Kimsufi: the affordable dedicated server
kimsufi.com
kimsufi.com
Last week I ordered one of their small servers (PS-1). Although their site is in English, the registration form was in French and despite giving me a drop-down to choose another language, there wasn't one. I complete the process and I am asked to email them a copy of my ID and a utility bill for verification. I did so and never heard back from them. This is unacceptable and I can't think of many worse cases of contact from companies. I sent you a copy of my ID and you do not even reply back? Even a Nigerian prince would be more polite than this.
Also in the past, I gave them a try with the €2.99 offer. They just canceled my order because it couldn't be "validated". I can understand if they have problems, but I expect them to be more straightforward.
I just ended up going with Digital Ocean instead. It would've been nice to have a cheap dedi but it isn't worth this kind of hassle.
Maybe I'm just small potatoes compared to what other customers do with their infrastructure?
I am asked to email them a copy of my ID and a utility
bill for verification. I did so and never heard back from
them. This is unacceptable and I can't think of many
worse cases of contact from companies.
So, I personally own some kimsufi's, and I run a hosting structure for CS students with another since 4 years.
The things you have to know about Kimsufi is:
- they are full dedicated servers, fully capable of handling a decent charge
- they are second hand hardware, already made profitable (that's why the price is so low)
- you should change change them every 4 years so that you won't run into hardware issues
- you can do whatever you want with them, there's really no chance to lose a kimsufi thanks to the remote control console which can make a reboot on a minimal image
- you can do whatever you want with them, really. The bandwidth is really free and unlimited, no bullshit.
- the OVH network is really strong. In 5 years of use, I've never seen any downtime of any of my servs.
For me, that's the best choice for non-critical hosting. They are unbelievably much cheaper than everyone around (except online.net, who has a weaker network), with twice as many features, their greatest community manager is the CEO (checkout @olesovh), things just work everyday. When they don't, just check http://travaux.ovh.com . No bullshit about the problems (cc PlanetHoster, DreamHost and the like).
I'll be happy to answer questions if you have.
I've got two Kimsufi dedicated servers at OVH since years and years and, to me, it's an amazing service (at a price which apparently nobody can beat).
One of my Kimsufi on which I installed Debian reached an uptime of four years. Four years of uptime. The smallest of the Kimsufi, which is already the cheaper of the dedicated servers OVH provides. Four years.
A pretty stock Debian, with only SSH and Tomcat and not a single (known) root exploit forcing me to install a patch that would have required me to reboot the box. Meanwhile I had two very serious DoS Java bugs requiring me to patch the JVM / JRE (IIRC the Tomcat version I had could do with just the JRE, no need for the JDK). One Java exploit was the infinite floating-point parsing bug and the other the hashmap not being O(1) anymore (the attack consisted in submitting very long URL with carefully query paramaters).
Now the real funny thing: one day I got an email from OVH saying my server was down and that it "would not reboot". What happened is that the motherboard died and they moved my stuff to a new system. But the Debian version on my Kimsufi was so old that it wouldn't recognize the new motherboard...
That's basically how stable Kimsufi are: they can happily crank up for years and years and years and years.
Now I'll have to look into it: because I pay 20 EUR / month for mine (VAT not included) and apparently the new ones at 17 EUR / month are already more powerful than the ones I have, so I may want to switch to a beefier machine for a cheaper price.
Also note that during summer time (month of august IIRC), they launched a Kimsufi at 2.99 or 3.99 EUR / month (don't remember, but several people here point the number of 2.99). But it got so successful that they had issue and were forced to remove the offer. And "Octave" tweeted that OVH would come up with an entirely new offer. I'm glad to see they're now offering Kimsufi at 8 EUR / month.
That's 8 EUR for your own dedicated server. Seems quite a good deal to me.
- In summer 2013, they used their customers as beta testers for their anti-ddos service. This was mandatory for ALL customers, there was no way to opt out.
This caused false detections on some of my servers and ended up blocking ALL dns requests until I uploaded the deb for PDNS (because apt-get wouldn't work anymore) and configure TCP dns lookups.
- Multiple times in August and September all servers that detected a DDoS attack in the past 24 hours became disconnected from the internet or the US for an entire day.
- Also in summer 2013, they upgraded their offerings as usual. Their website said it would come in a week but I waited for over 60 days before I finally told them to cancel the order. This was for their midrange server.
- They removed the ability to pay for less than a month because everyone was extending the rent on their old server until their new ones arrived. This was very scummy coming from OVH.
- Later I found out they were complaining about "turnover" even though when I asked support if I could upgrade my server, they said the only way to do that is to cancel the old server and get a new one.
- They removed e-mail support for Kimsufis even though some of them cost more than their new mid-range line that has it. Now they expect you to use a forum where responses have gone unanswered and everyone can see details on your server. They didn't even reduce the price.
- There have been a few sporadic cases throughout the year where the server just lost connection to the internet for a minute. Support had nothing to say about this, but sometimes I could find some related message on travaux.ovh.net (this page gets more updates than status.ovh.net)
They have more chance to be there tomorrow than most hosts.
If you get a tiny ddos attack for a few seconds, you'll get null routed for 24 hours. Any longer than that and they'll potentially kick you out.
If you've never been ddosed, your really don't have a lot of users. Multi gigabit attacks are available for the price of a cup of coffee.
Although, I do only have 1k daily users and I sit behind cloudflare.
Last year, everyone outside of EU who ordered the €2.99 deal were canceled without any mention of the rules. Some non-EU customers were told to order from their Irish site (kimsufi.ie). But this year, it seems that they merged all the ccTLDs into a single multilingual website. Anyone have any idea which countries they allow/deny?
Why should I trust them now?
They've got some perfect matches for server setups I need right now, but if their checkout process is this bad, I shudder to think how much of my time dealing with any actual problems with the servers might consume.
If you want to test out the speed of the network feel free to download some of our publicly released crawl files on http://archive.meanpath.com which is on a 2gbps burstable pipe.
price-performance ration at Kimsufi is fine from my point of view. I guess anybody who is ordering a VPS for 8€ / month should know that he will not get the latest technology in his box, but for the one or another usecase, such boxes are awesome.
Their 'enterprise' dedicated servers look really attractive.
$109,$174 for 64gb,128gb ram with really nice e5-16x0v2s. 2x 240gb intel S3500 ssds for $35 more a month.
http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/
Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?
The customer support goes up with the bill. You can't ask the same support for a 3e/month server and a 100e/month.
> Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?
Yes. Ovh is one of the main Isp actor in Europe at the Wan level. Moreover Ovh is full ipv6 compliant, unlike hertzner, and bandwidth is totally free without quota.
Ah, and Ovh building itself their servers, they are the biggest PC manufacturer in EU. They don't even play on the same field.
* No phone number nor contact form for any kind of support. * No way to change to change my password (or I didn't find it). And I don't like to be forced to keep those "randomly" generated password. They seem to have reduce everyextra to 0, their lean customer service is way too lean to my taste. Destroying obvious features to make your customer upgrade is bad.
Do not run anything beyond a throwaway personal blog on a server without ECC RAM.
b) It limits the damage you can do when your box gets owned.
b.1) It limits the amount of damage you can do if your business/usage model assumes more traffic than their business model assumes you'll use.
Twice (in different context) I have tried to use online.net and fallback to OVH/Kimsufi. Why ? First time unability for them to sell servers, second time unability for them to get paid.
Online.net only uses branded hardware and server hardware (except the 'SC' product range) : Xeon, ECC, Hardware RAID, ...
I'd say the price/quality ratio is better at Online.net but you just might not need that higher quality if you are running a personnal blog.
Speaking about the support, OVH has been internationnaly selling for much longer than Online.net, it's still quite 'fresh' at Online.net.
About the network, OVH's one is wider and it has a datacenter in Canada, Online.net only has datacenters in France and their network has gone international last summer with many peerings/transits (they used to rely on a French ISP before). Online.net servers are all gigabit connected. Both network are DDoS protected. OVH has a mandatory SMTP filter which has its pros and cons.