15 ms·

OVH launches 2.99€/mo dedicated servers (2G RAM, 500G disk)

286 points by julien_c 13y ago

ck2 13y ago
Note these are atom based. But I bet nginx could still crank out static files from them. Translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&&act=url&u=http://forum.ovh.com/showthread.php?t=89592 http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre... We have 3 servers in the KS series: KS-2G ATOM powered with 2G of RAM, 500GB, 100Mbps 2.99e/mois. KS-4G 4GB of RAM, 2x500GB software raid 9.99e/mois KS-16G Core i5 with 16G, VT and 2x1TB 19.99e/mois 3 euros is $4 USD and 20 euros is $26.50 USD They are also on the UK site: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml That $26.50 server is currently $40 in the US (CA) http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi2.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi2.xml The real deal here IMHO is the i5 for $26.50, that cpu can run laps around the atom and can run in "turbo" mode near 3.5ghz all day.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  They're also great for backups.
- TillE 13y ago
  Even if it can't do serious web hosting of any kind, that's 500GB of storage for $4/month. Great solution for offsite backups, bearing in mind of course that there's no redundancy.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - lechevalierd3on 13y ago
    They used to have unmetered bandwidth, so you could also use them for big transfer.
  - chime 13y ago
    Pretty certain, like most hosts, they won't allow the storage to be used for remote backups. The 500GB is usually only for data/files being served/processed by the server.
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      With an encrypted volume, how on earth would they know?
    - nakkiel 13y ago
      These are physical, dedicated servers. You get full control over what's going on.
    - Wilya 13y ago
      It's dedicated hosting, not some shared managed thing. You do whatever you want with it.
    - pavs 13y ago
      Thats a dedicated server, you are confusing it with shared hosting.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - taneliv 13y ago
      I've been using a 1TB one for over a year as a backup, nothing was against this in the contract. Mind you, there's a 5TB per month traffic cap, after which the bandwidth is limited from 100Mbps down to 10Mbps.
- lechevalierd3on 13y ago
  e = € but this it before taxes. After taxes: 3.58€ 11.95€ and 23.91€ (= 31.61)
  - dwild 13y ago
    They remove tax if you're outside of France. I paid 2.99€/month (but then Paypal added their conversion fees, I paid 12,58$ CAD for 3 months.
- lelf 13y ago
  Info here: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.it/server_dedicati/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.it/server_dedicati/kimsufi.xml So for UK, prices are in £ :)
- bravura 13y ago
  For the benefit of those of us who don't know much about Atom, could you explain what the limitations are of using Atom for webserving?
  - Tuna-Fish 13y ago
    It is a very slow CPU designed for power efficiency, not speed. As such, it can be quite surprisingly slow, managing to limit a lot of loads that most devs take for granted these days.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    The Atom is Intel's weakest chip. It is designed for super-low power consumption, which means that they cost very little money to run. (so usually, data-centers like running them, because they don't use much electricity. Naturally, the savings are typically passed onto the consumer). The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad. It is still fully x86 compatible, its just slow. Roughly... the speed of a Pentium 4 or so. Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only, which means 4GB maximum RAM (not an issue for smaller webservers with only 2GB). Atoms tend to be best for I/O limited tasks. If you do video streaming for instance, the vast majority of your CPU power is going to be "wasted" on waiting for the Hard Drives and the Network. So the Atom makes a good, cheap CPU for that kind of task. For tasks with tons of computations, (ie: game servers), the Atom is woefully inadequate. You can purchase an Atom computer for ~$165: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-ZID60-U http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-ZID60-U. So play around with the performance yourself, and see if its enough.
    - benologist 13y ago
      Atoms predate iPads by approximately 11 billion years. They're the chips used in Windows-based netbooks, nettops etc.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      > Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only Some lines of Atoms since mid-2010 or so have supported x86_64. The Sxxxx "server" atoms released at the end of 2012 are all 64-bit-enabled, for example, although they can still only take 8GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265 http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265 I agree that this is mainly interesting if you're I/O-limited. Most benchmarks show a "regular" recent-gen Intel CPU performing around 5x-10x the Atom, so if you're CPU-limited, even a low-end VPS that gives you an average of 1/4 share of a core will probably outperform sole tenancy on an Atom core. But a high-contention VPS in most cases will give you much worse I/O performance. Also, the storage space and bandwidth quota here are much better than with a comparably priced VPS.
samarudge 13y ago
Page from the UK site with full specs and prices in £ https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml
alexchamberlain 13y ago
Wow! I'm taken down my VMs this weekend.
- alexchamberlain 13y ago
  Hmmmmmmmmm Debian (the sensible choice) or Arch (the slightly more interesting one)?
  - replax 13y ago
    Go for Arch! Enjoy pacman and be on the bleeding edge. Added bonus: new performance improvements will hit your tiny server faster, thus: more speed :)!
  - charliesome 13y ago
    Arch is definitely a viable option for a personal server.
  - puzzlingcaptcha 13y ago
    I have run Arch for two years on a tiny personal server. It is fun but depending on how you use it and what Alan is currently breaking, it can be a lot of fiddling. Just as one example, sysvinit - systemd migration took some careful file editing not to botch things remotely. At one point, merging all binaries in /usr/bin incentivized me to move from the no longer supported GRUB-legacy to GRUB2. GRUB2 installer failed leaving a zombie process that prevented anything from touching the mbr... I wiped it, installed Wheezy and I can tell you that it requires far less maintenance and you can still pull bits and pieces from testing if you really want to.
txutxu 13y ago
By the price of two coffees you get a server connected to internet. When I started with this, the price of a server was the salary of an adult of medium class working during one year (and you got it without connection to internet, neither hosting facilities)... I wish the price of technology at home (devices, connections, etc), could go down the same way for everybody.
- UVB-76 13y ago
  Where do you get two coffees for less than €2.99?!
  - rg3 13y ago
    I can't speak for the OP, but where I live in Spain it's not uncommon for a standard coffee to be about... €1.2 to €1.5.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Here in Portugal, a €0.70 coffee is somewhat expensive ;) That said, it should be noted that here in the Iberian Peninsula we just mean coffee, not buckets of water, cream, sugar and milk with some coffee mixed in, like those served at Starbucks.
  - nextweek2 13y ago
    Go to a good English greasy spoon rather than a posh coffee shop.
    - andyking 13y ago
      Those places usually sell you a cup of cheap supermarket instant coffee...
  - ttsda 13y ago
    Here in Portugal a cup coffee usually costs between 0.50€ and 1€
DanBlake 13y ago
Any bandwidth included? If not, how much is transfer?
- GBiT 13y ago
  100 mbit up until 3 TB, later 10 mbit cap.
  - UVB-76 13y ago
    Note traffic within the OVH network isn't counted. For certain applications (which you may or may not know about) that's quite significant.
    - jrn 13y ago
      Between ovh datacentres as well? If I have servers, in ovh canada, uk, and france?
      - UVB-76 13y ago
        T&Cs [1] state: > 3.7 Traffic within the OVH network is not recorded. [1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/support/termsofservice/Special_Conditions_VKS.pdf https://www.ovh.co.uk/support/termsofservice/Special_Conditi...
    - glomph 13y ago
      But these are Atom based meaning they are not great for a part of those certain applications :p
    - axus 13y ago
      Ooh, ooh, I know, you mean BitTorrent seeding.
      - UVB-76 13y ago
        Indeed. For the uninitiated, I would venture to guess a majority of OVH network traffic is BitTorrent.
kephra 13y ago
I wonder what price is shown to US, UK and French customers? German customers have to pay €3.99 for KS2G. The German price should be 1 cent cheaper, and not 1 Euro more expensive, as French VAT is 19.6% while German VAT is 19%. See http://www.ovh.de/dedicated_server/isgenug.xml http://www.ovh.de/dedicated_server/isgenug.xml if this is possible outside Germany. You can not see ovh.com inside Germany, as ovh.com is redirected to ovh.de.
- Wilya 13y ago
  The french site http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ (not sure it's accessible outside France) shows the new prices. It seems the german site hasn't been updated yet.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  ovh.ie (Ireland) shows €2.99 for KS2G with VAT at 23%.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  On the german site the prices are shown including taxes, on the others excluding taxes. It's minor differences from rounding to "nice" numbers.
autotravis 13y ago
Where are these located? I'm wondering how bad latency from the U.S. would be...
- julien_c 13y ago
  Roubaix (North of France). Try pinging productism.com and report the ping from where you are? Data center list: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/data_centre_selection.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/data_centre_selection...
  - freehunter 13y ago
    112ms from Michigan, USA.
    - julien_c 13y ago
      Sounds high. Should be closer to 60-70ms from the East Coast.
      - diydsp 13y ago
        From Metro Boston: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 100.297/104.900/110.846/3.406 ms
      - pridkett 13y ago
        From New York on a major corporate network: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 75.940/79.012/81.289/1.950 ms That's similar to the ping times to my current VPS on the West Coast.
      - freehunter 13y ago
        Well, Michigan isn't exactly "east coast".
      - fictorial 13y ago
        From NY on FiOS: ~80ms ping
  - 13y ago
talles 13y ago
Amazing for the disk space. Anyone recommends the company? Never heard of.
- Wiz 13y ago
  In my opinion they are number one in France. Their European network is nice too. The US one is rather new, I have no idea but be warned that theses new servers are not available at their American (Beauharnois, Canada) datacenter.
- reidrac 13y ago
  "Since 2012 the company has been classed as the largest server host in the world" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovh Don't know if the Wikipedia is correct, but I know them (I'm in EU).
  - nakkiel 13y ago
    It's correct, in terms of physical servers installed. That said, there's no reliable comparison (that I know of) with VPS instances hosted by well known US companies (such as Amazon) because they are not quite as willing to release figures.
    - oijaf888 13y ago
      While it wouldn't cover VPC clients you can get a max figure by looking at the number of ip addresses allocated to AWS. They list them all here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 I think the last time I did the math it worked out to something like 2M addresses in US-EAST.
- adventured 13y ago
  OVH is a very large dedicated hosting company. They now have a nice location in North America (Montreal) as well, with tremendous prices. They generally get solid reviews. If I had to peg them, it'd be a B rating or 8 out of 10. Weak customer service, but you can pay a modest fee and get immediate attention. Their hardware is solid. Whether you use them or not is probably down to three issues: do you need managed servers and rapid response from a tech inside the company; if you need US based hosting, they don't offer that, but the Montreal location gets great speeds to most of the US; the listed kimsufi servers are obviously located in Europe.
DigitalJack 13y ago
That VAT costs more than the service. Hard to believe.
- seszett 13y ago
  > £2.49 excl. VAT /month > ( £2.99 VAT inc) That's £2.69 service and £0.50 VAT. Seems reasonable to me.
- jamescun 13y ago
  How can VAT cost more than the service itself, when VAT is set at 20% of the cost? (I believe its £2.49 without VAT, £2.99 with VAT included)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > That VAT costs more than the service. I suspect the error here is confusing the VAT inclusive cost with the cost of the VAT alone.
- xur17 13y ago
  Try ovh.ie. You have to send proof of address, but you don't have to pay VAT if you live in the US.
andrewmunsell 13y ago
Another interesting use may be for an always-on BitTorrent Sync node. I have a Raspberry Pi for this purpose, but the 500 GB of storage space is much better than the 16 GB SD card I currently have.
- aioprisan 13y ago
  You can always attach an external usb drive to your PI. I built a Time Capsule drive with my Pi, works flawlessly through network storage.
  - lechatleon 13y ago
    Also, a KS has 100mbps bp.
  - mthoms 13y ago
    Do you have a link with more info on this setup?
    - andrewmunsell 13y ago
      I've never tried it, but something like this should work: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=47029 http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=47029 It's a similar process to setting up Netatalk on any Ubuntu server to get Apple computers to recognize a Linux server as a Time Machine endpoint.
      - krbbltr 13y ago
        It should be noted that the Pi is really, really slow. Too slow for this sort of application, IMHO. An actual Time Capsule can be annoyingly slow sometimes, and I would expect it to be about five to ten times as fast as a Pi-based solution. The link you posted has some good advice though. Like not using HFS+. Apart from HFS+ arguably being an antiquated filesystem, the Linux driver is in a horrible state and will cause corruption when used in rw mode. ext4 is the sensible choice.
  - 13y ago
josephby 13y ago
Anyone try this yet? Do they include any sort of remote console access?
- MarkHarmon 13y ago
  See my reply above, basically if you are outside the UK then it looks like you won't be able to complete the order form truthfully.
  - xur17 13y ago
    Try this site: https://www.ovh.ie/order/kimsufi.cgi https://www.ovh.ie/order/kimsufi.cgi
- wlk 13y ago
  I don't think it's there. Kimsufi is a low cost alternative to normal OVH services. I have few kimsufi servers for over year now and I never had to use remote console there.
  - wlk 13y ago
    Just to add, I have found that really only options that are available are: * hardware reboot * os reinstalation But there is a option called "netboot" which looks like it might be what you are looking for, but unfortunately I can't try it now on any of my servers.
    - Wilya 13y ago
      Netboot enables you to boot in a rescue environment. From there, you can usually mount your disk, do some basic tests, and fix mistakes. Not as efficient as a direct console access, but for the occasional "Oh , I just firewalled myself" moment, it's enough.
      - josephby 13y ago
        Thanks; so basically if you bork your box your options are (1) netboot, and failing that (2) reinstall the OS. Reasonable enough, for the price. I suppose that this is why we have Chef and Puppet
MarkHarmon 13y ago
I just tried to order and it only let me choose from one country (for my personal address) and that is UK. No option to select USA.
- zzzcpan 13y ago
  You have to use their french website to select other countries: http://www.ovh.com/fr/index.xml http://www.ovh.com/fr/index.xml
  - cma 13y ago
    They removed the US as an option
    - zzzcpan 13y ago
      No, it's there, follow this link, order something, it will allow you to create new contact with United States as your country: https://www.ovh.com/fr/commande/kimsufi.cgi?hard=134sk1 https://www.ovh.com/fr/commande/kimsufi.cgi?hard=134sk1 At this point it doesn't matter what to order, you will have to place your order again once VAT is removed from your account.
      - rhema 13y ago
        Just did this. Now (in french of course) they want me to send an email to verify my identity with a scan of my drivers license or passport before being able to purchase. Not sure if I want to do that...
qwd 13y ago
I am using the US version of their dedicated server to run URL unshortening API service http://api.unshort.me/api.html http://api.unshort.me/api.html . The web stack is Nginx + Python (Flask) + Couchbase. So far, I haven't notice any issue with their server.
- dylz 13y ago
  You mean Canadia
ukandy 13y ago
DC photos can be found at https://lafibre.info/datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-1/ https://lafibre.info/datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-1/. It doesn't get any cheaper than that. I'm guessing they buy mini-itx boards from China by the container load.
- zschallz 13y ago
  This is their data center in Roubaix. The datacenter these new dedicated servers are available in is in their new datacenter, Graveline (Graveline France). Probably similar spec, though.
- opendais 13y ago
  Aye. But if you are paying less than $75/month for a dedicated server, what do you expect? XD
- tobeportable 13y ago
  some more media : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QoIG7sEBf0&list=TLJpXLs0uN70Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QoIG7sEBf0&list=TLJpXLs0uN7...
superuser2 13y ago
This is very exciting, but appears to be UK only. The only country available on the selection is UK and it wants a UK address.
- wlk 13y ago
  This is for every kimsufi offer, by default kimsufi.com redirects me to http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ but you have to add different coutry TLD to see prices in different currencies.
- spindritf 13y ago
  You need to go to the appropriate OVH site for your country. OVH.es for Spain, OVH.pl for Poland, etc.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Kimusufi.com did not have this offer and kimsufi.us is something else entirely, but kimsufi.ie seems to accept Americans.
porker 13y ago
Are they using ECC or non-ECC RAM in the server? I'm guessing the latter, can't find evidence either way.
- Macha 13y ago
  I checked on my OVH server, and using the method here (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10510/how-to-detect-memory-type-under-linux http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10510/how-to-detect-...) seems to imply that it's non-ECC RAM as the total width and data width are both 64 bits.
- alexchamberlain 13y ago
  What are the advantages/disadvantages of either?
  - icebraining 13y ago
    ECC Ram has a checksum that can correct one wrong bit in memory and detect two wrong bits in memory.
- perryh2 13y ago
  They are all using non-ECC. These are not Intel Xeon's.
  - Ecio78 13y ago
    Atom could support ECC: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Atom/Intel-Atom%20S1240.html http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Atom/Intel-Atom%20S1240.html
jschulenklopper 13y ago
Next to this, it is a little unfortunate that just two days ago OVH announced on their forum (http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070 http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070) that an attacker had gained control of a system administrator's account, and used that to gain access to a VPN account of one of the firm's backoffice staff. That again was used to get the personal data of customers in Europe and from a hosting firm in Canada. Well, at least they are being open about this, but from the forum it seems the security incident is still open.
metal 13y ago
Is there a way to get the 2.99 euro price from the US? How about from Canada?
- dcc1 13y ago
  order with OVH.IE
haddr 13y ago
the price is actually in pounds, not in euro. (still cheap however)
anonymous 13y ago
Hmm, that's all nice, but what about securing my data against snooping? I'm wondering specifically how I would prevent people from snooping data while in transit (MITM) and prevent someone with physical access to the hard drive from reading my bits? To simplify the question, assume I just want to store and retrieve plain files. Bonus points if I can also safely share them in some way (i.e. share one file without also giving up security on the rest).
- joeyh 13y ago
  For backup, you could use duplicity or obnam, both of which gpg encrypt incremental backups. For file storage, you can use git-annex which gpg encrypts data stored on rsync special remotes. I hope to add gpg encrypted git repositories to it soon too. Or tahoe-lafs, which encrypts files and allows sharing them by sharing a special url.
- skolor 13y ago
  What? Encrypt it on your system, store the encrypted blob there. Add a simple web server to host them. If you do any crypto on these servers, obviously anyone with physical access could compromise it (although potentially not without alerting you that it had been).
- X-Istence 13y ago
  Set up VPN...
nimo 13y ago
No doubt the new rates for their dedicated servers are in response to hetzner's new rates. ISPs seem to have this unfortunate ability to retain ridiculous profit margins indefinitely. I guess the tactic is quite simple: Be extortionate while you have market share. Undercut your opponents when it starts being threatened. Not that I'm complaining when stuff like this happens, I like OVH, sometimes.
bluedino 13y ago
Anybody have one of these that can benchmark it against a $5 Digital Ocean VPS? $2.99 is a crazy price for a dedi.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  It's 2.99 euro, or $3.97 (not $2.99). Still under $5, though.
presty 13y ago
would this be a good fit for storing and serving lots of images?
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  Yes. In fact that'd be a perfect use for this given the low-powered CPU. Just make sure you have decent backups and replication to protect against node failure.
dgoujard 13y ago
Additional information: You can't add ip failover on your server. i ordered one 3€ server
seivan 13y ago
Why would you want to host your stuff on a company who's CEO isn't developer-friendly?
- blacktulip 13y ago
  Because it is budget friendly. Sad, I know. But true.
- muyuu 13y ago
  Not developer-friendly??
  - icebraining 13y ago
    He's talking about his tweets on how he prohibits his devs from posting on Github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6064087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6064087
    - muyuu 13y ago
      I see. That's totally unrelated to their service though. Lots of companies have an exclusivity policy. Nothing to do with whatever development happens in their servers done by their customers.
mrb 13y ago
OVH is much less expensive than Amazon EC2... Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon. Well OVH proves this is possible. This OVH dedicated server is comparable to an Amazon EC2 Standard small (m1.small) instance. Taking an Amazon reserved instance, "heavy utilization" (to minimize cost), and in their less expensive region, with a 1-year term, the upfront payment is $169 plus $0.014 per hour, which amounts to $24.30 per month. Compare this to OVH is only 3€, that is $4.00 per month... 1/6th the price! And OVH has 500GB storage vs 160GB for Amazon!
- hackerboos 13y ago
  >Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon Yes but EC2 is a cloud provider and these are dedicated machines which are harder to scale without setting up a complex cluster.
  - Tobu 13y ago
    They have this in beta: https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml
  - dgoujard 13y ago
    You have API to order new server on OVH but it's not delivery instant
- yashg 13y ago
  People don't use AWS because it's cheap. People use it because its scalable. You can deploy hundreds of new servers in minutes literally to meet any demand. You pay for that flexibility.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    People use it because they think they need the scalability. The reality is that almost nobody that use EC2 have the ability to scale up or down that quickly, and even fewer needs it: Most sites have a fairly stable base load, and most dedicated providers these day can provision in less than 24 hours, so you at most need the ability to handle short spikes or growth over hours rather than days. And EC2 is expensive enough that you can handle huge variations by buying extra dedicated capacity to cope. But the (far) cheaper option still is to handle your base load on a cheaper provider, and build your system to be able to scale using EC2 or another cloud provider to handle spikes. WIth more and more providers providing "hybrid" services with colocation, dedicated, dedicated vms (single vm per physical server), and cloud servers all (or most) on offer from one location, this gets even easier - you can sometimes even get virtual private lans across dedicated and cloud servers without having to mess with your own vpn or pay for the bandwidth
wcfields 13y ago
Can't just signup right away, they require: Proof of ID: ID card Driving Licence Passport Proof of address: Utility bill (Gas, electricity, phone) Bank statement Official correspondence
- DocG 13y ago
  Thats bad. Means I can't sign up at all. a)I dislike giving so much information up b)I don't have proof of address (Outside us, nothing is on my name because it's cheaper that way)
  - superuser2 13y ago
    >a) I dislike giving so much information up... How do you ever make a credit card transaction online without giving up your name and address? That's pretty much standard every time fiat currency changes hands on the internet.
    - DocG 13y ago
      I don't like giving up my address. I know they do still need my name. I am not trying to be untraceable, I am just against everyone collecting information about me. I don't think they usually confirm my billing address(haven't bought anything in a while where I don't need shipping address anyway) Also, I am using virtual credit card + debit with credit card possibilities. EDIT: My bank does not require confirmation on my home address. I have random numbers and address there.
      - superuser2 13y ago
        Interesting. The know-your-customer rules in the PATRIOT Act pretty much require that banks verify home addressees now. Were you grandfathered or something?
        DocG 13y ago
        Mentioned before, living outside US. In a small country in EU. I can't also sign up to mt gox because they don't accept my proofs.
harrytuttle 13y ago
I use http://bigv.io/ http://bigv.io/ - much better and local to me. There is only a few beers difference between €2.99 and £12 a month... They are VMs but they perform better than a dedicated Atom from my testing.
- JosephRedfern 13y ago
  Do they perform x4.65 better than a dedicated Atom?
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    No but they work, get provisioned within 5 minutes, have decent support, are faster and can be upgraded on the fly to 2TiB SATA, 2TiB 15K SAS, 2TiB SSD, 180GiB RAM, 16 cores without having to reinstall anything... That's more than 4.65x better.
    - mattmanser 13y ago
      That's a VM, not a dedicated machine. Big, big difference.
      - harrytuttle 13y ago
        Yep having managed both for years, give me a VM any day.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- thenomad 13y ago
  I also use BigV, and can confirm that they're hella solid for a cloud service. Plus, their custom Linux distro, Symbiosis, makes a quick setup of a new site considerably quicker.
- thejosh 13y ago
eertami 13y ago
Well... for 9GBP for 3 months, might as well just buy one and see if it is any good. If not, that's fine.
syncopate 13y ago
I tried to register but it seems that one has to have a UK address for that. That's a pity...
JohnHaugeland 13y ago
This company requires extremely invasive amounts of personal information - going as far as to ask for your drivers' license and a home utility bill. They also just got severely owned the other week. So you can trust that the extreme invasion of privacy won't get straight to the wrong people. http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=d2344fbaf05bddbe375071d4ec197f41 http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=d2344fba...
- killnine 13y ago
  Thank you! I can not bElieve I had to page down beyond 50% to see mention of this. Come on guys! This company has major security issues on top of the fact they are way overstepping in the personal data they require. I can't think of many better strategies than big sales right after a major hack when customers are dropping like flies
felixvolny 13y ago
I wonder how one of these Atom powered servers compares to a free EC2 T1-micro instance. This is kind of apples and oranges , since this is a dedicated server, but I'm not sure if you'd really get a lot more out of them.
eldavido 13y ago
Not sure who they're targeting with this. Small guys will go with AWS as it's not worth the risk of using an untested provider to save a few dollars, big guys will likely build their own datacenter/on-premise compute grid.
- zschallz 13y ago
  Feels like they're targeting the hobby-box market. I picked up the 16gb model because I think it will make my life a bit easier by moving most of my virtual machines away from home. For the price, the hardware necessary is about $500, which is roughly 26 months of paying OVH.
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  > untested provider untested? OVH is one of the top-5 ISPs world-wide. They are anything but untested.
nly 13y ago
This is perfect. I have a $4 VPS in the States that is crapping out with 50% packet loss in the evenings... and that only has 500GB tranny, 20GB disk and 256 MiB RAM.
imperio59 13y ago
FWIW I switched the company I interned at in Paris to using OVH and was very pleased with their website and tech support. The server we ordered was available quickly, their tools were easy to use yet very powerful. I also cut costs while getting a better server than from that company's previous provider...
rfatnabayeff 13y ago
How can I order it from Russia?
yashg 13y ago
There's one catch - there are prepaid servers. You need to pay for 3, 6 or 12 months in advance.
chatmasta 13y ago
Could someone explain to me why a business would enter the hosting industry with minimum operating margins? My guess is that OVH plans to offer more premium servers, for greater margins, after it acquires customers. Increase profit margins with upgrades. The more premium the server, the higher the profit margin.
- julien_c 13y ago
  OVH is not really entering the hosting industry at this point.
  - iSloth 13y ago
    Yeh they are already vasily in it...
- nolok 13y ago
  OVH is the leading hosting company in Europe and the fourth in the world (according to netcraft). They created the sub-brand kimsufi (which this article is about) a few years ago to go into the low cost market, and are now going even deeper into it, but it is still a sub-brand, look at ovh.com and you see actual premium servers (although still low priced when compared to american hosting companies)
tjosten 13y ago
You might want to consider if you want to go to OVH, because they recently had a security breach. http://status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=f988fc8bbe16944daf564c6dabbcdc58 http://status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=f988fc8b...
gkoz 13y ago
After jumping through various hoops I had their support tell me this: The Kimsufi 2 G offer is only for members of the EU.
- _delirium 13y ago
  What I gather from some other reports: 1. The French site will only sell to EU residents 2. The UK site will only sell to UK residents 3. The Irish site will sell to Irish, Canadian, and US residents So it's not strictly true that it's only for members of the EU, but Canada/US seem to be the only exceptions, and only if you order from ovh.ie.
superuser2 13y ago
I jumped on this right away and still have not seen even acknowledgement of my identity documents. Has anyone else had success getting this working?
- xur17 13y ago
  I haven't received a response yet either. I'm assuming they are currently overwhelmed with people that are interested. It looks like support for sales is only there M-F also.
xur17 13y ago
Has anyone else tried purchasing a server from the US? The require you to send proof of id, but I haven't received a response from the yet (I sent it 2 days ago).
Ellipsis753 13y ago
I ordered mine very quickly when it said I would get it within 24 hours. However it's now been days and no dice. They sent me the IP of the server but it's stuck on "installing OS". Quite honestly I really assumed the installing process would be automated. Has anyone got there server yet? (or are you still waiting?)
superuser2 13y ago
In case anyone tries this: I called customer service (via Skype) to find out when I could expect my server to be online, and was told that OVH has temporarily discontinued Kimsufi sales to the US. The rep confirmed that it is a temporary ban, but had no information on when it might be lifted. So I guess it was too good to be true.

286 points by julien_c 13y ago

ck2 13y ago

Note these are atom based. But I bet nginx could still crank out static files from them. Translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&&act=url&u=http://forum.ovh.com/showthread.php?t=89592 http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre... We have 3 servers in the KS series: KS-2G ATOM powered with 2G of RAM, 500GB, 100Mbps 2.99e/mois. KS-4G 4GB of RAM, 2x500GB software raid 9.99e/mois KS-16G Core i5 with 16G, VT and 2x1TB 19.99e/mois 3 euros is $4 USD and 20 euros is $26.50 USD They are also on the UK site: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml That $26.50 server is currently $40 in the US (CA) http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi2.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi2.xml The real deal here IMHO is the i5 for $26.50, that cpu can run laps around the atom and can run in "turbo" mode near 3.5ghz all day.

StavrosK 13y ago
They're also great for backups.
TillE 13y ago
Even if it can't do serious web hosting of any kind, that's 500GB of storage for $4/month. Great solution for offsite backups, bearing in mind of course that there's no redundancy.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lechevalierd3on 13y ago
  They used to have unmetered bandwidth, so you could also use them for big transfer.
- chime 13y ago
  Pretty certain, like most hosts, they won't allow the storage to be used for remote backups. The 500GB is usually only for data/files being served/processed by the server.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    With an encrypted volume, how on earth would they know?
  - nakkiel 13y ago
    These are physical, dedicated servers. You get full control over what's going on.
  - Wilya 13y ago
    It's dedicated hosting, not some shared managed thing. You do whatever you want with it.
  - pavs 13y ago
    Thats a dedicated server, you are confusing it with shared hosting.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - taneliv 13y ago
    I've been using a 1TB one for over a year as a backup, nothing was against this in the contract. Mind you, there's a 5TB per month traffic cap, after which the bandwidth is limited from 100Mbps down to 10Mbps.
lechevalierd3on 13y ago
e = € but this it before taxes. After taxes: 3.58€ 11.95€ and 23.91€ (= 31.61)
- dwild 13y ago
  They remove tax if you're outside of France. I paid 2.99€/month (but then Paypal added their conversion fees, I paid 12,58$ CAD for 3 months.
lelf 13y ago
Info here: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.it/server_dedicati/kimsufi.xml http://www.ovh.it/server_dedicati/kimsufi.xml So for UK, prices are in £ :)
bravura 13y ago
For the benefit of those of us who don't know much about Atom, could you explain what the limitations are of using Atom for webserving?
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  It is a very slow CPU designed for power efficiency, not speed. As such, it can be quite surprisingly slow, managing to limit a lot of loads that most devs take for granted these days.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  The Atom is Intel's weakest chip. It is designed for super-low power consumption, which means that they cost very little money to run. (so usually, data-centers like running them, because they don't use much electricity. Naturally, the savings are typically passed onto the consumer). The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad. It is still fully x86 compatible, its just slow. Roughly... the speed of a Pentium 4 or so. Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only, which means 4GB maximum RAM (not an issue for smaller webservers with only 2GB). Atoms tend to be best for I/O limited tasks. If you do video streaming for instance, the vast majority of your CPU power is going to be "wasted" on waiting for the Hard Drives and the Network. So the Atom makes a good, cheap CPU for that kind of task. For tasks with tons of computations, (ie: game servers), the Atom is woefully inadequate. You can purchase an Atom computer for ~$165: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-ZID60-U http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-ZID60-U. So play around with the performance yourself, and see if its enough.
  - benologist 13y ago
    Atoms predate iPads by approximately 11 billion years. They're the chips used in Windows-based netbooks, nettops etc.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    > Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only Some lines of Atoms since mid-2010 or so have supported x86_64. The Sxxxx "server" atoms released at the end of 2012 are all 64-bit-enabled, for example, although they can still only take 8GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265 http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265 I agree that this is mainly interesting if you're I/O-limited. Most benchmarks show a "regular" recent-gen Intel CPU performing around 5x-10x the Atom, so if you're CPU-limited, even a low-end VPS that gives you an average of 1/4 share of a core will probably outperform sole tenancy on an Atom core. But a high-contention VPS in most cases will give you much worse I/O performance. Also, the storage space and bandwidth quota here are much better than with a comparably priced VPS.

samarudge 13y ago

Page from the UK site with full specs and prices in £ https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml

alexchamberlain 13y ago

Wow! I'm taken down my VMs this weekend.

alexchamberlain 13y ago
Hmmmmmmmmm Debian (the sensible choice) or Arch (the slightly more interesting one)?
- replax 13y ago
  Go for Arch! Enjoy pacman and be on the bleeding edge. Added bonus: new performance improvements will hit your tiny server faster, thus: more speed :)!
- charliesome 13y ago
  Arch is definitely a viable option for a personal server.
- puzzlingcaptcha 13y ago
  I have run Arch for two years on a tiny personal server. It is fun but depending on how you use it and what Alan is currently breaking, it can be a lot of fiddling. Just as one example, sysvinit - systemd migration took some careful file editing not to botch things remotely. At one point, merging all binaries in /usr/bin incentivized me to move from the no longer supported GRUB-legacy to GRUB2. GRUB2 installer failed leaving a zombie process that prevented anything from touching the mbr... I wiped it, installed Wheezy and I can tell you that it requires far less maintenance and you can still pull bits and pieces from testing if you really want to.

txutxu 13y ago

By the price of two coffees you get a server connected to internet. When I started with this, the price of a server was the salary of an adult of medium class working during one year (and you got it without connection to internet, neither hosting facilities)... I wish the price of technology at home (devices, connections, etc), could go down the same way for everybody.

UVB-76 13y ago
Where do you get two coffees for less than €2.99?!
- rg3 13y ago
  I can't speak for the OP, but where I live in Spain it's not uncommon for a standard coffee to be about... €1.2 to €1.5.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Here in Portugal, a €0.70 coffee is somewhat expensive ;) That said, it should be noted that here in the Iberian Peninsula we just mean coffee, not buckets of water, cream, sugar and milk with some coffee mixed in, like those served at Starbucks.
- nextweek2 13y ago
  Go to a good English greasy spoon rather than a posh coffee shop.
  - andyking 13y ago
    Those places usually sell you a cup of cheap supermarket instant coffee...
- ttsda 13y ago
  Here in Portugal a cup coffee usually costs between 0.50€ and 1€

DanBlake 13y ago

Any bandwidth included? If not, how much is transfer?

GBiT 13y ago
100 mbit up until 3 TB, later 10 mbit cap.
- UVB-76 13y ago
  Note traffic within the OVH network isn't counted. For certain applications (which you may or may not know about) that's quite significant.
  - jrn 13y ago
    Between ovh datacentres as well? If I have servers, in ovh canada, uk, and france?
    - UVB-76 13y ago
      T&Cs [1] state: > 3.7 Traffic within the OVH network is not recorded. [1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/support/termsofservice/Special_Conditions_VKS.pdf https://www.ovh.co.uk/support/termsofservice/Special_Conditi...
  - glomph 13y ago
    But these are Atom based meaning they are not great for a part of those certain applications :p
  - axus 13y ago
    Ooh, ooh, I know, you mean BitTorrent seeding.
    - UVB-76 13y ago
      Indeed. For the uninitiated, I would venture to guess a majority of OVH network traffic is BitTorrent.

kephra 13y ago

I wonder what price is shown to US, UK and French customers? German customers have to pay €3.99 for KS2G. The German price should be 1 cent cheaper, and not 1 Euro more expensive, as French VAT is 19.6% while German VAT is 19%. See http://www.ovh.de/dedicated_server/isgenug.xml http://www.ovh.de/dedicated_server/isgenug.xml if this is possible outside Germany. You can not see ovh.com inside Germany, as ovh.com is redirected to ovh.de.

Wilya 13y ago
The french site http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ (not sure it's accessible outside France) shows the new prices. It seems the german site hasn't been updated yet.
yapcguy 13y ago
ovh.ie (Ireland) shows €2.99 for KS2G with VAT at 23%.
aw3c2 13y ago
On the german site the prices are shown including taxes, on the others excluding taxes. It's minor differences from rounding to "nice" numbers.

autotravis 13y ago

Where are these located? I'm wondering how bad latency from the U.S. would be...

julien_c 13y ago
Roubaix (North of France). Try pinging productism.com and report the ping from where you are? Data center list: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/data_centre_selection.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/data_centre_selection...
- freehunter 13y ago
  112ms from Michigan, USA.
  - julien_c 13y ago
    Sounds high. Should be closer to 60-70ms from the East Coast.
    - diydsp 13y ago
      From Metro Boston: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 100.297/104.900/110.846/3.406 ms
    - pridkett 13y ago
      From New York on a major corporate network: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 75.940/79.012/81.289/1.950 ms That's similar to the ping times to my current VPS on the West Coast.
    - freehunter 13y ago
      Well, Michigan isn't exactly "east coast".
    - fictorial 13y ago
      From NY on FiOS: ~80ms ping
- 13y ago

talles 13y ago

Amazing for the disk space. Anyone recommends the company? Never heard of.

Wiz 13y ago
In my opinion they are number one in France. Their European network is nice too. The US one is rather new, I have no idea but be warned that theses new servers are not available at their American (Beauharnois, Canada) datacenter.
reidrac 13y ago
"Since 2012 the company has been classed as the largest server host in the world" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovh Don't know if the Wikipedia is correct, but I know them (I'm in EU).
- nakkiel 13y ago
  It's correct, in terms of physical servers installed. That said, there's no reliable comparison (that I know of) with VPS instances hosted by well known US companies (such as Amazon) because they are not quite as willing to release figures.
  - oijaf888 13y ago
    While it wouldn't cover VPC clients you can get a max figure by looking at the number of ip addresses allocated to AWS. They list them all here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 I think the last time I did the math it worked out to something like 2M addresses in US-EAST.
adventured 13y ago
OVH is a very large dedicated hosting company. They now have a nice location in North America (Montreal) as well, with tremendous prices. They generally get solid reviews. If I had to peg them, it'd be a B rating or 8 out of 10. Weak customer service, but you can pay a modest fee and get immediate attention. Their hardware is solid. Whether you use them or not is probably down to three issues: do you need managed servers and rapid response from a tech inside the company; if you need US based hosting, they don't offer that, but the Montreal location gets great speeds to most of the US; the listed kimsufi servers are obviously located in Europe.

DigitalJack 13y ago

That VAT costs more than the service. Hard to believe.

seszett 13y ago
> £2.49 excl. VAT /month > ( £2.99 VAT inc) That's £2.69 service and £0.50 VAT. Seems reasonable to me.
jamescun 13y ago
How can VAT cost more than the service itself, when VAT is set at 20% of the cost? (I believe its £2.49 without VAT, £2.99 with VAT included)
dragonwriter 13y ago
> That VAT costs more than the service. I suspect the error here is confusing the VAT inclusive cost with the cost of the VAT alone.
xur17 13y ago
Try ovh.ie. You have to send proof of address, but you don't have to pay VAT if you live in the US.

andrewmunsell 13y ago

Another interesting use may be for an always-on BitTorrent Sync node. I have a Raspberry Pi for this purpose, but the 500 GB of storage space is much better than the 16 GB SD card I currently have.

aioprisan 13y ago
You can always attach an external usb drive to your PI. I built a Time Capsule drive with my Pi, works flawlessly through network storage.
- lechatleon 13y ago
  Also, a KS has 100mbps bp.
- mthoms 13y ago
  Do you have a link with more info on this setup?
  - andrewmunsell 13y ago
    I've never tried it, but something like this should work: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=47029 http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=47029 It's a similar process to setting up Netatalk on any Ubuntu server to get Apple computers to recognize a Linux server as a Time Machine endpoint.
    - krbbltr 13y ago
      It should be noted that the Pi is really, really slow. Too slow for this sort of application, IMHO. An actual Time Capsule can be annoyingly slow sometimes, and I would expect it to be about five to ten times as fast as a Pi-based solution. The link you posted has some good advice though. Like not using HFS+. Apart from HFS+ arguably being an antiquated filesystem, the Linux driver is in a horrible state and will cause corruption when used in rw mode. ext4 is the sensible choice.
- 13y ago

josephby 13y ago

Anyone try this yet? Do they include any sort of remote console access?

MarkHarmon 13y ago
See my reply above, basically if you are outside the UK then it looks like you won't be able to complete the order form truthfully.
- xur17 13y ago
  Try this site: https://www.ovh.ie/order/kimsufi.cgi https://www.ovh.ie/order/kimsufi.cgi
wlk 13y ago
I don't think it's there. Kimsufi is a low cost alternative to normal OVH services. I have few kimsufi servers for over year now and I never had to use remote console there.
- wlk 13y ago
  Just to add, I have found that really only options that are available are: * hardware reboot * os reinstalation But there is a option called "netboot" which looks like it might be what you are looking for, but unfortunately I can't try it now on any of my servers.
  - Wilya 13y ago
    Netboot enables you to boot in a rescue environment. From there, you can usually mount your disk, do some basic tests, and fix mistakes. Not as efficient as a direct console access, but for the occasional "Oh , I just firewalled myself" moment, it's enough.
    - josephby 13y ago
      Thanks; so basically if you bork your box your options are (1) netboot, and failing that (2) reinstall the OS. Reasonable enough, for the price. I suppose that this is why we have Chef and Puppet

MarkHarmon 13y ago

I just tried to order and it only let me choose from one country (for my personal address) and that is UK. No option to select USA.

zzzcpan 13y ago
You have to use their french website to select other countries: http://www.ovh.com/fr/index.xml http://www.ovh.com/fr/index.xml
- cma 13y ago
  They removed the US as an option
  - zzzcpan 13y ago
    No, it's there, follow this link, order something, it will allow you to create new contact with United States as your country: https://www.ovh.com/fr/commande/kimsufi.cgi?hard=134sk1 https://www.ovh.com/fr/commande/kimsufi.cgi?hard=134sk1 At this point it doesn't matter what to order, you will have to place your order again once VAT is removed from your account.
    - rhema 13y ago
      Just did this. Now (in french of course) they want me to send an email to verify my identity with a scan of my drivers license or passport before being able to purchase. Not sure if I want to do that...

qwd 13y ago

I am using the US version of their dedicated server to run URL unshortening API service http://api.unshort.me/api.html http://api.unshort.me/api.html . The web stack is Nginx + Python (Flask) + Couchbase. So far, I haven't notice any issue with their server.

dylz 13y ago
You mean Canadia

ukandy 13y ago

DC photos can be found at https://lafibre.info/datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-1/ https://lafibre.info/datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-1/. It doesn't get any cheaper than that. I'm guessing they buy mini-itx boards from China by the container load.

zschallz 13y ago
This is their data center in Roubaix. The datacenter these new dedicated servers are available in is in their new datacenter, Graveline (Graveline France). Probably similar spec, though.
opendais 13y ago
Aye. But if you are paying less than $75/month for a dedicated server, what do you expect? XD
tobeportable 13y ago
some more media : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QoIG7sEBf0&list=TLJpXLs0uN70Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QoIG7sEBf0&list=TLJpXLs0uN7...

superuser2 13y ago

This is very exciting, but appears to be UK only. The only country available on the selection is UK and it wants a UK address.

wlk 13y ago
This is for every kimsufi offer, by default kimsufi.com redirects me to http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ but you have to add different coutry TLD to see prices in different currencies.
spindritf 13y ago
You need to go to the appropriate OVH site for your country. OVH.es for Spain, OVH.pl for Poland, etc.
- superuser2 13y ago
  Kimusufi.com did not have this offer and kimsufi.us is something else entirely, but kimsufi.ie seems to accept Americans.

porker 13y ago

Are they using ECC or non-ECC RAM in the server? I'm guessing the latter, can't find evidence either way.

Macha 13y ago
I checked on my OVH server, and using the method here (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10510/how-to-detect-memory-type-under-linux http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10510/how-to-detect-...) seems to imply that it's non-ECC RAM as the total width and data width are both 64 bits.
alexchamberlain 13y ago
What are the advantages/disadvantages of either?
- icebraining 13y ago
  ECC Ram has a checksum that can correct one wrong bit in memory and detect two wrong bits in memory.
perryh2 13y ago
They are all using non-ECC. These are not Intel Xeon's.
- Ecio78 13y ago
  Atom could support ECC: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Atom/Intel-Atom%20S1240.html http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Atom/Intel-Atom%20S1240.html

jschulenklopper 13y ago

Next to this, it is a little unfortunate that just two days ago OVH announced on their forum (http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070 http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070) that an attacker had gained control of a system administrator's account, and used that to gain access to a VPN account of one of the firm's backoffice staff. That again was used to get the personal data of customers in Europe and from a hosting firm in Canada. Well, at least they are being open about this, but from the forum it seems the security incident is still open.

metal 13y ago

Is there a way to get the 2.99 euro price from the US? How about from Canada?

dcc1 13y ago
order with OVH.IE

haddr 13y ago

the price is actually in pounds, not in euro. (still cheap however)

anonymous 13y ago

Hmm, that's all nice, but what about securing my data against snooping? I'm wondering specifically how I would prevent people from snooping data while in transit (MITM) and prevent someone with physical access to the hard drive from reading my bits? To simplify the question, assume I just want to store and retrieve plain files. Bonus points if I can also safely share them in some way (i.e. share one file without also giving up security on the rest).

joeyh 13y ago
For backup, you could use duplicity or obnam, both of which gpg encrypt incremental backups. For file storage, you can use git-annex which gpg encrypts data stored on rsync special remotes. I hope to add gpg encrypted git repositories to it soon too. Or tahoe-lafs, which encrypts files and allows sharing them by sharing a special url.
skolor 13y ago
What? Encrypt it on your system, store the encrypted blob there. Add a simple web server to host them. If you do any crypto on these servers, obviously anyone with physical access could compromise it (although potentially not without alerting you that it had been).
X-Istence 13y ago
Set up VPN...

nimo 13y ago

No doubt the new rates for their dedicated servers are in response to hetzner's new rates. ISPs seem to have this unfortunate ability to retain ridiculous profit margins indefinitely. I guess the tactic is quite simple: Be extortionate while you have market share. Undercut your opponents when it starts being threatened. Not that I'm complaining when stuff like this happens, I like OVH, sometimes.

bluedino 13y ago

Anybody have one of these that can benchmark it against a $5 Digital Ocean VPS? $2.99 is a crazy price for a dedi.

BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
It's 2.99 euro, or $3.97 (not $2.99). Still under $5, though.

presty 13y ago

would this be a good fit for storing and serving lots of images?

kintamanimatt 13y ago
Yes. In fact that'd be a perfect use for this given the low-powered CPU. Just make sure you have decent backups and replication to protect against node failure.

dgoujard 13y ago

Additional information: You can't add ip failover on your server. i ordered one 3€ server

seivan 13y ago

Why would you want to host your stuff on a company who's CEO isn't developer-friendly?

blacktulip 13y ago
Because it is budget friendly. Sad, I know. But true.
muyuu 13y ago
Not developer-friendly??
- icebraining 13y ago
  He's talking about his tweets on how he prohibits his devs from posting on Github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6064087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6064087
  - muyuu 13y ago
    I see. That's totally unrelated to their service though. Lots of companies have an exclusivity policy. Nothing to do with whatever development happens in their servers done by their customers.

mrb 13y ago

OVH is much less expensive than Amazon EC2... Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon. Well OVH proves this is possible. This OVH dedicated server is comparable to an Amazon EC2 Standard small (m1.small) instance. Taking an Amazon reserved instance, "heavy utilization" (to minimize cost), and in their less expensive region, with a 1-year term, the upfront payment is $169 plus $0.014 per hour, which amounts to $24.30 per month. Compare this to OVH is only 3€, that is $4.00 per month... 1/6th the price! And OVH has 500GB storage vs 160GB for Amazon!

hackerboos 13y ago
>Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon Yes but EC2 is a cloud provider and these are dedicated machines which are harder to scale without setting up a complex cluster.
- Tobu 13y ago
  They have this in beta: https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml
- dgoujard 13y ago
  You have API to order new server on OVH but it's not delivery instant
yashg 13y ago
People don't use AWS because it's cheap. People use it because its scalable. You can deploy hundreds of new servers in minutes literally to meet any demand. You pay for that flexibility.
- vidarh 13y ago
  People use it because they think they need the scalability. The reality is that almost nobody that use EC2 have the ability to scale up or down that quickly, and even fewer needs it: Most sites have a fairly stable base load, and most dedicated providers these day can provision in less than 24 hours, so you at most need the ability to handle short spikes or growth over hours rather than days. And EC2 is expensive enough that you can handle huge variations by buying extra dedicated capacity to cope. But the (far) cheaper option still is to handle your base load on a cheaper provider, and build your system to be able to scale using EC2 or another cloud provider to handle spikes. WIth more and more providers providing "hybrid" services with colocation, dedicated, dedicated vms (single vm per physical server), and cloud servers all (or most) on offer from one location, this gets even easier - you can sometimes even get virtual private lans across dedicated and cloud servers without having to mess with your own vpn or pay for the bandwidth

wcfields 13y ago

Can't just signup right away, they require: Proof of ID: ID card Driving Licence Passport Proof of address: Utility bill (Gas, electricity, phone) Bank statement Official correspondence

DocG 13y ago
Thats bad. Means I can't sign up at all. a)I dislike giving so much information up b)I don't have proof of address (Outside us, nothing is on my name because it's cheaper that way)
- superuser2 13y ago
  >a) I dislike giving so much information up... How do you ever make a credit card transaction online without giving up your name and address? That's pretty much standard every time fiat currency changes hands on the internet.
  - DocG 13y ago
    I don't like giving up my address. I know they do still need my name. I am not trying to be untraceable, I am just against everyone collecting information about me. I don't think they usually confirm my billing address(haven't bought anything in a while where I don't need shipping address anyway) Also, I am using virtual credit card + debit with credit card possibilities. EDIT: My bank does not require confirmation on my home address. I have random numbers and address there.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      Interesting. The know-your-customer rules in the PATRIOT Act pretty much require that banks verify home addressees now. Were you grandfathered or something?
      - DocG 13y ago
        Mentioned before, living outside US. In a small country in EU. I can't also sign up to mt gox because they don't accept my proofs.

harrytuttle 13y ago

I use http://bigv.io/ http://bigv.io/ - much better and local to me. There is only a few beers difference between €2.99 and £12 a month... They are VMs but they perform better than a dedicated Atom from my testing.

JosephRedfern 13y ago
Do they perform x4.65 better than a dedicated Atom?
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  No but they work, get provisioned within 5 minutes, have decent support, are faster and can be upgraded on the fly to 2TiB SATA, 2TiB 15K SAS, 2TiB SSD, 180GiB RAM, 16 cores without having to reinstall anything... That's more than 4.65x better.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    That's a VM, not a dedicated machine. Big, big difference.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      Yep having managed both for years, give me a VM any day.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
thenomad 13y ago
I also use BigV, and can confirm that they're hella solid for a cloud service. Plus, their custom Linux distro, Symbiosis, makes a quick setup of a new site considerably quicker.
thejosh 13y ago

eertami 13y ago

Well... for 9GBP for 3 months, might as well just buy one and see if it is any good. If not, that's fine.

syncopate 13y ago

I tried to register but it seems that one has to have a UK address for that. That's a pity...

JohnHaugeland 13y ago

This company requires extremely invasive amounts of personal information - going as far as to ask for your drivers' license and a home utility bill. They also just got severely owned the other week. So you can trust that the extreme invasion of privacy won't get straight to the wrong people. http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=d2344fbaf05bddbe375071d4ec197f41 http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=d2344fba...

killnine 13y ago
Thank you! I can not bElieve I had to page down beyond 50% to see mention of this. Come on guys! This company has major security issues on top of the fact they are way overstepping in the personal data they require. I can't think of many better strategies than big sales right after a major hack when customers are dropping like flies

felixvolny 13y ago

I wonder how one of these Atom powered servers compares to a free EC2 T1-micro instance. This is kind of apples and oranges , since this is a dedicated server, but I'm not sure if you'd really get a lot more out of them.

eldavido 13y ago

Not sure who they're targeting with this. Small guys will go with AWS as it's not worth the risk of using an untested provider to save a few dollars, big guys will likely build their own datacenter/on-premise compute grid.

zschallz 13y ago
Feels like they're targeting the hobby-box market. I picked up the 16gb model because I think it will make my life a bit easier by moving most of my virtual machines away from home. For the price, the hardware necessary is about $500, which is roughly 26 months of paying OVH.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
> untested provider untested? OVH is one of the top-5 ISPs world-wide. They are anything but untested.

nly 13y ago

This is perfect. I have a $4 VPS in the States that is crapping out with 50% packet loss in the evenings... and that only has 500GB tranny, 20GB disk and 256 MiB RAM.

imperio59 13y ago

FWIW I switched the company I interned at in Paris to using OVH and was very pleased with their website and tech support. The server we ordered was available quickly, their tools were easy to use yet very powerful. I also cut costs while getting a better server than from that company's previous provider...

rfatnabayeff 13y ago

How can I order it from Russia?

yashg 13y ago

There's one catch - there are prepaid servers. You need to pay for 3, 6 or 12 months in advance.

chatmasta 13y ago

Could someone explain to me why a business would enter the hosting industry with minimum operating margins? My guess is that OVH plans to offer more premium servers, for greater margins, after it acquires customers. Increase profit margins with upgrades. The more premium the server, the higher the profit margin.

julien_c 13y ago
OVH is not really entering the hosting industry at this point.
- iSloth 13y ago
  Yeh they are already vasily in it...
nolok 13y ago
OVH is the leading hosting company in Europe and the fourth in the world (according to netcraft). They created the sub-brand kimsufi (which this article is about) a few years ago to go into the low cost market, and are now going even deeper into it, but it is still a sub-brand, look at ovh.com and you see actual premium servers (although still low priced when compared to american hosting companies)

tjosten 13y ago

You might want to consider if you want to go to OVH, because they recently had a security breach. http://status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=f988fc8bbe16944daf564c6dabbcdc58 http://status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=5070&PHPSESSID=f988fc8b...

gkoz 13y ago

After jumping through various hoops I had their support tell me this: The Kimsufi 2 G offer is only for members of the EU.

_delirium 13y ago
What I gather from some other reports: 1. The French site will only sell to EU residents 2. The UK site will only sell to UK residents 3. The Irish site will sell to Irish, Canadian, and US residents So it's not strictly true that it's only for members of the EU, but Canada/US seem to be the only exceptions, and only if you order from ovh.ie.

superuser2 13y ago

I jumped on this right away and still have not seen even acknowledgement of my identity documents. Has anyone else had success getting this working?

xur17 13y ago
I haven't received a response yet either. I'm assuming they are currently overwhelmed with people that are interested. It looks like support for sales is only there M-F also.

xur17 13y ago

Has anyone else tried purchasing a server from the US? The require you to send proof of id, but I haven't received a response from the yet (I sent it 2 days ago).

Ellipsis753 13y ago

I ordered mine very quickly when it said I would get it within 24 hours. However it's now been days and no dice. They sent me the IP of the server but it's stuck on "installing OS". Quite honestly I really assumed the installing process would be automated. Has anyone got there server yet? (or are you still waiting?)

superuser2 13y ago

In case anyone tries this: I called customer service (via Skype) to find out when I could expect my server to be online, and was told that OVH has temporarily discontinued Kimsufi sales to the US. The rep confirmed that it is a temporary ban, but had no information on when it might be lifted. So I guess it was too good to be true.