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I'm not surprised. OVH deals are insanely good, often less than 10% of the cost of the equivalent AWS/azure/google compute costs in terms of the raw power you g

I'm not surprised. OVH deals are insanely good, often less than 10% of the cost of the equivalent AWS/azure/google compute costs in terms of the raw power you get. I'm consistently surprised that more people don't use them for workloads that don't require super high reliability, but do use an enormous amount of compute/storage/bandwidth. I think a lot of services fall into this category.

simple1 12y ago
OVH prices are so amazing, I wonder if they must be running at a loss. I use them to run Aberoth (http://www.aberoth.com http://www.aberoth.com), and I always keep my eye out for a better deal, but nothing comes close for high RAM servers. They also seem to be continuously sold out: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers.xml http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers.xml, so there is clearly a huge market for these cheap servers. I wonder why no one else seems to be able to compete close to their price point.
- geoka9 12y ago
  Don't forget about OVH's lowest tier offering: kimsufi. I'm using a server since August and so far haven't had any problems whatsoever.
  - revelation 12y ago
    Been using their <$5/month Atom server for quite some time now. Zero problems, and I've had months pushing 500GiB of traffic, getting full 100Mbit pretty much all the time.
    - geoka9 12y ago
      Their cheapest Atom seems to be $7? It also looks like the cheapest one they have in their Canadian data center is a $21 Core i3 (which is still a very good deal, with 2 cores/8 GB RAM/1 TB HDD/unlimited traffic).
      - corobo 12y ago
        There was an offer on within the last year or so that took them down to crazy low prices. It apparently caused a lot of customer churn which is why they now do setup fees :( Never had a problem with their service, but their pricing is all over the place
      - X-Istence 12y ago
        I am on their Core i3 offering with 8 GB of RAM with 2 2TB drives, with unlimited traffic. It has been absolutely rock-solid.
    - koralatov 12y ago
      Same here. Some months I barely use it, but it's just so cheap and the performance is just so good that I can't let myself let it expire.
  - linuxydave 12y ago
    The only issue I've had with OVH and Kimsufi servers was that any incoming or outgoing SSH connections would also terminate on the first connection attempt. Always. Mac, Linux, Windows - it didn't matter. I've never had this issue with any other host. I got so annoyed with it that I created a simple bash script that would attempt to connect, pipe the results to /dev/null and then connect again. Always failed on the first attempt, always worked the second. Their support weren't able to help me either. The only upside was that it forced me to add decent connection error-handling to my scripts.
dsl 12y ago
The math on AWS makes sense if you either have very unpredictable workloads or are a startup that lacks capital to get into any medium to long term commitment.
- super_sloth 12y ago
  I see the latter case used as an argument lots but I just don't seem to understand it. OVH will rent you servers for as little as a month at a time, for a _massive_ reduction in cost over AWS. We're talking >10x. Are there really startups that only have capital to last a week?
Khao 12y ago
Having the full cloud ecosystem on AWS/google is great. Launch a server that store files in S3, talks to a DynamoDB and memcache server and has a CDN and load balancer. The amount of back-end work required to make that is minimal and coordinating all those services (scaling, configuration, redundency) is so easy you don't even need a sys admin to do it.
- edwinnathaniel 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you prepare different environments in AWS/Google? staging, dev (individual dev if possible), prod? What happened when you have internet interruption during development/testing cycle?
  - Khao 12y ago
    I can't give a very complete answer as I've been using AWS to work on a side project for about a whole week. I try to design my app with 12-factor in mind (http://12factor.net/ http://12factor.net/) so all the configuration is passed to the app at run time (either ENV vars, config files, args or pulled from etcd). I'm trying to run the exact same code while in dev and while deployed in prod. For example I will absolutely try and avoid having "if Env == Test" or "if Env == Prod" in my code. For example, my service connects to S3 to store/retrieve files. The access key, secret key and even the bucket name are all passed as ENV variables so I can work on a test bucket easily with a test api key without changing code. Some services I can run locally (memcache or redis are really easy to spin up locally) and some services I'll rely on Amazon to provide like S3 even in dev/test. Of course this requires a reliable internet connection but it's the best way to deal with this for me as a single developer/devops. I'm sure bigger teams handling larger projects could give a lot of valuable information on the subject, I would love to hear about it too.
  - zimbatm 12y ago
    You need a way to declare your cluster using some orchestration tool like ansible / CloudFormation. Once you have that it's easy to setup/teardown a whole cluster. To further separate dev/prod you can create separate VPC (virtual networks) and use IAM (ACL) to limit access. It's also possible to create an AWS account for each developer and keep an eye on the spending with consolidated billing but in practice devs often want to share infrastructure for example when testing out something together. Downtime sucks, if it happens a lot try investing in a better Internet connection. It's possible to re-use ansible formulas to deploy something locally but usually you'll end up booting machines that themselves need internet to fetch packages / dependencies anyways.
beachstartup 12y ago
they're not insanely good, they're just very close to the cost of the actual financed hardware. AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their marketing, which is cleverly disguised as spec sheets and technical documentation and other things engineers who think they are not susceptible to marketing fall easily for. someone's paying for all those free AWS instances, and it ain't the low end customers. edit: if you want to know the true price of the hardware, take the purchase price of your standard supermicro server, and multiply it by .025 - that's what big companies pay per month for hardware, usually on 3-year leases. i.e. $10,000 box = costs $250/month. A decent cloud provider can usually get about $3000+ a month of revenue off of a box like that. even after you add power, networking, staff, it's still a large markup.
- tracker1 12y ago
  And, lets say you only need 3-5 of those $250/month instances... given AWS's services (or azure, or google) it isn't really a bad deal. I'm not saying it's for everyone. I'm still running some personal projects on smaller hosting providers... but with a modest budget, AWS and the like are decent offerings for what you get. If you're designing for distributed data/services from the start, it's better still.
  - beachstartup 12y ago
    i think you misread what i typed. the entire $10k server costs amazon $250/month.
ABS 12y ago
I guess I'm unlucky: have tried them multiple times over the years and always had issues, in particular connectivity has always been pretty bad :-(
- geoka9 12y ago
  Which data center?
  - ABS 12y ago
    GRA-1 for sure, we then tried at least another one in France (need to dig into emails to find out which) and was kind of the same
    - geoka9 12y ago
      I've only tried the Canadian one and it's been rock solid for me.
x3sphere 12y ago
I've been using them with no issues for the past 3 months or so. I priced out AWS just for kicks and it would end up costing us around 15x more from the $174/month at OVH. At least for me, the cloud has a long way to go before prices become even remotely comparable to dedicated hardware.

simple1 12y ago

OVH prices are so amazing, I wonder if they must be running at a loss. I use them to run Aberoth (http://www.aberoth.com http://www.aberoth.com), and I always keep my eye out for a better deal, but nothing comes close for high RAM servers. They also seem to be continuously sold out: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers.xml http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers.xml, so there is clearly a huge market for these cheap servers. I wonder why no one else seems to be able to compete close to their price point.

geoka9 12y ago
Don't forget about OVH's lowest tier offering: kimsufi. I'm using a server since August and so far haven't had any problems whatsoever.
- revelation 12y ago
  Been using their <$5/month Atom server for quite some time now. Zero problems, and I've had months pushing 500GiB of traffic, getting full 100Mbit pretty much all the time.
  - geoka9 12y ago
    Their cheapest Atom seems to be $7? It also looks like the cheapest one they have in their Canadian data center is a $21 Core i3 (which is still a very good deal, with 2 cores/8 GB RAM/1 TB HDD/unlimited traffic).
    - corobo 12y ago
      There was an offer on within the last year or so that took them down to crazy low prices. It apparently caused a lot of customer churn which is why they now do setup fees :( Never had a problem with their service, but their pricing is all over the place
    - X-Istence 12y ago
      I am on their Core i3 offering with 8 GB of RAM with 2 2TB drives, with unlimited traffic. It has been absolutely rock-solid.
  - koralatov 12y ago
    Same here. Some months I barely use it, but it's just so cheap and the performance is just so good that I can't let myself let it expire.
- linuxydave 12y ago
  The only issue I've had with OVH and Kimsufi servers was that any incoming or outgoing SSH connections would also terminate on the first connection attempt. Always. Mac, Linux, Windows - it didn't matter. I've never had this issue with any other host. I got so annoyed with it that I created a simple bash script that would attempt to connect, pipe the results to /dev/null and then connect again. Always failed on the first attempt, always worked the second. Their support weren't able to help me either. The only upside was that it forced me to add decent connection error-handling to my scripts.

dsl 12y ago

The math on AWS makes sense if you either have very unpredictable workloads or are a startup that lacks capital to get into any medium to long term commitment.

super_sloth 12y ago
I see the latter case used as an argument lots but I just don't seem to understand it. OVH will rent you servers for as little as a month at a time, for a _massive_ reduction in cost over AWS. We're talking >10x. Are there really startups that only have capital to last a week?

Khao 12y ago

Having the full cloud ecosystem on AWS/google is great. Launch a server that store files in S3, talks to a DynamoDB and memcache server and has a CDN and load balancer. The amount of back-end work required to make that is minimal and coordinating all those services (scaling, configuration, redundency) is so easy you don't even need a sys admin to do it.

edwinnathaniel 12y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you prepare different environments in AWS/Google? staging, dev (individual dev if possible), prod? What happened when you have internet interruption during development/testing cycle?
- Khao 12y ago
  I can't give a very complete answer as I've been using AWS to work on a side project for about a whole week. I try to design my app with 12-factor in mind (http://12factor.net/ http://12factor.net/) so all the configuration is passed to the app at run time (either ENV vars, config files, args or pulled from etcd). I'm trying to run the exact same code while in dev and while deployed in prod. For example I will absolutely try and avoid having "if Env == Test" or "if Env == Prod" in my code. For example, my service connects to S3 to store/retrieve files. The access key, secret key and even the bucket name are all passed as ENV variables so I can work on a test bucket easily with a test api key without changing code. Some services I can run locally (memcache or redis are really easy to spin up locally) and some services I'll rely on Amazon to provide like S3 even in dev/test. Of course this requires a reliable internet connection but it's the best way to deal with this for me as a single developer/devops. I'm sure bigger teams handling larger projects could give a lot of valuable information on the subject, I would love to hear about it too.
- zimbatm 12y ago
  You need a way to declare your cluster using some orchestration tool like ansible / CloudFormation. Once you have that it's easy to setup/teardown a whole cluster. To further separate dev/prod you can create separate VPC (virtual networks) and use IAM (ACL) to limit access. It's also possible to create an AWS account for each developer and keep an eye on the spending with consolidated billing but in practice devs often want to share infrastructure for example when testing out something together. Downtime sucks, if it happens a lot try investing in a better Internet connection. It's possible to re-use ansible formulas to deploy something locally but usually you'll end up booting machines that themselves need internet to fetch packages / dependencies anyways.

beachstartup 12y ago

they're not insanely good, they're just very close to the cost of the actual financed hardware. AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their marketing, which is cleverly disguised as spec sheets and technical documentation and other things engineers who think they are not susceptible to marketing fall easily for. someone's paying for all those free AWS instances, and it ain't the low end customers. edit: if you want to know the true price of the hardware, take the purchase price of your standard supermicro server, and multiply it by .025 - that's what big companies pay per month for hardware, usually on 3-year leases. i.e. $10,000 box = costs $250/month. A decent cloud provider can usually get about $3000+ a month of revenue off of a box like that. even after you add power, networking, staff, it's still a large markup.

tracker1 12y ago
And, lets say you only need 3-5 of those $250/month instances... given AWS's services (or azure, or google) it isn't really a bad deal. I'm not saying it's for everyone. I'm still running some personal projects on smaller hosting providers... but with a modest budget, AWS and the like are decent offerings for what you get. If you're designing for distributed data/services from the start, it's better still.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  i think you misread what i typed. the entire $10k server costs amazon $250/month.

ABS 12y ago

I guess I'm unlucky: have tried them multiple times over the years and always had issues, in particular connectivity has always been pretty bad :-(

geoka9 12y ago
Which data center?
- ABS 12y ago
  GRA-1 for sure, we then tried at least another one in France (need to dig into emails to find out which) and was kind of the same
  - geoka9 12y ago
    I've only tried the Canadian one and it's been rock solid for me.

x3sphere 12y ago

I've been using them with no issues for the past 3 months or so. I priced out AWS just for kicks and it would end up costing us around 15x more from the $174/month at OVH. At least for me, the cloud has a long way to go before prices become even remotely comparable to dedicated hardware.