It is quite the opposite of Rackspace who do obsessive hand holding (which I find far more annoying). For uptime I like AWS the best, for just cheap, heavy machines I like OVH the best (crawling, big data analysis, cpu intensive stuff; things that don't require all nodes to be up all the time, but requires them to have tons of disk space, cpu & memory) and I like Rackspace for making money (% kickback on client hosting and clients do like handholding).

What's your opinion on their network? Back in the day they had poor interconnectivity reputation. Do you have any experience about responsiveness to hardware problems?

My sample size is limited, however I've not had an issue. I'm getting > 100megs. latency isn't bad either. 9-10ms between paris and the Midlands in britian, and 6ms to amsterdam

I think it depends on your offering, I understand that different parts of the company (online.net appears to be a subsidiary of OVH) have different specs.

They do have a rather sexy graph though:

https://status.online.net/weathermap/

So does OVH: http://weathermap.ovh.net/

online.net is the biggest competitor of OVH!

Well, just in France. :)

You can't tease like that without supplying said competitors! Are we just talking Hetzner or are there others I don't know of in the budget dedi market?

I have a Dedibox MD 2015 Gen2 [1] (with SSDs) on online.net. I can't complain, the machine runs well and the support is fast. I use it in production to run a website which serves Europe customers. These are my IPv4 speedtests using bench-sh-2 [2]:

  CDN - nearest location:
  Download speed from Cachefly: 95.0MB/s
  
  America - United States:
  Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 13.5MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 12.1MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 11.7MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 20.8MB/s
  
  Asia:
  Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, Japan: 4.32MB/s
  Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 10.3MB/s
  
  Europe:
  Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, Netherlands: 54.2MB/s
  Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, Netherlands: 88.5MB/s

They currently have connectivity issues to Coloat (Atlanta). I raised a issue ticket and they responded that they have "already contacted Coloat to change the route on their side and use better route but they don't do the modification".

[1] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-md

[2] https://github.com/hidden-refuge/bench-sh-2

I've encountered some bad routing with OVH, but so I've done with other service providers too. I guess most of people don't even notice those fails, because they don't have constant automated monitoring. Usually NOC such problems pretty quickly.

When I tried them around spring of this year they did have poorer international peering than others. Should be fine for EU and US tho.

I have a couple of their 6 euro/mo shit boxes and I couldn't be happier. I use them for hosting a couple of small apps, torrent boxes, and IRC bouncers.

Bandwidth to the US sucks, but I didn't expect much more. 10Mb/s on this low spec machine.

They have an s3 offering under the runabove brand. Useful if you have to keep your data in Canada for regulatory reasons like I do.