>I'm alarmingly familiar with OVH. And their hardware failures. And their slow support exactly when you need them most. And their poor inventory control, leaving popular system configurations unavailable when I (or, rather, my clients) need them.
There's a plenty of places that aren't OVH, however I figured they'd be the most relevant choice here as game servers were being discussed earlier. DDoS protection being cool and all, something you really don't get on EC2.
>This isn't some deep-magic thing for sites with tens of thousands of instances, either--I've had clients with ten total instances benefit both financially and operationally from building out fairly straightforward elastic capacity (not least because the same code paths necessary for elasticity also makes things like setting up development environments single-click affairs, which enables deeper and more complete testing of the application to ensure correctness).
If for the cost of 10 instances they could've had 30 dedicated servers with better specs, did they really benefit very much? While I can certainly appreciate the part about development environments, applications that would actually benefit from such scaling are rather rare. Although, admittedly, if they hired you they probably did need it.
>Even were a $2200 premium a credible number, that's eleven hours of my billing rate.
$2200 per instance, does someone only running a couple of boxes even need your services?
>Reimplementing what AWS provides even a fairly straightforward system--easy, API-driven system deployment and configuration (and while OVH's public cloud APIs can enable some of this, your "dedis" cannot), straightforward and API-controlled support services of more or less any stripe, integrated system monitoring and alerting--would be hundreds of hours of work, be a worse solution, and require ongoing maintenance.
And again, I believe most businesses simply don't need what AWS providers. AWS is certainly a good choice if you actually need what they offer, however very few do.