OVH raises $327M to accelerate its international development
ovh.com
ovh.com
I'm consistently surprised that more people don't use them for workloads that don't require super high reliability, but do use an enormous amount of compute/storage/bandwidth. I think a lot of services fall into this category.
AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their marketing, which is cleverly disguised as spec sheets and technical documentation and other things engineers who think they are not susceptible to marketing fall easily for.
someone's paying for all those free AWS instances, and it ain't the low end customers.
edit: if you want to know the true price of the hardware, take the purchase price of your standard supermicro server, and multiply it by .025 - that's what big companies pay per month for hardware, usually on 3-year leases.
i.e. $10,000 box = costs $250/month. A decent cloud provider can usually get about $3000+ a month of revenue off of a box like that. even after you add power, networking, staff, it's still a large markup.
If you're designing for distributed data/services from the start, it's better still.
the entire $10k server costs amazon $250/month.
Never had a problem with their service, but their pricing is all over the place
I got so annoyed with it that I created a simple bash script that would attempt to connect, pipe the results to /dev/null and then connect again. Always failed on the first attempt, always worked the second. Their support weren't able to help me either.
The only upside was that it forced me to add decent connection error-handling to my scripts.
What happened when you have internet interruption during development/testing cycle?
To further separate dev/prod you can create separate VPC (virtual networks) and use IAM (ACL) to limit access. It's also possible to create an AWS account for each developer and keep an eye on the spending with consolidated billing but in practice devs often want to share infrastructure for example when testing out something together.
Downtime sucks, if it happens a lot try investing in a better Internet connection. It's possible to re-use ansible formulas to deploy something locally but usually you'll end up booting machines that themselves need internet to fetch packages / dependencies anyways.
I try to design my app with 12-factor in mind (http://12factor.net/) so all the configuration is passed to the app at run time (either ENV vars, config files, args or pulled from etcd). I'm trying to run the exact same code while in dev and while deployed in prod. For example I will absolutely try and avoid having "if Env == Test" or "if Env == Prod" in my code.
For example, my service connects to S3 to store/retrieve files. The access key, secret key and even the bucket name are all passed as ENV variables so I can work on a test bucket easily with a test api key without changing code. Some services I can run locally (memcache or redis are really easy to spin up locally) and some services I'll rely on Amazon to provide like S3 even in dev/test. Of course this requires a reliable internet connection but it's the best way to deal with this for me as a single developer/devops.
I'm sure bigger teams handling larger projects could give a lot of valuable information on the subject, I would love to hear about it too.
OVH will rent you servers for as little as a month at a time, for a _massive_ reduction in cost over AWS. We're talking >10x. Are there really startups that only have capital to last a week?
- Multi DC colocation, building your own servers/network equipment
- Multi DC colocation, buying servers/network equipment
- Single DC colocation, building your own servers/network equipment
- Single DC colocation, buying servers/network equipment
- Dedicated servers
- VPS servers
- Virtualized servers as a service with barebone supporting
infrastructure (e.g. Digital Ocean)
- Virtualized servers as a service with robust supporting
infrastructure (e.g. AWS)
- Platform as a service (e.g. Heroku)
I too have seen startups burning six figures monthly in AWS because they're afraid of buying gear, renting colo space, and hiring sys|network|linux admins.
a huge number of our sales conversations are people who spend $50k+ on aws or something similar, but are scared shitless to move off of it because they don't know what they're doing and their trusted technical advisors got them into the situation they're in. you literally have to talk them down, like a kitten that climbed up a tree and can't get back down.
imagine amazon had your business by the balls to the tune of $1M/year and the cost is increasing faster than your business can sustain, and you have no idea what hosting really is, or how it actually works. this happens. a lot. there are a lot of very lucky people out there who build incredibly successful businesses with a trail of terrible decisions.
for what it's worth, we've figured out the threshold is basically $10k. if you're spending over 10k on amazon, you might just be doing it because it's convenient, not because you have any idea of what you're doing, either technically or from a P&L perspective.
Preferably someplace with the lowest mean latency, like Texas [1]
[1] http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/network_delay.html
>> "They explained to us that a key part of OVH’s growth strategy is growing their US business, including establishing a data center on the west coast, and attracting more US customers with an offering they call Dedicated Cloud."
http://dailycloud.info/european-web-hosting-giant-ovh-target...
Are there any other OVH brands out there aside from this, Kimsufi, SoYouStart and Hubic?
I wonder what happens next with the competitors: 1&1/United Internet is probably the biggest hosting company but they still don't show signs of a new cloud approach. As far as I can see they just focus on their "website builder" product which is something like Squarespace and probably the future of the former "shared hosting" segment. They tried to build an infrastructure as a service company called Profitbricks but it took them years to provide decent API adapters to popular cloud connection frameworks like fog.io or Apache's libcloud. There service is limited (couldn't find something like route53 or a global CDN-option like Cloudfront, Akamai)
Then there is still Hetzner which tries to compete by price. They still offer powerful dedicated servers but still lack any professional feature including an API to order or cancel new servers.
Let's see, maybe both are going to acquire capital in the future and start inventing again.
On the other Hand DigitalOcean with its Amsterdam and London based locations is very cheap, powerful and can already be use fully automated. I would probably build my SaaS business on their infrastracture and then scale out using AWS or Google.
When you use said DC for your servers and you see the severing naming conventions and routing paths involved... its cool to kinda be able to visualize how it physically is laid out.
Once I rented a server for 20€/month, few weeks later they launched a new equivalent server for only 4€ and they don't allows me to migrate.
At one point I had servers at The Planet/Softlayer and after a year they had a new deal with the same server/hardware with more memory for half of what I was paying. I ended up ordering a new server, and having to move my data and everything because the sales rep couldn't get me the new deal on my old server.