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Comment by notamy | Hacker News Reader

> I have serious doubts about the OVH’s and Scaleway’s unlimited traffic, seems more marketing strategy than real to me (joe di castro).

Anecdotal, of course, but I have an application on OVH (on the USD $3.50/month plan) that pushes/pulls >10TB/month - coming close to saturating the 100/100 connection at times - and I've not heard anything from OVH about it being an issue.

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Yeah, they have no problem with that. But I do recall years ago when a few customers were running hundreds of seedboxes OVH changed ToS and asked them to leave.

It seems to depend on if you generate complaints. If you're not causing problems for them they won't likely care. Goes for most seedboxes, actually.

That, I no like it. I understand it, but not like it.

It's like being at their mercy (or other clients) or like if the rules were written in the shore's sand, you're well until the tide rises. I would prefer clear lines into this kind of things.

So you'd prefer them to what? Go to court so people can keep seeding illegal torrents? They'd never win in court and it would be business suicide.

I was not referring here about the "activity" per se, I was talking about quotas and percentages of use. No matter for what kind of activity you are going to use the service, I would like to have clear from the beginning what limits of use I have.

Another thing completely different is the permissibility about certain illegal activities or loopholes in their servers. That's not my concern, that's only a question of moral/ethics/legal between the client, the provider and the authorities.

There aren't any limits. I've run my port at 100% for a full month and they've never batted an eye. The only time I've heard of anyone getting the banhammer is for repeatedly getting abuse notifications due to illegal torrenting.

Obviously, always that there is a limit, would be people trying to abuse them. The key is to trace clear limits between what is a fair use of the service and what is a clear abuse, but sometimes the creativity of your clients can easily surpass any expectations or planned use cases that you had.

Oh! That's nice to know, I'm glad to hear that and that they keep that promise. I knew that they have their own infrastructure, but even then, I really have doubts because in my experience almost all of the providers have "little marketing white lies".

Scaleway are owned by one of the largest ISPs in France. Bandwidth is typically brought symmetric, but home traffic is nearly entirely download. It's my assumption that they use their server buisness to offset their bandwidth costs for their underutilised outbound links.

Yes, Free is very well known here in my country, it has a great reputation.

Your assumption makes sense to me, and probably is close to the truth.

I really want to try out OVH but I don't like their requirement that you need to send a copy of your passport. None of the other ones DO, Scaleway, Linode etc. requires this.

Really? I've not run into that issue - they let me get going with a Paypal account and nothing else.

Yes, I used my credit card, though. I already had too much trouble with Paypal (after two years still they frozen my account) to avoid them

I run tens of terabytes every month through my $3 Scaleway server, going on about a year now. I use it as a seedbox for Linux ISO's.

As these graphs suggest, their disk speed is not great compared to my Vultr servers.

Good to know, I suppose that I would need to change that phrase to be more accurate. Thanks for sharing it.

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