Hacker News Reader

Comment by meow | Hacker News Reader

Is this host trustworthy ? Feature wise it seems too good to be true:

Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quadcore incl. Hyper-Threading Technology

    RAM 32 GB DDR3 RAM
    Hard disks 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD
    7200 rpm (Software-RAID 1)
    NIC 1 GBit OnBoard
    connected at 100 MBit
    Backup Space 100 GB
    Traffic Unlimited*

View on HN

They are one of the largest hosts in Europe (~50k dedicated servers if I remember correctly). Large doesn't always mean best, though. Similar to OVH, they provide good hardware, reliability and a decent enough network, but if anything goes wrong you best know how to fix it yourself. I also believe their network isn't /as/ good as somewhere like Rackspace however with CDN's etc. that's probably not as much of an issue.

TL;DR; Yes they're trustworthy, generally speaking

OVH definitely does not provide good hardware; we have more broken disks and NICs there than all our other hosters combined.

Edit: I see we might be exceptions. We have been using OVH since 2005, running up to 40 servers about 2 years ago. We are also running at iWeb, Softlayer, Amazon and Leaseweb. Hardware wise the only one we have issues with is OVH, and i'm talking every 2 weeks since 2005 (in 2006 they managed to lose all our data on 2 clustered RAID machines; one died, all corrupted, then when we were busy setting up the replacement, the other one died...). But they are so cheap and easy (like the easy OS installation which is cloud-like, already for many years) we stick with them for some projects which need high spec hardware in clusters. Note: the SSD drives are great, no problems with those so far (knock on wood).

Really? I guess you're experience differs from mine. Currently we have 5 servers with OVH (Ranging from high to low end) and have never had a single hardware issue. We've had 4 of these servers for +18 months and 1 for +2 years with no issues at all. That being said, they're not exactly known for their fast response times to support calls although I believe they have a 2hr SLA for critical hardware failures. I guess it's just down to experiences though, I have all our high-profile servers/apps with UK2 or LiquidWeb.

Somebody always has a bad experience with any given company. What I keep wondering about is how to effectively get the collective knowledge out there to figure out whether you're the exception or the rule.

I sort of wish hosting companies would publish the hardware failure rates -as seen by them- too - though I don't know how much of a competitive advantage that would be, if any.

Well yes, but this is not getting some bad support a few times; this is consistently bad hardware on our part.

I'm kind of wondering now if we are running different workloads; we are running very high IO and network stuff. Maybe we just hammer a lot harder on the disk than others are? With HP DL360s @ leaseweb we are running the same loads without any problem (since 2006...); 1 broken disk that ended up not actually being broken.

OVH put brand new disks in every server sold.

They also do remarkably well: out of the thousands I've had from Leaseweb and OVH, OVH wins hands down.

Strange to hear that about OVH. I use them since 2010 and never had a hardware issue yet.

How do CDN's solve bad connectivity of your app server?

They have no issues with connectivity, they might have higher latency and lower bandwidth than some of the higher end providers. But since +90% of the data transfer on most sites is static assets, using a CDN to distribute those will reduce the bandwidth requirements on the server.

Of course, if you're working on a larger project with enough budget, services like Akamai provide methods of routing your static content via their network, further reducing the problem.

Traffic is limited ie. they cap you too 10mbit after you exceed 10TB, (you can buy more uncapped traffic ofc.)

And yes the "host" is a very big datacenter, I have one server with them for 3 years, with pretty good uptime. 2-3 outages on their end over last 3 years. You need to remember that you need to buy additional packages for hardware raid or failover that will cost you about 20-30 EUR - if you need them, still it's one of best offers out there and def. best in Europe price wise.

Interestingly, the 10TB only applies to outgoing traffic. For most people this probably isn't that important but for my current project it's great because the bulk of my bandwidth will be users uploading data and/or me fetching that data on their behalf.

AFAIK it's pretty normal, at least outside of cloud computing, that incoming traffic is cheap or free.

Incoming traffic to AWS is also free.

On a sidenote: AWS is way more expensive than dedis in every calculation I make for my business.

I've used them for the past year with zero issues, but I then I haven't done anything too hardcore. Network is excellent although I've noticed one site (oron.com) cannot be routed to - haven't bothered figuring out if maybe this is because it's Germany and there's a block, or if there's something else going on. I've also been impressed with their server management tools (web-based VKVM access, you can boot into a rescue system if required, etc.).

I used to live 3 km from their datacenters here: http://www.datacenterpark.de/ Basically in the former East Germany. They are doing things the right way. I am not hosting with them at the moment, but I have been for a couple of years without issues.

You must also know that the EU paid some good money to get the datacenters there as part of economical development initiatives. Hetzner is operating since 1997.

It's where we host all of our staging servers for client apps now, pretty good value if you ask me.

In general, I've had nothing but good experiences with them. They're reasonably bare-bones, though; don't expect miracles in terms of support.

They've been around for a while, and are fairly well known.

Yep, it's a well known german datacenter.

I know many people who recommend it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com