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Most of these GUI differences came during OVH's huge expansion around 2014. At that point they split into several "business lines" (kimsufi/so you start/ovh dedicated/ovh cloud...) that operate mostly independently, and hence the separate logins and interfaces. I'm not saying that it isn't a mess, because it is, but at least there's an explanation.

Also, part of the bad interface design seems due to them building public API's first and then the GUIs. This leads to the same kind of "impedance mismatch" problems that many frontend apps suffer where the backend functions aren't well suited to provide good UX. Of course this is also their fault for either not improving the APIs and/or not putting enough effort to work around the limitations in their GUIs. However, it has the upside that you have APIs for everything.

Also... we've been customers for a very long time, mainly of their dedicated server offerings. After dealing with their support a non-trivial number of times, our learned procedure is: just get a new server and migrate, without renewing the old one. Sadly, this also means that we don't trust any managed service from them.

We share this experience. We received a faulty server. It happens with all providers. The problem was we were not able to get it repaired in a one month timeframe. Support suggested getting refund.

We switched all other services from them pretty instantly. It would not be an option if one of our production servers had a failure and we could not get repair procedure quickly handled. We are willing to pay for this privilege.

BTW - we were their customer for 6 years. It worked smoothly and there were no problems with their service on running machines.

That's actually very fair, I recall that before 2014 I used their old UI and it was not that terrible (other than feeling outdated even then, but outdated is better than nearly unusable).

I found that using OpenStack's CLI utilities is sometimes better than any of their UIs. Unfortunately even then I have to switch to their UI to switch a server to monthly billing (transforming it into more of a VPS than a cloud instance). Wish they handled it the same way as Google does with the sustained usage discount.

An upvote wasn't enough - I REALLY wanted to work with OVH but their various web portals can't seem to even consistently remember your country or language, billing is a nightmare, etc. One of the few experiences I've had in life where they made working with them (and giving them money) so impossible I began to wonder if they're a front or money laundering operation. To be clear on that point I know they aren't and I'm not accusing them of any wrongdoing, the experience was so appallingly bad I had to come up with a humorous explanation just to rationalize the whole thing.

I was able to ignore the UX because I just needed a small box for OpenVPN and Caddy.

I could not however continue using them once they asked me to verify my identity after a month of usage.

I was paying $3.50 per month.

No other hosting provider has asked me for that kind of information.

With that stupid move, they lost a customer for life.

Try living in Eastern Europe. Digital Ocean did that to me when I opened the account more than 5 years ago.

Great to know people confirming the horrible experience (actually bittersweet). Happy to know I'm not the "odd one out".

> website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know.

No, not a European thing. They are just special.

Okay, that's good to know. However, I had a quick glance at Hetzner (an OVH competitor), and it looks to be using esoteric design.

I was thinking about using Hetzner, but I dread it may be like OVH. Anyone with first-hand experience with Hetzner?

I have a few dedicated boxes for almost 10 years now. I highly recommend it. I use it to run bitcoinity.org since it was created in 2011. Because of relatively big database (2TB) and many concurrent websocket connections (peaking around 20K) cost would be prohibitive elsewhere. Great uptime, instant responses, eKVM and blah blah I'm not their marketing team, I'm just a really happy customer.

I've tried OVH I think on two or three occasions, mostly VPS which was really sucked. But that was a few years ago maybe they got their s..ervers together.

How many servers do you have with Hetzner to manage 20,000 websocket connections? Also, did you ever have data loss in your large database because of hard drive failure?

Theoretically, they could get away with just one: http://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-webso...

That said, it depends on the stack, the level of optimizations and how much each websocket requires...

I'd love to know too though (both the # of servers and the other details)

Yup, I switched to phoenix lately. Works as advertised. I didn't even mess much with any kernel options. I still have most of my stack on ruby (on rails), but I bridge more and more things with elixir app (and phoenix), mostly using redis queues. As mentioned just 2 boxes are doing ws pushing currently, they also serve the app, one additional server also serving app but mostly static files, DB server, DB-slave and the app logic (which in my case is mostly fetching data and calculating some stats).

Unfortunately, even though there are some fallbacks and it seems to be pretty reliable, these servers are pets rather than cattle.

Two are doing just fine with the current stack (elixir), I actually have more problem with gigabit connections getting saturated at some points, but that's just my failure to optimize data that's being sent. Before that I was using nginx module (nginx-push-stream-module) which is also great and way ahead of any other out-of-the-box solution that I know.

Every server has RAID1 by default, plus I keep postrgresql slave on another box and I try to keep up to date backup. I actually never experienced a drive failure there (I currantly have ~10 boxes), but on my dev server at home which runs the same service I got I guess 5 HDDs failures already. Just two of them were server-grade though.

YMMV but I've had a very pleasant experience with Hetzner. On the same level as many US DC's when it comes to server and account management.

Switched to Hetzner from ovh a few years ago. No problems with either provider.

What do you mean by "esoteric design"?!

Design that does not follow "standard" conventions. Don't make me define "standard"!

Ah a French company with one of their DC in Quebec. What could go wrong ?

Probably had GoDaddy's crew build it on the side

I use OVH's So You Start line and I think my biggest complaint is that they don't allow automatic renewal. Every monthly renewal means manually keying in my card number every month. The only alternative is to pre-pay in 3, 6, or 12 months in advance. It is the only online service I use that doesn't handle auto-renewal.

Ask them to update your account to the newest version. I assure you they handle automatic renewals and they handle them very strictly - I'm getting emails blasted to both main and optional email account at the first time there is a card decline.

Here some screen shoots from minutes ago:

Exhibit 1: huge yellow sticker to tell me to switch to auto-pay, which I actually don't want to for some of my clients.

Exhibit 2: both bills for servers setup as autopay.

Actually the option to pay in advance is a blessing and as far as I know, only known to me provider that does that. Last December where I was for $35,000 in taxes, I was able to significantly lower that down for purchasing OVH services for 12 months in advance. OVH rocks!!

[1] https://ibb.co/enhmen

[2] https://ibb.co/nGGJs7

That's OVH, which uses a different control panel than their SoYouStart division. I just submitted a ticket with them asking if autorenew was possible and they replied right away confirming that autorenew is not possible, unfortunately.

I use their dedicated servers and they just implemented automatic renewals in February. I don't know if that covers all their offerings though.

Same here, it's so weird. Most services are dying to get you to sign up for autorenewal, these guys don't even allow it.

That is assuming you manage to find the right portal to log into! Heaven forbid you travel and hit their geofence!

>-they use OpenStack (Yay!). Unforuntely, they have a confusing implementation of OpenStack dashboard, AND on a separate site, with separate credentials.

can you point me at a not-so-confusing implementation of OpenStack?

I'm (mostly) not being snide... this is actually relevant to my interests (and yours, if you want to buy a certain kind of OpenStack services)

My own impression as a SysAdmin is that OpenStack is incredibly overcomplex, and that you want Ganeti instead. I mean, this is from the SysAdmin side, setting up and maintaining the cluster. Ganeti clusters are setup by one person. OpenStack clusters are giant IBM-esqe projects where you switch consulting firms at least twice before completion.

Of course, on the end user side, it's a different thing, and having a consistent api to code against has a multitude of benefits.

so I'm super interested in what users who are enthusiastic about (and paying for services from) service providers who provide service using openstack. I'm especially interested in how much of the openstack api is exposed to the user and how.

The UI is good enough to set up the storage once and then not ever touch it again. I also enjoy when it randomly switches to French.

That is correct. But it's those times when you need to interact with the dashboard or billing that makes you cringe. I run a business, I can't "afford" that headache.

And true about the random French switching.

I only use dashboard when I buy a server and perform installation. It is pretty good these days and automatic renewal also works. In my opinion it is much better than AWS - as in simpler.

Re: Random French switching

Maybe you are using their Quebec DC. (Bill 101)

Maybe the obfuscation saves them in support budget. If you are persistent enough to go through the confusing interface you are also persistent enough to solve problems yourself.

There is also Scaleway owned by Iliad (French telecom/isp provider). Even cheaper and they have basicly copied the DigitalOcean Design.

My problem is their support. Packet loss to a server? 'Sorry this is not our issue'. I have one server left there, and if it goes above ~50mbit it drops ~25% of network traffic to multiple sources.

I was unable to set up their Open Stack and the support didn't help, but at least I got refund. But their dedicated server is pretty good and you can easily setup Kubernetes on it.

Plus you have some French that surfaces all over the place in the UI even when you are a UK customer.

But that’s kind of OVH’s DNA. It originated as a bunch of servers hosted in a closet, and has been progressively hacking together more features cheaply, it’s kind of the duct tape and shoe string hosting provider, but it has prices in line with that style as well. A much more polished and support-focused provider wouldn’t charge these prices.

I love OVH and have used them for a few years now but I'll echo your sentiments about a confusing jumble of dashboards and settings.

It does seem to have got a little better over the last year although their Openstack cloud service is made a little more difficult to manage because of their pre-paid servers discount being tied to a specific instance, it makes auto scaling difficult.

I can confirm !

I wanted to store a couple gigs of data online.

A friend told me that OVH had a service for that.

I checked their service and found it; wow it was literally 10x as expensive as competitors.

Turns out there are 2 services to store data online by OVH, the one I am looking for was named differently and hard to find on their website.

After seeing that they both had extremely negative reviews, I did not look further.

The credits are probably because it’s a way to get to you to pay in front rather than after the billing period. Some other cloud companies do this too so it’s not too far out.

However, it’s a better UX and less hassle to just bill customers in actual dollars/euros than in “MyCompany Credits” (that probably map 1:1 or 1:100 or 1:1000 to USD)

I get the rationale for credits. However, in true OVH fashion, credits is way more confusing than it has to be. The invoice is also confusing. Not a simple "you bought this, you owe this". But it has deductions, subtractions, additions, sub-totals, credits, etc. I am not an accountant!

That's pretty basic stuff for any adult person, no accountant needed.

Whilst you could check the bill each month and do these calculations do you really want to spend anytime doing that for a server costing $3.50 a month? Anytime spent checking it is a false economy.

> -I was "just" using OVH object storage [...]

> -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap"

Have you looked at wasabi.com? They are much cheaper than just about anyone for object store. OVH is 0.0112/GB/mo and Wasabi is 0.0049/GB/mo.

Have you used wasabi? Is it usable in the US? I've tried it once before, and today, but the speeds are still completely unusable for me (in Northern EU). Would be awesome if they had some regions closer to me.

Does wasabi support static web hosting?

Not sure myself, but a quick look in their support area comes up with (below) which seems like it might answer your question.

https://wasabi-support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150014...

from their FAQ: Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times.

Wasabi it appears is not suitable when content is downloaded is many times, which is the use case for websites.

> -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything.

This times a hundred. I'd keep running into tasks that DIDN'T WORK on the web UI and was told to use the API, but then the API didn't work because of the region I was in and I had to use an older version or a different command that did seemingly the same thing or...

I share most of your toughts, they really should put some real effort in UX. Example: domains informations are linked to user accounts, if you want to edit registrant, administrative or technical contacts you are required to create full OVH user profiles.

Their customer portal / billing interface seems to be significantly improved on the new US OVH site. It seems like they plan on rolling that out globally eventually.

The only time I login to their website is when I have to use their KVM - once or twice a year at the most.

RIP /managerv3/

Have you ever looked at online.net?

And what's esoteric design?

I had very bad experience with physical server at online.net. One time I noticed that my server did not return from reboot. I logged into KVM and discovered that both my SSD drives failed and need replacement.

I immediately backed up all my data and created ticket. I wait for I day. I wait for 2 days. After three days (all this time my server was offline) I got answer "we can't replace your drives and can't replace your server because we do not have stock. And you can wait for end of the month for new server".

Isn't it brilliant? :(