblaze B2, for example) and still save money compared to AWS, Google Cloud, etc.

tetha 5y ago

I cannot share that experience with the hetzner support. We currently do have some weird problems with an hcloud-dedicated joined vlan and the network topology and support is a bit weird there. I'm hoping that'll improve, because then hetzner might become a prod leg for us. But besides that, both the cloud and dedicated support are very good. Last 10 - 20 HDDs we needed swapped were swapped in under 30 minutes each, and in some of the more complex issues, they were able to guide our engineer wherever they needed to be quickly. I've dealt with much, much worse hosters at multiples of that price.

cyanydeez 5y ago

ovh changed their login system, froze me out of payment and refused to respond to email. They're as on fire as their datacenters

comboy 5y ago

I tried OVH a few times and ran away every time. Currently have 10+ dedicated boxes at Hetzner and I'm taking time to write this comment because I like them that much. I only contacted support a few times during my 10+ years there but it was immediate response and to the point. I remember waiting 24h+ for OVH support with my service down (it was 5+ years ago though) and for Hetzner it was always in minutes. Can you elaborate why do you think they are unskilled?