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Comment by lilbobbytables | Hacker News Reader

It's truly helpful to hear experiences first hand across different providers - especially so specifically.

I'm really interested in your experience with OVH - how long ago did you last use it, and what problems did you have?

I've used OVH successfully for various unimportant things for a while now. I'm about to setup a prod environment on OVH for a side project that we anticipate getting some good initial traction. So, not trying to spend a ton, but willing to forego the conveniences of AWS the best cost to performance ratio.

OVH has made a big Openstack push, it seems. "VPS Cloud n" series is KVM (Openstack), with NVMe drives, using Ceph (Openstack) storage, and a moderate 99.99% uptime (same as DO).

It's quite attractive at their prices - so I'm trying to gather as much relevant intel as possible on others' experience with them.

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I have multiple dedis (not VPSs) at OVH Canada (Windows on bare metal as well as Proxmox with Linux and Windows VMs). You'll want multiple dedis there too, if you use them.

Occasionally a server will hard lock and when you got into the management web app and ask for a reboot it will say that the system is not responding and they have to send a tech to go physically power cycle it. When that happens (and it will, it's happened to ALL of my dedis there at some point) you're down for 30-90 minutes.

They provide remote reboot and a java-based ILO which can solve most weird issues, but the hard lock stuff continues to confound us.

Oh wow. That's something new.

We currently have multiple dedicated servers out of OVH BHS Canada (bare metal servers) and I have never ran into that problem. Most of the time I believe OVH gives you all the tools necessary. If I recall correctly, I believe their power-cycle feature is sending a SNMP command to the UPS, so their online control panel should technically work, but mileage may vary.

We've started moving on to Colocated hardware though. Unless you specifically need OVH's VAC system or their network (or free 256 IPs with setup fees), I've found OVH's availability of hardware and configurations to be fairly lacking. Glad it works out for you guys though!

Yikes. That's what I want to avoid. Since I'm going VPS, I'm looking at RamNode now instead.

The CEO is actually really nice and accessible, and their customers seem to really vouch for them.

My experiences with OVH's cloud platform has been a bit dated. I've been using their cloud platform since 2012, especially when their OpenVZ "Cloud" VMs were nested VMs inside their VMWare containers and had regular network outages (due to noisy neighbors) or restarting the VM every few hours. I switched to their VMWare VMs and they work like a charm. Granted some see it as a bit pricey for a small project but it's still cheaper than some other options.

My experience with OVH's KVM Openstack line was when it was still maturing as a RunAbove product. I remember they had problems out the gate and at one point had regular service restarts and I think at one point had a storage problem becoming read-only. I stopped using them since then and just chalked it up as another problem with using OVH's cheapest cloud platform. They've never worked out for me.

However, for those who stuck around and also bought KVMs from OVH after they "graduated" from RunAbove, I believe it works to an extent. It's not the best, it's obviously focused on minimizing costs and maximizing possible resources and reliability, and (this is my own speculation now) I think their server density is fairly high (VMs per host node). I haven't heard of any major problems lately with their KVM platform but again, I wouldn't put anything intensive on there either.

If cost is a major factor for you, then go with OVH's Openstack KVM line. If you still need fairly solid reliability, I think going with AWS or GCP might be worth another look. If you're fine with a VPS starting out without Ceph, NVMe, etc, then I'd really suggest you hit up Linode. Linode offers some of the best resources per cost ratio while still providing a decent reliability factor. If you really do need reliable storage then I'd look at DigitalOcean's Block-Storage (also known as network storage). Once you've grown your operation a bit more and have more resources and funds, then I think it'd be worth re-visiting the idea of moving to AWS or GCP or any other cloud platforms.

YMMV as I am just one person.

If you want a more detailed response feel free to let me know.

Best of luck!

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