> I don't know how good OVH is with outage and availability.
I've personally observed failure rates similar to AWS EC2 and EBS. You need to plan for failure, like any cloud provider.
> the raw compute is cheaper
Dramatically so. 20% of the price.
> There's also storage
You can get local NVMe, cheaply, with literally 100x the perf you can get with the most expensive EBS volumes. AWS does not have a storage offering that comes close, not even their instance store NVMe.
> what happens to his disks
VM images can be backed up automatically without downtime (on a schedule, not live.) They offer an EBS equivalent.
> OVH doesn't have regions everywhere
They have enough. us-west, us-east, eu-west, APAC, others. I'll grant that the US regions are operated by a different corporate entity and a different web interface, and that is annoying.
But if you need to persist transactions you still need to replicate and persist state yourself. Or can I mount an OVH virtual drive that I know will survive across VM migrations?
> I'll grant that the US regions are operated by a different corporate entity and a different web interface, and that is annoying.
Why? Do they at least support the same API? Can OVH actually scale on demand?
Yes, Block Storage: https://us.ovhcloud.com/public-cloud/block-storage/
> Do they at least support the same API?
Yes
> Can OVH actually scale on demand?
Not as big as AWS, but yes.
Remember that you're getting 5x the compute resources for the same money. You don't need to autoscale as much. You're not fighting crappy EBS performance. You're not architecting around remote-network RDS databases with milliseconds of RTT. I firmly believe that for most applications you're going to be better off just massively overprovisioning your hardware and keeping the software stack simple.
That and the 9's. I don't know how good OVH is with outage and availability. Sure the raw compute is cheaper.
There's also storage. He's renting physical drives on OVH meaning he has to take care of replication and back-up himself. The disks in his AWS VMs should be persistent. If his OVH server goes down due to hardware failure, what happens to his disks? I genuinely don't know.
Lastly, OVH doesn't have regions everywhere. Then it's yet another different provider with slightly different product for every geographical region he wants to support.