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This one seems to be a very interesting option. Anyone having any experience with OVH? Would love to hear that.

by shail 13y ago

kilburn 13y ago
Long time (european) OVH customer here. We've had some 10 servers there for ~4 years. TL;DR: The hardware is cheap. You _must_ have spare servers and plan for failure because they _will_ fail from time to time. Avoid dealing with their support people (just replace the server when there's some problem with it) and you'll be fine. In more detail: - Renew servers monthly. This will let you drop any server at any point and only lose the remainder of that month's worth of server cost. - The hardware you get is cheap. This is generally not much of a problem, but you _must_ expect things to fail at some point. - They handle most of these failures pretty quickly. A failed motherboard gets replaced in less than 30min. usually. - The real PITA are the disk drives. They are _not_ enterprise disks, which means that their failure rate and performance loss over time is larger than what you are probably used to. - It is very hard to convince OVH to replace underperforming but operational disks. Basically, it is hard to convince them about any degradation that doesn't halt the server. The time you must spend to convince them is just not worth it: replace the server and call it a day. - Hence, you should always be ready to switch from one server to another. It's much easier to just rent a new server and cancel the older one than to make them acknowledge non-obvious hardware problems. - A good strategy is to rotate servers every 1 or 2 years (tops) to avoid getting to this point. - From time to time, a new server you rent is faulty. _Always_ test the hardware _extensively_ before you start using it. - There will be outages from time to time, but they are rare. When this happens, some of your servers will go offline for as much as 1h. Most of these problems are caused by power supply problems, which means that your server will get shut down uncleanly and may have problems coming back up. - Just for the fun: most of the outages are caused by them fking up while testing electrogen groups and/or backup power supplies. Sometimes we wish for them to not have any redundancy systems to test... All in all, the service is very good for that price, but you _must_ be prepared to handle failures.

This one seems to be a very interesting option. Anyone having any experience with OVH? Would love to hear that.

by shail 13y ago

This one seems to be a very interesting option. Anyone having any experience with OVH? Would love to hear that.

Long time (european) OVH customer here. We've had some 10 servers there for ~4 years. TL;DR: The hardware is cheap. You _must_ have spare servers and plan for failure because they _will_ fail from time to time. Avoid dealing with their support people (just replace the server when there's some problem with it) and you'll be fine. In more detail: - Renew servers monthly. This will let you drop any server at any point and only lose the remainder of that month's worth of server cost. - The hardware you get is cheap. This is generally not much of a problem, but you _must_ expect things to fail at some point. - They handle most of these failures pretty quickly. A failed motherboard gets replaced in less than 30min. usually. - The real PITA are the disk drives. They are _not_ enterprise disks, which means that their failure rate and performance loss over time is larger than what you are probably used to. - It is very hard to convince OVH to replace underperforming but operational disks. Basically, it is hard to convince them about any degradation that doesn't halt the server. The time you must spend to convince them is just not worth it: replace the server and call it a day. - Hence, you should always be ready to switch from one server to another. It's much easier to just rent a new server and cancel the older one than to make them acknowledge non-obvious hardware problems. - A good strategy is to rotate servers every 1 or 2 years (tops) to avoid getting to this point. - From time to time, a new server you rent is faulty. _Always_ test the hardware _extensively_ before you start using it. - There will be outages from time to time, but they are rare. When this happens, some of your servers will go offline for as much as 1h. Most of these problems are caused by power supply problems, which means that your server will get shut down uncleanly and may have problems coming back up. - Just for the fun: most of the outages are caused by them fking up while testing electrogen groups and/or backup power supplies. Sometimes we wish for them to not have any redundancy systems to test... All in all, the service is very good for that price, but you _must_ be prepared to handle failures.