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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

What's the target market for this "showdown" ? Hopefully not an online business, as all of these providers are the cloud hosting equivalent of shared servers from the early 00's. I've used DO and Linode and both have serious reliability problems that you have to engineer around yourself, and I can't imagine the other providers are any more robust.

Linode was too pricy for what they provided back when I tried them, too. At this point I would only use these providers for a personal website, but I would choose the cheapest, and get an identical second provider and dual host for redundancy.

Even if they were more reliable systems than they are now, the bigger they are the more they attract attacks on their core. Only the giants like Amazon and Google, or more professional (read: expensive) providers have the resources to deal with it.

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I thought several minutes about answering you, but here we go...

I have several DO droplets running, one is running for 4 years now, zero downtime. I heared about some problems but that were no massive outages, but rather single host systems failing, which is no problem, since you should built your application that way that one VM failing is no problem. It happens everywhere, on Bare Metal, on AWS, on Google Cloud, etc.

Linode cut their pricing (or rather improved their plans) and started offering a $5 plan, I don't see how they are too pricey compared to the competition.

You pay a massive amount of money on AWS to be protected against DDoS, otherwise they will just bill you the bandwidth costs (that are very very high compared to those companies compared in the blog post).

> What's the target market for this "showdown" ? Hopefully not an online business, as all of these providers are the cloud hosting equivalent of shared servers from the early 00's. I've used DO and Linode and both have serious reliability problems that you have to engineer around yourself, and I can't imagine the other providers are any more robust.

OVH has openstack support in some regions and that is the current defacto non aws / Google / Azure cloud competitor.

And, all of the big providers have their own issues - cloud computing is hard, and no one has it 100% yet.

> Even if they were more reliable systems than they are now, the bigger they are the more they attract attacks on their core. Only the giants like Amazon and Google, or more professional (read: expensive) providers have the resources to deal with it.

While, yes they may not have the capacity themselves to swallow a large ddos, there is service providers who do, and any iaas worth there salt will have a contract with one or more of them.

I've never had problems with linode... yes there are the occasional hardware problems that require restarts, but certainly better than AWS in uptime. For a while my VMs were going on a year+ of uptime. What issues did you see?

To start? Customer data exfiltration, credential compromise, mandatory kernels (security problems), system downtime, network issues, ddos, and unusual performance problems. They may have a couple lower cost options now, but you'll probably still pay out the nose to upgrade them as before.

You do realize that OVH weathered DDoSes largee than 1100Gbps in the past, without issues?

And that, like Scaleway, it belongs to a large french ISP with a nationwide network, own backbones, and they are even developing and using their own hardware?

These are giants.

I'm not familiar with those at all, I can only speak to the two I spoke of.

But it's a bit strange for an ISP to develop its own hardware, and ddos prevention has nothing to do with system management or cloud hosting feature sets. Furthermore, those two are the least mature, slowest, tiniest, and most limited providers in the shootout on every metric except perhaps network performance in France.

> But it's a bit strange for an ISP to develop its own hardware

For an ISP that, 5 years ago, was the largest hosting provider on the planet, and is still an ISP in several countries with their own backbones, custom hardware is not unusual.

You don't complain when Google or AWS develop custom hardware, or when Level3 develops custom hardware.

Why would OVH be different?

> and ddos prevention has nothing to do with system management or cloud hosting feature sets.

No, but it's something you complained about, although OVH managed to successfully handle the second-largest DDoS known to date without downtime.

It's very obvious you're not familiar with them at all.

I was literally just about to launch a consumer facing app on Digital Ocean this month...was I being incredibly naive?

Just make sure you are not relying on one droplet and you are good to go.

serious reliability problems that you have to engineer around yourself

Sounds like AWS - they explicitly state that you can't count on their stuff and you need to engineer your stack that way.

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