OVH increases pricing with the rise of their next generation DDoS Protection | Hacker News Reader

OVH increases pricing with the rise of their next generation DDoS Protection

sinfulforums.net

86 pointsdx03432 comments

OVH is one of the few hosting providers that used to offer DDoS protection for free to everyone - and a good one.

The issue is that it became a refugee for sites that could not stay online on other providers due to DDoS - so they were getting hit often.

The price change is not too bad considering how cheap they are. Still use and recommend them.

>The issue is that it became a refugee for sites that could not stay online on other providers due to DDoS - so they were getting hit often.

Eh...not really. OVH has and will just blackhole your IP(s) in BGP and terminate your service......But not before logging into your server with the OVH root key they install by default and seeing what you're up to of course (yay backdoored by default)

OVH has a lot going for them, but reasonableness and consistency in business are not one of them. They have no problems dumping larger BW clients even if they're following the FUP/TOS.

OVH already put up a mandatory DDOS protection in 2013, with about the same price (article about the feature states 0.5 to 10€ per server : https://www.nextinpact.com/news/81703-ovh-protection-ddos-ca...).

Before that, sites that were the target of a DDOS often were simply disabled and their subscriptions cancelled.

At the time the practice raised a lot of criticism, since that was presented as an "option" that you could not refuse to pay for, which seemed a bit forceful. Now they're being more honest, the need to protect from DDOS has a cost, especially considering that a DDOS makes a lot of collateral damage and it is needed to protect innocent bystanders. Everyone pays a little bit, and those who actually need protection don't have to pay anything more. Maybe they've taken some inspiration from the French socialized health system :)

Hetzner used to have a bad rep for simply disabling accounts of people getting DDoSd. The have recently claimed to have improved on this https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/ddos-schutz

That email was really bad, "New: Anti-DDOS Next Gen" is not a suitable subject line for what boils down to a 20% price bump in my case. They don't even state the new prices in the email, and the linked page (https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml) has a different product listing than when I ordered my server, and lists the same model number with different prices because the model number doesn't appear to specify the model anymore, there are different versions with different amounts of disk space. OVH handled the whole thing really terribly.

And not just for kimsufi, also for the main brand. To figure out the price difference you have to consult a PDF which splits prices differently than the main page. They stated in the email that new orders will see the new price but that's definitely not the case. The blog article talks about increases in the range of 1-10€ while in reality, increases in public cloud are much higher (20-30%). Selling that as a DDOS investment is questionable, I guess they just miscalculated prices.

Well at least they're consistent in communicating it badly!

At least for the kimsufi line, you still get the old price if you renew in November. Guess who just renewed for another year ;)

Their blogspot where they talk more about the decision: https://www.ovh.ie/a2536.anti-ddos-protection-why-ovh-must-k...

The increase in price is €1 to €10 ex. VAT/month. It's pretty reasonable given the anti-DDoS service they offer.

FS-48T appears to be going from $355/mo to $395.99/mo.

A lot of the public cloud increases by much more, around 30% for many instances. As much as I like ovh, this definitely narrows their price advantage.

Hah, I received this email and read about half of the first paragraph before concluding it was a sales pitch to purchase something and deleting it. Talk about burying the lede.

That said, the servers are so inexpensive that it's pretty hard to argue with this "request".

I'd like to see OVH take a stronger stance on actioning abuse requests for hosts serving malware before hearing about some paid protection offering. For those not fortunate enough to deal with OVH, if you report abuse, your information and report often find their way directly to those committing the malicious actions - the "customer". This results in the actor simply removing their content to appease OVH and then continuing business as usual. In the face of clear evidence, OVH will often cite privacy issues for why they can't or won't take action. At this point, anytime I see their infrastructure in an investigation, I know it's a waste of time.

I feel that's the way it should be. Otherwise you run into the problems of a customer's service being taken down due to frivolous/malicious reasons.

Honestly, I wouldn't expect a hosting service of that scale to even respond to something like that unless it was a serious letter from law enforcement.

Often today we're stuck with guilty until proven innocent in online communities, ex - DMCA. So I think I like what they're doing.

And with cases where malware, etc is involved, it gets a lot more difficult to conclusively point out malice.

I think this is one of the strongest pros for using OVH;

YOU get the abuse letters and as someone operating a internet service it is YOUR responsibility, legal and otherwise, to deal with them.

This means if the abuse letters are ignored, the next step is the legal one instead of having OVH deal with it. It's business between you and the hoster, not between you and OVH.

Unfortunately, the legal process has not caught up with the speed in which malicious actors can conduct their attacks. In some cases, infrastructure is used for merely a few hours before swapping to something new. It's a constant game of wack-a-mole and without the provider's help, there's no way to stop it.

incidentally, i found that ovh offers a kvm vps with 2gb ram and unlimited traffic for a bit over $3.

2gb ram at digital ocean is $20, with limited traffic (3tb seems like a decent amount, though). a ri on aws runs slightly over $10, but traffic costs are an absurd tragedy.

i was pretty hyped when i found this, but sadly ovh didn't offer private/internal networking for their vps last i checked. so if i want a web vps to talk to a db vps, i have to give the db an internet-facing ip; this increases risks and possibly latency if there isn't some router config preventing public-ip packets from leaving the datacenter.

You can get the VPS range as cloud servers for the exact same price. Then you get all the cloud features including private network.

I guess they are keeping the old VPS range as it seems many people find cloud hosting too advance.

Their dedicated servers are good, but I have found their VPS service to be unreliable, and their support people clueless. We had an outage every month for a while, and the support people said that it was "normal" to take 30 minutes to reboot an instance. So I think it's a different tech stack and team within OVH.

They have their vRack available for those instances. Have them running in production just fine.

OVHs networks are pretty terrible.

Why? I always found them to be quite reliable. Both latency and bandwidth is pretty good to almost anywhere in the world, considering data centre locations.

terrible or oversold? Also, benchmarks? For how cheap some of their stuff is, it seems like a decent trade-off even if it is some level of bad.

It’s about time that hosting companies raise the prices a little bit. The industry has undergone so much consolidation, and service quality has suffered as a consequence. Paying an extra euro per month to make sure that the provider is properly funded to provide a good quality of service makes a lot of sense to me.

I got a VPS at OVH which claims to have "triple data replication". One day it crashed at root password reset (they forced me to reset the root password). I contacted them but they said I have to reinstall the VPS. wtf? I told them that they have the data replicated. They replied with "Yes, the data is replicated but the data is corrupted. So you still have to reinstall the OS". Never trust marketing quotes, do regular backups and never choose the lowest price :)

Data replication only protects against hardware failure. For everything else you need backups.

Raid increases uptime but don't rely on that as your only protection.

Great. This is a good thing. You want them to mitigate your DDoS instead of black holing your site every time a 15 year old gets pissed off. Why is this framed negatively? This is awesome news.

Have they started supporting recurring billing yet? I actually left because they didn't let me do recurring billing. Everything else worked just fine. Not having the ability to have a credit card billed automatically however is just insane. WTF, seriously.

Just an update here for future travelers that OVH will start doing recurring billing after Dec 4th 2017. Great news.

So what about those folks that use other DDOS protection services like Cloudflare?

Do we still need to be charged more if we have other measures in place? Seems a bit odd.

Hey, if you just want to raise your prices a bit, just do it (I understand that) but doing it under the guise of needing to "fight the collective fight of DDOS", (not so much).

From the email I got:

  For dedicated servers, the extra cost for Anti-DDoS will be applied to:
  * OVH servers w/ 1 Gbit/s network  
  * OVH servers with either 10, 25, or 40 Gbit/s network

So it seems like the older, lower-network-speed Kimsufi dedi boxes will stay at the same price?

Surely there is some better source for this than an almost empty web forum...

https://www.ovh.ie/news/articles/a2536.anti-ddos-protection-...

See the last paragraph of this post

> This is why OVH has decided to request a contribution from customers, via a €1 to €10 ex. VAT/month increase in the price of VPS, Public Cloud instances and dedicated servers (except Game). This increase will be visible on the OVH websites by the end of October and it will apply to new orders of dedicated servers and VPS. The same will be rolled out for Public Cloud at the start of December. Existing customers whose services are implicated in the price increase, will receive personal email notification of the revised pricing due to take effect on the 1st of December.

Show HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538 (2017May:146comments)

This changes the landscape quite a bit!

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