> OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client
but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would they eat those costs for you?
I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history:
> it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then
> I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection advertised to be capable of 500mbps×24h = 5.4TB/day... that's reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a 5$/month VPS
Probably not by default, but if your usage starts to saturate their network switches they’ll add one, to figure out who’s disrupting everyone else’s QoS.
(I think they mostly do this so that customers can see and verify that any DC-level peering relationships, or per-customer site peering contracts [a.k.a. "OVHCloud Connect"] are being taken advantage of to flow the customer's traffic. But it's convenient for other things, too.)
Yes, of course. Having flow data (or monitoring ports/interfaces) for traffic engineering and management is pretty essential, not least for determining when capacity upgrades are needed.
I understand both sides of the argument here. The idea of offering "unlimited" is appealing because most users of a typical 2GB RAM virtual machine (as an example) consume less than 1TB of bandwidth per month. Offering unlimited bandwidth removes the hassle of overage charges/billing queries and eases customer concern/friction. Both sides benefit from this.
However, on the other hand, is it reasonable for a $5/month virtual machine customer to use 1Gbps 24/7/365, potentially consuming $100–$200 worth of bandwidth?
Should providers avoid offering unlimited bandwidth unless it's truly unlimited? From an engineer's perspective, yes, I agree. But this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"—just to address a handful of users who take full advantage of it.
It's tough, so IME most such providers leave something in their terms that allows them to intervene in extreme cases but typically exercise restraint in doing so, usually only doing it manually if they notice that 'extreme' usage is damaging other users experience e.g it's serious and prolonged usage.
Meanwhile, in an ecosystem where everyone isn't already being ripped off with overly-expensive bandwidth, if an ecosystem-level event happens that causes the average user to suddenly use more bandwidth, the service either has to raise rates for everyone or they have to start claiming some uses of bandwidth are "egregious".
The result is then that, to defend the small-scale user from paying even more than the too much you are already charging them (as they are subsiding the larger users), you suddenly start doing traffic analysis with price discrimination by use case, and network neutrality goes out the window :/.
The real reason any of this works is just that people in fact aren't being charged fair prices most of the time, and these unlimited plans let the provider hide that from all involved. If everyone were charged a fair price, not only would heavy users pay a lot and light users pay LESS than they often do today, but everyone would be paying little enough that this idea that it is a big customer "concern" goes away, the same as it is for electricity or water: except in extreme circumstances, no one frets over sudden utility overages.
What you are missing here is that the adjustment is not low usage users subsidising high usage users, it’s OVH margins. Nobody is being subsidised. Low usage users just make OVH more money than high usage users. OVH doesn’t mind because per user costs are actually low and they are already competitive at that price without adding more complexity to their product mix. Users which would lead to an actual loss are rate limited.
Personally I would say if Amazon makes a profit selling you a book and makes a loss shipping me some shoes which I return, the loss was paid by Amazon, not by you.
What happens is roughly that:
- You are costing 1$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 4$. They are happy. Nobody offers you a cheaper alternative so you are stuck paying 5$ anyway.
- You are costing 4$ (bandwidth, etc.). You make OVH 1$. They are happy as marginal costs are low anyway.
- You are costing more than 5$. OVH severely rate limit your bandwidth to cut their costs and wait for you to leave because the service is now useless to you.
I did not miss this, and it was part of my point: the only reason this makes any sense at all is because these providers are ripping people off on bandwidth, which is how they have a margin so large that they feel a need to hide it from people under this kind of ridiculous pricing abnormality.
What is awkward is just accepting that and helping to make it worse by advocating for making it easier to kind of hide that fact: bandwidth is a commodity product, and these pricing games aren't pro-consumer because they somehow help people not have to worry about one month getting ripped off too much... they are anti-consumer because they enable the perpetuation of the state of affairs wherein people get ripped off in the first place.
The bandwidth providers know this, but they--of course ;P--like their excessive margins... but, if you just stopped claiming this was pro-consumer and realized what was actually going on here, the idea that a margin so excessive as to be able to essentially make the usage for the median user irrelevant should indicate a nigh-unto-ridiculous level of market distortion.
Like, we shouldn't sit around and just tolerate these margins. And that this particular pricing trick helps make these margins a bit more stomached by people really sucks! And in some sense I get it that it does make it easier to stomach... but... only because I think people are just buying into the idea that this must be a reasonable price :(.
And--even then--it doesn't fix the other problem I talked about (which I explicitly hedged as being in the world where the price wasn't set up to gouge everyone): when Facetime came out, it overnight was going to cause everyone with an iPhone to suddenly need more bandwidth, and so network providers temporarily needed to ban it or charge more for it; we see the same thing with the step up to video streaming services from basic web browsing, leading to providers feeling a need to zero-rate.
The reality is that bandwidth IS a limited common resource being shared at that provider--the same as any other product where the price isn't being distorted: this is the whole reason we use markets for this stuff in the first place--and the pricing of it at different providers should encounter market forces to drive it down closer to cost... except we are trapped in a local minimum here by people who refuse to understand that unlimited schemes cost more, not less.
If there was significant gains to be made by being more aggressive on the low end of the market, providers would already be doing it (and they are - OVH 5$ offer is quite aggressive). There is a reason nobody actually offers a better deal.
So you prefer to pay $4.50 for your vm + 47.12126 cents for 460Gb data transfer , rather than $5 for your VM with unmetered data transfer?
I think by the way that the sensible answer is what DO/Linode etc do which is allocate some included data transfer per VM and pool it across your account. That's honestly a very sensible balance from my viewpoint, but they then charge you quite alot for overage around 1-2c per GB which is ~10X the "fair price".
It's reasonable for OVH to prevent that, and it's also reasonable for OVH to explicitly and clearly define the limits up front.
It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers dont understand that transit costs blend with port costs depending on destination, and some destinations are effectively ‘free’ to send/receive from (fixed port costs only, no marginal costs), and other destinations are not (marginal costs associated with transit supplier fees).
The billing model consumers want is a simple BW used calculation, without facing the reality that if they consume their entire BW allowance as quickly as possible, it incurs order of magnitude higher costs than if they consume it at a trickle over the whole month.
Like:
> Generous bandwidth limits*
> *see this link for details
Irrelevant. If you sell a vCPU with enough bandwidth to feed your 1GBps 24/7/365 needs, and you charge $5/month for it, then it matters nothing what's your personal notion of reasonable. What matters is the service plan offered by the cloud provider and the performance indicators they are contractually obligated to meet.
Indeed, and those indicators are specified in the contract, not in the headline product description. There are a lot of people unhappy that those indicators in this contract are not specific enough. Those people shouldn’t buy these contracts.
(Also, if you use your 1Gbps port at full speed at the most peak time for bandwidth utilisation, for 37 hours in a month, and not at all outside of that, assuming 20 cents a megabit with 95th percentile billing, the costs you’ve incurred to your provider are $200. Also it doesn’t matter at all what you do after those 37 hours, the costs to the provider are the same. You doing 300TB in a month costs the same as you doing 16TB, if you do the 16TB the ‘wrong’ way.)
> Yes, of course.
So it's not unmetered as advertised or am I misunderstanding that word?
> this stance also risks degrading the experience for the 99.5% of "normal" customers—those who don’t exploit this simplification of "free bandwidth"
How so? If they want to be relaxed about it, the terms can say that you can burst more (e.g. "you can use 500GB/month, and burst to 5TB for two months of every two-year period; we'll send you a notification email whenever this happens so you're not caught by surprise"). If they don't want to be flexible, they can mention the hard limit that they are going to enforce regardless of whether they call it unlimited without asterisk. Either way, the buyer would know what they can actually use and doesn't have to guess
They don’t put a specific hard limit because doing so both limits their own flexibility as a service provider and creates a target for abuse by users.
Some places will offer a choice between faster metered and slower unmetered. That seems like a good compromise to me. A nice big link should cost the host a single digit number of dollars per 100Mbps, so it's not hard to find an option where everyone is happy with the speed and pricing.
The unmetered issue involves other providers, and plenty of them are up front about it too.
Personal anecdote. A few years ago, I lost a lot of sleep on a domain renewal at OVH. Their incompetence was mind-boggling. A less common tld was the only slightly challenging bit. After a week of calling and emailing, and on the verge of the domain lapsing, I gave up and sent someone to the tld registry with cash.
Also, do search for OVH SBG2 should you have missed that.
As you mentioned I would stay away from them for things like domain hosting. Just use them for cheap compute, etc.
Neither has ever caused me a problem that didn't feel like "potentially having this level of problem occasionally is entirely in keeping with how little I'm paying" basically.
The pain begins when you need support. Just like you, I have lost a lot of sleep over domains held hostage by their incompetence (for almost a year in one instance). Lesson learned, never use OVH for domains.
The support for their dedicated servers is just as bad, mind you, but short of a hardware failure you really don't need them. I have several years of uptime on all my current services.
So for personal projects their vps/dedicated is still a fantastic value.
Well except that time one of their datacenters burned down, likely due to insufficient fire suppression, and the data backups were also lost because they kept them in the same building as the originals.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
These reports criticize OVHcloud for having no fire prevention system and no power cut-off on the site, for using wooden floors, and for a free-cooling design that created airflows that spread the fire. The reports also say that water was detected near electrical systems before the fire broke out.
It takes quite a while to regain trust after shitting the bed that badly.
I asked that question Hetzner support and they admitted doing the same
the OVH contract relating to automatic backup stipulates that a backup of the VPS server is scheduled daily, exported, and then replicated three times before being available in the customer space, and that the storage space allocated to the 'back-up option is physically isolated from the infrastructure in which the VPS server is set up.'
I had packet loss on my server. They asked me several times to reboot my server into rescue mode and leave it there for 10+ hours until their senior technician could look into it at an unspecified time of day.
After a month of doing this 3-4 times, they finally admitted that their switch is overprovisioned and there was no ETA. This problem happened in 2 locations.
Also had a problem with the failover ip failing to move. Again they told me to reboot into rescue mode and leave it like that for hours. No fix.
I've left OVH entirely after being a customer of theirs for over 10 years.
„… data center had wooden ceilings, no extinguisher, and no power cut-out“
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...
But I only pull dedis from hetzner; my VPSen are all ovh based. So please nobody expect my experience to generalise without triple checking the terms just like I did in the process of signing up for those systems.
AWS is $220 (us-east, r6a.2xlarge instance, 1yr reserved)
70 EUR for 64 GB with 8c/16t, 1 TB local NVMe
123 EUR for 128 GB with 16c/32t, 2 TB local NVMe