So what is Ovh's reputation as a host? Anyone use them? Any problems?
The prices are amazingly cheap, so might be worth trying them just because it won't cost much.
The prices are amazingly cheap, so might be worth trying them just because it won't cost much.
Two caveats:
- They have no taste and are really bad a interface design. Their administration tools are notoriously confusing, even after years of using them I'm still blown away at how they manage to make something simple so complicated. The boss (Octave) will post product announcements in the forums, and not in the official newsletter, encouraging a cult following of enthusiats/amateurs (that can be seen as both good or bad I guess…). Don't expect good documentation either.
- support is sub-par. I only contacted them a couple of times, and my carefully worded questions were met by a standardized reply, as if they had only read half of my email.
tl;dr : if you're a good sysadmin and don't need any hand-holding, they are good.
Well... everything is working pretty smoothly. I'm using their manager to upgrade/downgrade my host's RAM on a daily basis, as I'm using the cloud as a pre-production server for a webapp. The manager UI is quite ugly, to say the least, but sufficient to start/stop and upgrade/downgrade the virtual host.
I did not had to ask for help from the support team so I cannot offer any advice on them.
You're only really paying for the cost of the hardware, the rest is a heavy reliance on peering with no or little transit links (you'll see they only sell to some EU countries).
On the forums the only person complaining where people doing NSFW hosting or radio streams. For web app stuff (including Git/Subversion hosting) it is really really good.
You can check the backbone here: http://weathermap.ovh.net/
Also, for people not aware, they have their own servers with liquid cooling and they are crazy with respect to optimization of their processes, think TPM and Toyota.
The concern is, just because it works for you, doesn't mean it will work for all of your customers. Especially if they're not in the EU.
I'm not so sure on the cooling either -- their hard disks are very hot (I admit I don't know enough about hardware to say whether this is a problem) but generally I don't see many hardware failures.
I do however see plenty of random reboots -- only the HG servers (and strangely a few 19.99 servers with over a year uptime) seem to survive these as you'd expect.
I've taken new servers with Leaseweb and I'm building up with them now, I also have a few with 100TB in the US too. So now that when a customer says they are having poor speeds I just need to verify that it's to do with the bandwidth and explain the situation and this works very well for me. I can then move them to a new server and everyone is happy, it's an easier way to deal with something other than "err, sorry, would you like a refund?"
Although I realise I'm unique in that I can just move them around (well, 95% of the time). What would concern me is running a business critical website on a provider that doesn't provide international bandwidth.
For small servers they are pretty comparable price wise (more RAM, less CPU) but I prefer their interface :)
EDIT: Why the down-vote? Is my comment wrong? Is it out of topic? I can understand the random up-votes, but I thought the down ones should be justified.
Although I agree with you, a comment explaining would have been better than a down-vote -- best not to take those personally!
The comment below (to which I was implicitly refering to), talks about Kimsufi. I checked before I talked. This comment speaks true. I knew it.
Now, my comment was replying to a comment of ErrantX, which were talking about GANDI. So was I.
I thought there was absolutely no ambiguity, but now, I'm not so sure: namely, which interface ErrantX actually prefers? His "but" puzzles me.