RunAbove – French Cheapest S3-compatible Storage ($0.01/GB/month)

I really wanted to like this as it looked promising and I'm already using (or have used) other OVH-backed products like Kimsifi and So You Start, with great results. I set up an account to test it out and ended up cancelling and deleting the account after less than an hour of use.

What went wrong, in chronological order:-

1. 30 character password limit. Not the worst thing ever but it indicates they may not be properly salting & hashing passwords.

2. UK Postcodes fail if you type them normally, you must remove all spaces which you must learn through trial and error - the only feedback you get is 'Invalid zip code'.

3. Credit card details must be entered before you can use anything, and a 'Memorize this card' is checked but disabled, which seems odd.

4. No guaranteed minimum bandwidth for like on other OVH products. In my testing I saw about 19MB/s up and 26MB/s down, so not great but okay for the price.

5. The worst thing for me was really slow disk speed on their VPS's. My plan was to move one from DigitalOcean to RunAbove (very happy w/ DO, but want to mitigate risk by using multiple providers). Running 'dd if=/dev/zero of=iotest bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync' several times produced results showing disk speeds of barely 50MB/s. I can do this all day long on the cheapest DO VPS and see 5x those speeds. No comparison.

Still, like I said the other OVH projects I've used kick ass and I will probably try this again in six months or so. But for now, there is absolutely no comparison between RunAbove and DigitalOcean if you are looking for a VPS. For object storage only, you should test read and write speeds and make sure you are happy with the results after considering the slightly lower prices. Not quite there yet for me.

Also cheapest OpenStack-based instances provider. With OVH's DDoS protection included on top.

This is from OVH.

Even cheaper than Amazon Glacier storage.

looks promising!