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Comment by dineshp2 | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but how do you find OVH? Their hardware, bandwidth, uptime, customer service? I ask because of the conflicting reviews of OVH that a quick google search reveals.

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I'm living next to France and in talking to local geeks the name kept coming up (OVH is a French company). I had been using DigitalOcean but needed more storage space so I tried Kimsufi and SoYouStart which are both OVH-related, and then I started A/B comparing performance of VPSs for OVH and DigitalOcean and saw that the VPSs at OVH were consistently out-performing the same size machines at DigitalOcean. So, I moved everything I plan to keep online for more than a month to OVH. OVH's dashboard for creating and managing machines used to be really horrid but it has improved recently.

I don't know what to make of the bad reviews you found, my personal experience has been great for several years now. Multiple products used, the occasional support ticket with quick response, and decent pricing.

I found OVH's offer to be very good on every point, except customer service. I'm mostly using Kimsufi dedicated servers, and let's just say that when shit goes wrong, you're left alone in the dark.

Anecdote: I had my dedicated server suddenly go down because it overheated. Wouldn't come back to life. Two days after submitting a ticket and getting no input, the machine suddenly came back up without any explanation. A day later, I got a mail saying the motherboard was broken and got replaced. Overall it was a very unpleasant experience, but it's to be expected given the low price of Kimsufi.

I'm surprised people think it's acceptable to be 2 days in the dark just because it's cheaper. Even really low end companies like nocix (former datashack), 1&1, etc. will reply to your tickets in a few minutes.

It's good to know that this stuff happens with OVH. I'll make sure to stay far from them.

It's up to you to chose the product that fits your needs. Slow support is part of the deal. And do your own backups because they may switch the disks any time if they detect that something is wrong with it.

This thing happens with Kimsufi servers, a side brand of OVH for cheap dedicated servers. The real OVH servers are more expensive, but you get all the bells and whisles that come with a professional server hosting offer.

Kimsufi is a completely different service to OVH's, even though they are owned by the same company, so you can't really compare the two. Kimsufi is dirt cheap and has a reputation for terrible support.

This is a marketing strategy. Kimsufi are for people to try out dedicated server hosting. It provides a low entry barrier. When used to it, people switch to real server once their need develop.

This is because kimsufi are the cheapest dedicated server of OVH. They do provide support but its delayed and restricted to hardware issues. These servers are intendent for playing around and testing, hence the low price. The offer is also minimal. I use it for some toy web site hosting and mail hosting. It's good for boostraping.

At work we're using OVH for our production, we've been with them for several years. The key point is that the price-performance ratio is very difficult to beat, and it offsets the problems we've had.

We've had very few hardware-related issues, a disk failing or a motherboard to be replaced. In all of those cases, the component were swapped promptly and we've been kept informed of the progress.

Where we're unhappy is with the network, especially with their vRack offering. Looking back at our production incidents of the past 6 months, about 50% of them were caused by some vRack problem where at the same time the public interfaces were up and running just fine.

We're generally happy with customer service, but we pay for VIP support and we speak French to OVH's support agents (I believe that the latter helps a lot).

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