OVH plans massive cloud expansion | Hacker News Reader

OVH plans massive cloud expansion

enterprisetimes.co.uk

70 pointsSami_Lehtinen40 comments

I've never heard a good story about OVH. I've moved three clients away from them in the last 2 years after they were crapped upon by OVH. Their support is terrible and there are constant problems. They're trying but just not there yet. Moved them to Linode which is absolutely rock solid and enough for their needs.

However the WORST company I've ever dealt with for support is Amazon AWS which I was using for backup (S3). My account got locked due to a card expiry problem. I had updated my card details when I got a new one and their UI confirmed that the details were updated but nope, they weren't. Eventually consistent - not! Took over 48 hours to get a support contact.

Host Europe (circa 2005, Beeston) are just in front of them when we rolled up to extract some dead kit and found that our colo'ed kit was just piled up in the bottom of a telecoms rack, not a proper server rack. Cables everywhere 2 inches deep. Try getting the bottom HP DL380 G3 (27kg a piece) out of a pile of 8 DL380s without taking your site down or dinking some other poor sod's network cables or power trailing everywhere. Four people and piles of O'Reilly books to act as makeshift jacks. Total fucktards.

What kind of hosting solutions your clients had picked?

For their lower products OVH's support is pretty terrible. But for their professional solutions the support is good and reactive, but you need to get a premium support contract.

It's an option that you have to select when you choose the product and that the reason why they are able to offer such low costs for naked hosting solution (like super cheaps dedicated servers).

Dedicated servers. Even for cheap dedicated servers the support was crap.

6 days to change a blown disk for example...

I know I had the same exact problem for a personnal dedicated server. But as I said, for business use you absolutly need to pick the option entitled "for a professional usage" when you pick a server if you want to have a decent tech support from OVH. And also one need to stick to the enteprises/business solutions and avoid the starters and gamers servers.

Online.net (the other big french hosting company) has the same problem, you can get cheap servers but if you don't also susbscribe to a support contract you are screwed. :-/

So for me, they are a "ronseal" provider. (they do exactly as they say)

I use online.net for the http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc Its a dedicated 8core machine for £15 a month (including extra IPs)

What you don't get is fancy hand holding. So if you're not comfortable provisioning machines, they are not for you.

However if you are able to run real steel, then this is the shop for you. Faster and cheaper than amazon, but no real s3 offering.

What's your opinion on their network? Back in the day they had poor interconnectivity reputation. Do you have any experience about responsiveness to hardware problems?

When I tried them around spring of this year they did have poorer international peering than others. Should be fine for EU and US tho.

My sample size is limited, however I've not had an issue. I'm getting > 100megs. latency isn't bad either. 9-10ms between paris and the Midlands in britian, and 6ms to amsterdam

I think it depends on your offering, I understand that different parts of the company (online.net appears to be a subsidiary of OVH) have different specs.

They do have a rather sexy graph though:

https://status.online.net/weathermap/

online.net is the biggest competitor of OVH!

Well, just in France. :)

You can't tease like that without supplying said competitors! Are we just talking Hetzner or are there others I don't know of in the budget dedi market?

So does OVH: http://weathermap.ovh.net/

I have a Dedibox MD 2015 Gen2 [1] (with SSDs) on online.net. I can't complain, the machine runs well and the support is fast. I use it in production to run a website which serves Europe customers. These are my IPv4 speedtests using bench-sh-2 [2]:

  CDN - nearest location:
  Download speed from Cachefly: 95.0MB/s
  
  America - United States:
  Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 13.5MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 12.1MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 11.7MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 20.8MB/s
  
  Asia:
  Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, Japan: 4.32MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 10.3MB/s
  
  Europe:
  Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, Netherlands: 54.2MB/s
  Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, Netherlands: 88.5MB/s

They currently have connectivity issues to Coloat (Atlanta). I raised a issue ticket and they responded that they have "already contacted Coloat to change the route on their side and use better route but they don't do the modification".

[1] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-md

[2] https://github.com/hidden-refuge/bench-sh-2

I've encountered some bad routing with OVH, but so I've done with other service providers too. I guess most of people don't even notice those fails, because they don't have constant automated monitoring. Usually NOC such problems pretty quickly.

I have a couple of their 6 euro/mo shit boxes and I couldn't be happier. I use them for hosting a couple of small apps, torrent boxes, and IRC bouncers.

Bandwidth to the US sucks, but I didn't expect much more. 10Mb/s on this low spec machine.

It is quite the opposite of Rackspace who do obsessive hand holding (which I find far more annoying). For uptime I like AWS the best, for just cheap, heavy machines I like OVH the best (crawling, big data analysis, cpu intensive stuff; things that don't require all nodes to be up all the time, but requires them to have tons of disk space, cpu & memory) and I like Rackspace for making money (% kickback on client hosting and clients do like handholding).

They have an s3 offering under the runabove brand. Useful if you have to keep your data in Canada for regulatory reasons like I do.

OVH is one of those companies that are great.... if you never have an issue with their service. Had a ticket open for over a month now (routing issue) and they continually deflect and blame everyone but themselves (even though you can see the problem on their network weather map).

I have no love for OVH. When I asked them, quite a while ago (couple years now?), to delete an old and unused account of mine they dragged me in tickets and calls for over a week, until they finally asked me to send them a written letter to their offices in France, asking for the deletion of the account. They flat out refused to close down an account that hadn't been used in years unless provided with that...

Two months later, massive OVH breach. Grrr.

I have dealt with them a fair bit and they have been responsive and reliable. Then again I give them money, rather than just having an empty account.

shrug I'm sure a lot of people have had good experiences with them. I'd say ask them how you'd go about having your account closed and see how they react...

I have cancelled machines before and had no problems. I have spent a lotat ovh. I general use the web self serve because it is faster. I think ovh is a low cost provider and you should not expect too much hand holding from them. If you do you are likely using the wrong provider and they will probably agree.

Seriously how big of a monthly bill did you have at ovh that was the problem? Are we talking thousands, tens of thousands or something like a personal $20/mth account?

You seem to have misunderstood my post? I asked for an unused account, with no machine to its name anymore, to be closed down. After a week of back and forth, they asked me to send a written letter to their lawyer to go forward with it. It's the most absurd experience I've ever had closing an account on any website - ever.

Still, you're not a customer. Did you have any bad experiences while a customer?

Yes (and so does my friend who owns a large french website run entirely off OVH), but that's another story and not really worth getting into. OVH is a very mediocre host, and being mediocre is.. okay, I guess. Their behaviour when closing an unused account pissed me off far more than mediocrity ever could.

Not my case. They are usually slow when resolving issues, and downtime and restarts without a reason are common (I use a VPS)

They have different VPS tiers with different service levels and guarantees. With higher tiers they're pretty quick to deal with issues.

OVH support has its problems.

I've been with OVH for years and my main concern is that my monitoring service reports my server being inaccessible for hours a month. Luckily this isn't a critical server but there's no way I'd use them for an actual business.

Note: The large outage in the middle is actual maintenance. The others are just OVH's network being unresponsive.

http://i.imgur.com/nA3En5Q.png

I used to get the worst service imaginable in English, but calling their French offices in French worked very well for me. They own/run the servers and services and they could help you faster. They didn't speak English at all. This was a few years ago, not sure if it still applies.

I'm a french speaker, so this actually happened when I talked to their french branch.

Wow. Ok... Things must have changed a lot.

I have a private SQL server that is expired since 2011 and it's up and running. I can't recall how many time I asked them to close it.

> new data centres will all be self funded by the company who has said that it will be able to pay for these though its current cash on hand and current revenues.

If they really don't take any loans to build 12 data centers at once, that's really impressive. Or does that only mean "without taking investments"?

Let's say it takes 40M USD to build and stock a data center, built over the course of 3 years, that would be an extra drain of 120M USD per year.

Of course there is huge variabilty here: if they don't start from the green field, but buy/rent/lease existing buildings, they can go to market much faster. And it all depends on the size of the new centers, which hardware they stock it with etc.

UPDATE: Just found http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa... which claims that some Google data centers cost USD 600M each, so it seems there's not much of an upper limit, and/or my estimates were hopelessly low.

40M might cover capex & rent on a reasonably sized imprint in an existing DC for three years (say 100 racks/2000 servers)

I think it's good news as OVH is very competitive with its pricing. With 12 addtional datacenters, I hope they can deflate the prices outside their current markets. Last time I looked, South America and Asia were like an order of magnitude more expensive.

I worried they'd try to spend all their money on distractions, like an AWS competitor, an ISP in France, a conference, a magazine with a headshot of the founder, ..., which they're all still doing. Now I can hope most of the money is used for scaling the good part.

They really have issues with product bloat, always adding new stuff, never cleaning things up. For instance, their previous admin web UI lasted for like a decade. It was full of icons for obscure features (but icons are so user-friendly, you know) and hyperlinks were javascript-activated because DHTML was all the rage back then. The new UI is better but already suffering from the dozens of things it has to support to reach parity with the previous feature set.

They seem to be pretty good with building datacenters and getting peering/transit deals, not so much with software. I hope they realize it.

Will they plan any expansion of their abuse department, alongside?

I hope not. ;P

I have most of their CIDRs blocked due to years of spam and phishing emails from them. They need to clean up their act first.

Is it just me or is there very high margins in the hosting business"?

https://www.ovhtelecom.fr/overthebox/

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