VPS Classic: The most afforable VPS | Hacker News Reader

VPS Classic: The most afforable VPS

ovh.ie

69 pointsgionn64 comments

OVH is an absolutely horrible company.

I was in business with them years ago and they kept my account all that time. When they got hacked a couple years ago (or was it last year?), I remembered I had an account with them and asked them to delete it.

I had to go back and forth with their customer service, and in the end, they asked me to send them a signed letter to their offices in France for them to even consider deleting my account.

Arseholes. I couldn't be bothered to take this anywhere, but damn it I hope they get hell for this.

I can't comment on their actual services at present myself - all I have is negative hearsay (nothing positive anyway).

Same bad experience here.

I have 2Mo/s on my hard drives and they claim everything is normal on their side. I could trigger an investigation but if it comes from my config, they'll charge it on me. I don't know how I could have configured my disks to output 2Mo/s, but more important, I don't want to drop a single extra penny to that company.

And support takes around 30hrs to answer.

what is Mo/s?

French networking / disk throughput terminology ...

    Mo: un méga-octet, un million d'octets
  Mo/s: méga-octet par seconde

meaning "Megabyte per second". OVH is based in Montréal, Québec. [or not, actually]

noip, it's based in the north of france (one gray and shitty area)

Some alternatives with SSD:

http://vexxhost.com/cloud_servers#pricing

http://www.servermania.com/ssd-linux-vps-hosting.htm

http://www.atlantic.net/vps/linux-vps-hosting/

http://ssdvps.com/

https://www.ubiquityhosting.com/cloud

One of the best things about DigitalOcean is that they charge per hour, which means I can spin up several servers, test things out and then tear them down, incurring just a few cents of costs in total. OVH asks me to pay for 12 months up front.

Also, their support is awfully slow. I'm in the slow process of moving to another host/registrar.

You shouldn't let the same company be both your host and registrar.

DigitalOcean's big selling point for me is SSD disk. I don't see that listed on the OVH offering.

SSD isn't some magical word or feature - case in point, linode's non-ssd offering beats the pants off DO's ssd

Linode may outperform a similar DO box CPU-wise, but IO is no contest:

Here's a 512MB DO writing a large file:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/out bs=1M count=4k; rm -f /tmp/out
  4096+0 records in
  4096+0 records out
  4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 16.1503 s, 266 MB/s

A 2GB Linode of mine doing the same:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=1M count=4k; rm -f /tmp/output
  4096+0 records in
  4096+0 records out
  4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 36.4609 seconds, 118 MB/s

It's nice that all these hosting companies are dropping their prices so much. However, I've found it extremely hard to compare them against each other.

I wish someone would put together a site that compared each cloud provider when it comes to specific workloads -- for instance: Postgres and Mysql performance, Redis and Memcached performance, apache-bench, and so on. Even the performance of each virtual CPU is unclear.

Does anything like this exist?

I think you're looking for ServerBear: http://serverbear.com/

Someone already pointed out that DO's selling point are SSD drives. There's also a difference in the underlying technology. OVH uses OpenVZ, which are containers more than VMs, whereas DO is based on KVM.

Someone already pointed out that DO's selling point are SSD drives.

Yet Linode's non-SSD drives seem to beat Digital Ocean's SSD drives "in just about every area and not by a small margin" (http://irj972.co.uk/articles/VPS-disk-perf-cont)

I don't know anything about OVH's performance - all I'm saying is that having SSD drives doesn't necessarily mean superb performance - there are other factors involved.

Those tests smell fishy. If they use classic disks then typical average seek time is 8ms. Yet they measured 0,2ms which is ridiculous. My guess is that they used small virtual disks and measured page cache of the underlying host. 128MB limit for random read tests is also horribly wrong to make any conclusion.

For me there's two things that make OVH interesting: IPv6 and DDOS mitigation. It really depends on what you want to do though.

OVH might barely hit 40MB/s in the cheaper plans. Not comparable at all.

You get what you pay for. Oh, and by the way, this isn't the most affordable VPS. CloudAtCost's cheapest plan is $1.00/month, and in USD, VPS Classic/OVH is around $2.75, give or take (http://www.cloudatcost.com/). (current exchange: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&...)

However, you do get what you pay for. I'm a CloudAtCost customer, paid for their $35 one-time fee because I figured it would be nice to not have to worry about yet another recurring payment (however small) for stupid things like having a Linux machine to test new apps on and run my IRC bouncer. When they had some downtime, they did alert us but I didn't find out my server had failed to power back on until I opened my laptop one day and couldn't connect to IRC. Given their impossibly-low prices[1] and lack of history in our community, I'm probably always gonna be a little paranoid that my server is just going to die one day and there's nothing I'll be able to do about it.

That said, I think OVH is in a similar boat. Crappy customer service, but low prices, so my advice for anyone wanting to take a gamble on this is to definitely NOT host anything important on these low-cost VPS services. They're really best for staging and light internal use, and they're not to be trusted with the architecture of your whole company.

[1]: CloudAtCost is essentially a big Canadian ISP's server hosting brand. Basically, their parent company owns the datacenter they're hosting you in, so the service they're offering is practically cost-free to them. If this is true, the money they get from you must be 100% profit, or they wouldn't be able to keep themselves in business. (http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php) Go ask a record label owner sometime about how profit margins on the fraction of a dollar, even when new sales come in every day, work out for his bottom line ;)

Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.

They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.

I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.

Personally, I am still sticking with Linode. I absolutely love their support. I contacted them today and got an answer in minutes. This is a Sunday, mind you.

Sure the low prices on OVH and DigitalOcean seem lucrative and I have used DigitalOcean for a while, but I still came back to Linode. The Linode interface is another thing that I cannot do without especially when you see the alternatives.

YMMV.

An Anti-DDoS protection ! That's a god-send ! I had a terrible experience recently with Digital-Ocean. A VPS of mine with a fresh launched project was knocked down with some basic ddos attack. The support nodded and pointed to use CloudFlare. My server was down and they didn't do anything, that really sucks, you can't use a VPS without a DDos protection for anything serious. It can go down anytime when some script-kiddie opens a hunder of sockets.

It's really sad that DDoS protection didn't become ubiquitous yet. It's unacceptable that you can get down a server, even VPS with not-so-much bandwidth. All VPS have limited number of sockets and resources and it's trivial to knock them down. Absence of a DDoS protection makes them extremely vulnerable.

What do you believe "DDoS protection" entails? You got referred to cloudflare, a free* reverse proxy is as good as it's going to get. I can't imagine being attacked like that is anything like the norm.

Cloudflare is only for HTTP and internet is more than just HTTP.

I had a irc server for my friends, one of not-so-friendly visitors told me that the server will get down, and it went down. I lost ping to my server, CPU & the bandwidth were all at 100%. The support told me that I should use another company. I went to a company that has DDoS protection http://www.online.net/

I find it unacceptable that you can be DDoSed so easily, it's like we're still in 90'.. DDoS protection should be something ubiquitous for small power servers like VPS, otherwise it's trivial to get them down.

> I find it unacceptable that you can be DDoSed so easily, it's like we're still in 90'..

You can't stop resource exhaustion attacks no matter what you do. There's always someone with a bigger pipe. I'm still baffled that it's 2014 and I can't flush my gumboots down my toilet yet, shouldn't we have solved that already?

> I went to a company that has DDoS protection

What exactly does that entail, technically? Smells like snake oil to me.

OVH got a pretty good write-up on their blog[1], well worth a read. It looks as if their solution should be able to mitigate layer 3/4 attacks. From the blog: "Our surplus network has a capacity over 2 Tbps. We have three VAC in production, so we can manage up to 480 Gbps/480 Mpps." Cloud-flare took on the larges DDoS ever seen not to long ago, I think it peaked around 400Gbps.

1) http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-servic...

>There's always someone with a bigger pipe. I'm speaking here about a small size DDoS (<1GB/s) and not the CloudFlare 40GB/s flood.

>What exactly does that entail, technically? Smells like snake oil to me. At least the simple SYN flood and UDP flood. The atacker in question couldn't have anything sophisticated.

I set up a cheap dedicated server with OVH a few months ago. it took 48 days to get it set up and the OVH flavor of linux I went with was some bastardized version of gentoo so inbred that after two weeks of trying to get it upgraded to a sane version I just canceled my account.

If you're after bargain basement VDSes, as far as I know the place to look is http://lowendbox.com/

A lot of those providers aren't very reputable at all. Very few are in fact. Off a glance, RamNode is the only one which I'd trust.

If you're <not> after bargin-basement VDSes or VPSes, http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104 is your friend.

Careful with ramnode. I love their speed, and do have good uptime. That said, I've had service with them for months, generally using next to no resources. Decided to compile qt5 one day, and after about 45 mins of high CPU, they were opening a ticket to take the VPS down due to instability. Honestly, I don't know the policy at other providers, but feel that spiking CPU for an hour once in months shouldn't take the box offline...

You're right, I wouldn't trust many of those. I usually only consider providers that are from the top provider poll: http://lowendbox.com/tag/top-providers/

The forum itself (http://lowendtalk.com/) is also a nice place to find cheap VPS, and usually the comments make it easy to find if a provider is serious or not.

Just remember that "if it's too good to be true, then it probably it isn't" apply here.

Buyvm.net is another good one. Lowendbox is great for finding lesser known providers that don't want to become the next Digital Ocean. You are right though, you still need to due your due diligence.

It's OpenVZ.. IMO you can't compare KVM with OpenVZ, even tho DO thin provisioning of their KVM is far away from "true KVM" (own ISO installs etc..)

Sometimes it's not about the prices. Most of the time. Always, actually. Especially when it comes to web hosting.

Totally agree. These days I want great customer service and reliability. I can pay $20 for Google knowing Google will be around much longer and should come with a reasonable retiring/deprecation/shutdown policy. I chose DO for a similar reason. I know it will be around for a while and I have nothing to lose since I have access to my source code. I can migrate to another provider if I have to.

Also, DO is pretty fast at deploying and enabling new VM. I didn't know OVH until today. Sometimes advertising works well :/

Yep. I'm also a DO customer - very satisfied. You can't get that great customer support from Google (unless you pay more than 10k/month and you have your own tech account manager!) OVH is mainly known in Europe/french speaking countries.

> I can pay $20 for Google knowing Google will be around much longer

Not the best example IMO...

They cause more product genocides per year than all startups combined.

For me, the main reason DO beats other VPS providers is its large collection of tutorials. For people new to managing their own web server, these tutorials are a major asset. I even went back to their tutorials section when i was testing the service of one of their competitors

I learned a lot from OVH's guides too, but they vary from language to language. Some guides might be completely missing.

Over time, I realized I don't really want to manage services needed to run my apps on a VPS, like Apache, nginx or MySQL configuration and upgrades.

Is there anything like WebFaction, but cheaper, that can handle sysadmining for me?

You can try Dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) - it's still fresh so I wouldn't recommend running anything critical on top.

You can get a control panel like cpanel, or ispconfig, or what ever and they can manage your LAMP setup for you.

Does AppEngine or Heroku work for you?

Just dealing with AppEngine's yearly API rewrites and general flakiness is far more difficult than any potential problems you'd have just running it yourself. AppEngine is probably the most hassle you can get from 'commercial' hosting.

Heroku is pretty hassle free though, so it's a good choice. I think people overestimate the amount of work it takes to maintain a basic server though. It's generally on the order of max 1hr/month. Considering the premium you pay for managed hosting, most people don't make the $500/hr that would make hosted worthwhile...

Plus the freedom that comes from not being locked into a managed solution often saves you days of aggravation down the line.

100% agree here. The negatives of app engine vastly outweigh the positives. Being a python shop you would think otherwise but there is only so much you can do before you hit the wall of limitations. A native vhost means no lock-on too.

Why go for a VPS when you can get dedicated hardware for a similar and sometimes better price - http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/

Non-ECC RAM? Okay for testing stuff but wouldn't put it in production.

What kinds of issues can you run into with non-ECC RAM? I thought it was more of a nearly theoretical thing, that only critical systems should worry about.

That's an OVH service. And it's supposed to be their recycled `very` old hardware.

I think http://www.soyoustart.com/en/offers.xml is a better bet than kimsufi as you get fairly decent hardware for the same price? Same company too.

VPS is way easier to upgrade to a higher tier if you just end more CPU or memory.

Am I wrong in that kimsufi's not available to people in the US?

I believe their Irish site sells worldwide: http://www.kimsufi.com/ie/

7 GBP != 1.99 EUR

This really isn't news, OpenVZ isn't the same virtualisation as DigitalOcean are using and you're effectively tied to a kernel provided by OVH. It also isn't SSD-based.

But I had heard, the only catch is that, they are using 'desktop grade' hardware.

So do Google :)

IIRC Google gave up on non-ECC RAM a long time ago, so this is only partially true (ECC RAM constrains motherboard chipset and CPU family (e.g. Core i7 and suchlike don't support it))

From Google 2009:

DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

Looks like a wide range of Intel CPUs support ECC.

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true

OVH is not bad, I had some dedis with them few years ago. it just works.

> It just works.

I have found this to not be the case.

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