Dedicated Server Price Increase | Hacker News Reader

Dedicated Server Price Increase

mj.ovh.com

64 pointstachion47 comments

On an unrelated note, why on earth doesn't OVH have reoccurring billing. Every month I have to click on their email link and make sure that my server billing gets processed? It's so strange...

I've asked OVH about this many times, and they keep saying they'll get it. I'm actually going to leave OVH because of this and other issues. Its super annoying

They probably do it to reduce risk from chargeback fraud. Recurring payments run the risk of reversing multiple payments over a range. If someone files a chargeback dispute, OVH can dispute it by saying the customer authorized each charge.

Makes sense. I also had recurring bills that kept getting paid for 4-5 months after my credit card number was stolen and I got a new number+card for the same account. It was so odd.

It's a feature! IIRC, if a business has a certain volume, they can make an agreement with certain card companies to have the subscription "forward" to the new card.

They should be using an indemnified payment service. Maybe not cost effective enough for them.

if amazon, atlantic and DO can so this they can as well.

They can probably absorb more fraud.

Yet all the time people compare them to those services.

Maybe to encourage people to buy more months at once?

You can set up recurring billing - OVH calls it automatic renewal - I've got this set up, and they collect payment for my VPS and dedicated server with this method

It's only for their dedicated cloud product. http://docs.ovh.ca/en/faqs-renew-servers.html

Every month, I have to click on some invoice, enter CC details (even though I went through the process of saving those creds once).

UGH, so annoying. They're going to lose my business one day just because I'm going to forget..

I have a dedicated server and a VPS. Both renew automatically (at least here in the UK)

That's no real increase and just fair. At the moment servers in the UK were cheap compared to paying in Eur (if you can pay in both). Although I don't really understand why they price in £ anyway. They could just base it on € and convert the other currencies every month. With the current weak € this would be nice for nearly everyone else.

For the comparison, AWS bills everything in dollar.

AWS can now bill you in one of twelve currencies.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-set-preferred-payment-c...

Sorry, I should clarify.

AWS accounts for everything in dollars, and at the top of the monthly payslip there will be (only) one big number in your selected currency (which is just the total dollar amount at that day's exchange rate).

Title should be "Dedicated Server Price Increase in the UK".

Yes, that was really confusing at first.

I have a german server with a french company (OVH) took me a while to realize that this has nothing to do with my server based on that the text does not mention anything about it.

As a Swiss, we are used to these moves (due the Swiss Franc). Often, companies are taking these external events to increase their prices (or fire people). Oddly when it is at the customer advantage, the prices never follow the curve down...

hasn't there been a brutal multi-year price war between the large cloud vendors in favor of the customer?

If it had been brutal, they wouldn't still be so ridiculously expensive compared to dedicated.

They do what I wish I had done in my first startup: Realise that when your margins are massive and your main competition aren't dropping prices drastically, you don't rock the boat. You'll take your turn and drop your price a bit, and then let them take their turn and drop the price a bit, and you keep playing that game or as long as you can get away with it. (instead we went straight for the throat of our competition with much lower prices - two days later they decided to us the war-chest they'd built up over years to undercut us; nobody made any money in our market for the next several years)

If they were fighting a price war, Amazon, Google and Microsoft would have issued multiple profit warnings over it.

What they're doing is taking turns buying PR while trying hard not to trigger a price war.

I don't know that it has been so brutal, by every account I have heard, successful cloud service providers are still extremely profitable.

I gotta ask, because this looks like such a great deal on their website for a VPS...anyone use them? They're the only VPS i've seen that doesn't charge at all for bandwidth according to this its unliminted bandwidth https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-cloud.xml

Are they any good? I was thinking of picking this up here in North America, since they got data centers in Canada (should be good enough for my purposes)

Edit: For clarity, my wife makes homemade dream catchers and soy candles, so I was hoping to migrate her away from Etsy to a custom rolled store, and I was thinking of hosting it on a VPS since shared hosting seems so...sketchy.

I used to use OVH and most of the time their stuff works but when it doesn't there is very little chance of their tech support figuring out what the problem is and fixing it. They basically deny anything is on their side and you really have to move to a different VPS/Dedicated server or whatever instead of the issue actually being resolved. I use a dedicated server from a place in FL now that is a small shop but I get a real person(with a brain) when something goes wrong and they actually take me seriously and fix their stuff.

Fundamentally, if you use their backup service as well for critical services is that at least reliable? Rackspace was.....lackluster.

You missed your chance to spam the link to the store, it's Christmas time!

Also looking at your profile, be aware that email address is not shown unless you put it in the 'about' section yourself.

Got it, didn't realize that, fixed! Thank you.

I sure did ha! Her esty store does very well for what its worth, its getting to the point where its actually going to be worth taking the time to take it to the next level. I'll see if anyone else has more comments on using this service, do some research, and go from there. What I really need to do at this point is just link the owned domain of her shop to her etsy page as a stop gap for ease of use. I'm gonan down that now....:)

I use their cheapest SSD VPS to host few domains (mainly to avoid the hassle of installing php cms in a dedicated hosting environment where you don't have a full control over PHP configuration.) So far I can't complain about anything, I do have a fairly low traffic though.

I have been using their Cloud RAM product for a while now and haven't had any issues.

For what its worth, would you be comfortable elaborating how long you have used them and what kind of things you deploy there?

I host my personal email and web programming projects on it and have been doing so for four months. I've ordered two different Cloud RAM servers and haven't had any issues with either of them. In the Summer of 2015 I used their old VPS Cloud lineup which was not reliable and is no longer available to be ordered.

Cool cool. I'll certainly keep looking into them thank you. Do you find that their routing is pretty robust speed wise?

I'm able to saturate the 100 mbit port with incoming traffic, I'm sure I'd be able to do a full 100 mbit out as well but I haven't tested that with the VPSes. I really like the OVH professional products because you can enable the DDoS protection 24/7 and some of the sites I'd potentially be interested in hosting would be "high risk" for DDoS.

Only for the UK apparently?

Yep...all thanks to Brexit:

the UK decided to leave the European Union which caused the UK economy to rock and weakened the British pound against the Euro/Dollar. This impacted many businesses across the UK and in OVH’s case it triggered a price increase from our suppliers which we have absorbed over the past few months.

I'm sure they will lower their prices again if the pound recovers some of its recently lost value. cough

They will if there is competition...

Well it's due to the GBP devaluation after the referendum, so it makes sense.

Maybe this price increase is related to the decline of the pound or it is to offset the increased costs caused by the Snooper's Charter. Because I can't remember that there was a price increase after the 2008 Pound crash and compared to the Euro the Pound is where it was around 2011 before it started to rise against the Euro.

Prices tend to be pegged to the dollar not the Euro even tho OVH is a French company.

It does seem this was done to bring GBP/USD pricing back to parity with EUR/USD and is only an issue if you resided in the UK and need to spend GBP.

The SP-32 server was 48.99 GBP which is 60.65 USD via ovh.co.uk while the same server could be ordered for 69.99 EUR or 72.57 USD via ovh.ie.

something doesn't add up here...

today the euro is at a 10 year low against the dollar, and the pound against the euro is roughly the same as it was in 2013

Fair enough.

I thought ovh was French

Indeed, but they are implemented worldwide: https://www.ovh.com/us/about-us/network.xml

That's why they're jacking up prices in the UK (only); otherwise for the same amount of pounds the customer pays they would get less euros.

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