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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

Move to OVH -- they offer free DDoS protection as standard, and unlimited bandwidth. I just moved to OVH after getting DDoSed. I'm paying $109/month for a quad core 3.7Ghz Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual 2TB software RAID. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I haven't had any problems so far.

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Wow, I haven't done dedicated hosting in a long time, the prices are insane there!

https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/2014-MG-...

Thanks for posting :-)

I've been looking for provider possibilities for my next failed startup. I'm not sure how they can deliver for that price but who am I to complain!

100% worth it. I have monitoring/notification set up on my infrastructure, and have had two hardware failures since becoming an OVH customer a few years ago. OVH techs in the datacenter were on the scene before I got downtime notifications. Their techs must deal with this kind of thing all night, every night, because they seem to have this process of replacing hardware down to a science. This as opposed to my other dedicated providers, who basically don't give a shit, for the same hardware at the same price. OVH is an excellent budget investment!

I think the reason they can offer it so cheap is a combination of scale, cheap electricity, and tax breaks. iWeb is also in Quebec, so I figured there must be some tax break. Lo and behold there is one heck of a tax break:

http://www.investquebec.com/quebec/en/financial-products/smb...

Basically the Quebec government pays 24% of your company's wages, up to $83,333 per employee!

It's actually even better than that because there's also a national program that pays up to 35% of R&D salaries: http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-tax-credits-for-soft.... There are hundreds of smaller special programs that can pay even more (and they often stack).

Hmmm... now if there were a place to start a business...

Whops, I think you got a downvote. Tiny buttons...

"...for my next failed startup." Thanks for helping me give my sinuses a nice coffee rinse :)

If you don't need the latest hardware and enterprisey features, give soyoustart.com a look. It's an OVH company on same network with same DDOS protection that uses the 'OVH' brand recycled servers. About half the cost.

And if you don't need any support or server hardware, give kimsufi a look.

I do not work for OVH, but am so impressed by their automation and value in this field I refuse to use anyone else.

I am just wondering how can one know about such sites. I always thought the DO is one of the cheapest.

Did you recently start looking at hosting? Have a look at:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2 (and most of the rest of the site).

Unrelated to the story at hand. Have you been recently DDoSed on OVH? I know that (at least some time ago) they just null-route/deactivate your account on spot with no notification on anything that looks like a DDoS.

No I haven't been DDoSed at OVH (as far as I know), and I don't think they null-route customers any more. Here is some info about their system:

http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-service-...

I moved from iweb because they null-routed my server during a DDoS attack that happened for no apparent reason. (My guess is that it was a user upset at some user-generated content, so they decided to DDoS my server rather than notifying me).

This may be true. However, they are FAR more inclined to work with a customer before just flipping a switch like a lot of (for example) American hosting companies will. I have nothing but good things to say about OVH. They were helpful during a DDoS I had about a year ago throughout the incident, but I'm sure they would have nullrouted me had I not been so responsive to their support guys when things started going badly. "I'm sure" here is pure anecdote and based on zero evidence, but it's the feeling I got.

Been running a game server on OVH that has been repeatedly DDOS'd by random people. It may take a moment or two to kick in and cause some wonky connectivity around the times of the attacks, but their service has been able to take some attacks in the several GBps range without a problem while we have used them.

Yes, and the service has remained available to most users. It's just the initial flood knocked stuff out for about 2 minutes as the worker threads dropped their request queues.

They are using Arbor in their core network, and auto mitigate attacks on customers now. I am working with Arbor systems as well as others for DDoS protections where I am working now, and I can confirm that it works quite well.

Takes about 5 mins to kick in once an attack has started, which is very good.

I assume you mean 64GB of RAM.

LOL yes, fixed. It's pretty nice...it basically means that our entire disk is always cached.

To be exact, he probably means 64 GiB¹ of RAM (see IEEE 1541-2002²).

――――――

¹ — http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20GiB%20to%20MiB%20an...

² — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541-2002

No, GB is perfectly correct when referring to memory. Just because some people standardized on Gibibyte and redefined gigabyte doesn't invalidate what memory makers have been doing for ever. JEDEC still uses GB, as they should.

I think JEDEC is in the wrong here, though. Memory prefixes sound like SI prefixes, but they're not. That's clearly a bug.

I was unaware they had a monopoly on language usage. A byte is not an SI unit. Base2 is vastly more defensible and natural than base10. The real issue is that everyone in networking likes round base10 numbers divided over some arbitrary cesium fluctuations. This leads to 1GB / 1Gbps not being 8 seconds, which is confusing. But in JEDEC's and others defense: "why should I have to change, he's the one that sucks."

The real problem is that mega/giga/tera/peta have well established uses meaning "factor or 10" for EVERYBODY except people talking about memory.

Disk space even obeys this now even though it was only done by marketing so they could reduce the amount bits delivered while charging the same.

Trick question: How many bytes are in a 1.44MB floppy? In a 700MB CD? A 4GB USB stick? And a 480GB SSD? How many bytes/s bandwidth for 10Gb Ethernet?

I can't understand how people can be so delusional to think that randomly redefining prefixes is a good idea. It was never, ever used consistently, and JEDEC just should get rid of this idiocy.

Trick question in return: I'm selling a 256GB SSD. How many bytes am I legally required to deliver?

This is why there is a need for the two different prefixes. If I am selling a 256GiB SSD and you are selling a 256GB SSD, those are now differentiable on their face.

Because the "he" in question is the relevant standards authority.

The IEEE and/or SI are in charge of language? The same IEEE that sends car insurance offers to its members, just so we're clear. JEDEC is also a standards group, and they disagree. What now, a Wikipedia editing war to determine the victor?

Standards bodies aren't anything magical, and I don't get the slavish following they seem to get. So an RFC says something, or another group mandates something. BFD. Unless you're expecting interop to work, use standards as you see fit. They aren't an ends unto themselves.

In this case "GB", when referring to RAM is unambiguous. Only disingenuous cloud providers or petty editors would use a base 10 interpretation.

Sorry for going all ed on you, but SI is THE standard for measurements and measurement prefixes. And that's the end of the story.

"Unlimited" bandwidth? What kind of uplink is it, and will they really let you max it 24/7? Honest question, not trying to troll.

(1gbps ~ 300 TB, 100mbit ~30TB/month)

Its not that uncommon to see unlimited bandwidth offers. For example online.net offers 200 Mbsp - 750 Mbps unmetered too: http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedicated-server-o... http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedicated-server-o...

Thanks for sharing this info. Prices are really unbelievable.

That sounds too good to be true. I guess after a 24/7 china DDoS their costs are higher than that and they ask for more.

I don't think it's too good to be true. They have over 2Tbps of unused inbound capacity (or at least they did in 2013, and probably more now), and their routers mitigate attacks at the boundary of their network.

Thats damm cheap. I will be looking forward to move my little blog and website to them at 2.99 dollars a month.

> 64MB RAM

Oh really? :-)

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