You cant imagine it yet big chunk of the independent internet runs on small vps servers. There isnt much difference between DO and OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode... not sure why DO would be better. I mean its US company doing marketing right. Thats the difference. Plus ovh/hetzner have only EU locations.

I think small bussinesses like smaller simple providers instead of bigclouds. Its different philosophy if you are afraid of extreme centralisation of internet it makes sense.

I can think of a lot of big differences. For one you can get much larger machines at OVH and Hetzner with fancy storage configurations for your database if desired (e.g. Optane for your indices, magnetic drives for your transaction log, and raided SSDs for the tables)

They also don't charge for bandwidth, although some of those other providers have a generous free bandwidth and cheap overage.

> Optane for your indices

At OVH? If so, their US data centers don't seem to have that option.

Not that I need it. The largest database I run could easily fit in RAM on a reasonably sized dedicated box.

I didn't realize they had US datacenters before now. It's possible that's no longer an option. It was on the largest servers in the Montreal datacenter when I specced that out.

they have 2 data centers in the US

So you are saying they might be even better than DO depinding on requirements.

I didnt know.

Much cheaper and better performance at the high end. Doesn't compete at all at the low-end, except through their budget brand Kimsufi. I don't see them really as targeting the same market.

I rent a server from OVH for $32 a month. It's their So You Start line... doesn't come with fancy enterprise support and the like.

It's a 4 core 8 thread Xeon with 3x 1TB SATA with 32GB of ECC RAM IIRC (E3-SAT-1-32, got it during a sale with a price that is guaranteed as long as I keep renewing it)

The thing is great, I can run a bunch of VM's on it, it runs my websites and email.

Overall to get something comparable elsewhere I would be paying 3 to 4 times as much.

I would consider $50 a month or less low end pricing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I forgot they also have the so you start brand. It's probably more expensive than the majority of what digital ocean sells, but there is some overlap for sure.

I don't know about OVH but Hetzner beats DO at the lower end: for $5/month you get 2 CPUs vs 1, 2 GB RAM vs 1, 40 GB disk vs 25 and 20 TB traffic vs 1. They have an even lower-end package for 2.96 Euro/month as well.

OVH is not Europe-only, it has datacenters in America, Asia and Australia[1].

[1] https://www.ovh.com/world/us/about-us/datacenters.xml

OVH has at least one large North American datacenter in Beauharnois, located just south of Montreal. I've used them before for cheap dedicated servers. They may have others.

Yes ididnt know and i was generalizing too much.

But i assume they are less known in US.

OVH has a location in Canada, now.

AWS is a total and utter ripoff compared to the price/performance, DDoS protection & unmetered bandwidth provided by OVH.

If all you need is compute, storage, and a pipe, all the big cloud providers are a total ripoff and you should look elsewhere. The big ones only make sense if you are leveraging their managed features or if you need extreme elasticity with little chance of a problem scaling up in real time.

OVH is one of the better deals for bare metal, but there are even better ones for bandwidth. You have to shop around a lot.

Also be sure you have a recovery plan... even with the big providers. These days risks include not only physical stuff but some stupid bot shutting you off because it thinks you violated TOS or is reacting to a possibly malicious complaint.

We had a bot at AWS gank some test systems once because it thought we were cryptocurrency mining with free credits. We weren’t, but we were doing very CPU intensive testing. I’ve heard of this and worse happening elsewhere. DDOS detector and IDS bots are particularly notorious.

OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean.

It has twice the revenue, and is the third largest hosting provider in the world.

I would call it the EU Rackspace version. Except that it's not like insane Rackspace price.

> OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean.

I've been making this point for a long time. Both of those AS spaces are legendary for the volume of dodgy packets they barf at the rest of us.

drop

drop

drop

Twice the revenue of DigitalOcean still puts it < $1B ARR, or am I missing something? I can’t see how that’s the third largest in the world, or does your definition of “hosting provider” exclude clouds?

I took it from the top of their Wikipedia page.

In any case, they aren't "primarily for personal use".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH

OVH is one of the largest providers in the world. They run a sub brand for personal use (bare metal for $5/m, hardware replacements in 30 min or less usually).

..and they do support all of those things you just listed, not just API-backed bare metal.

Is that a typo? I only see OVH bare metal starting at >$50. How could a provider offer a bare metal server for $5?

OVH has new servers.

Their sub-brand soyoustart has older servers (that are still perfectly fine), roughly E3 Xeon/16-32GB/3x2TB to 4x2TB for $40/m ex vat.

Their other sub brand kimsufi for personal servers has Atom low-power bare metal with 2TB HDD (in reality it is advertised 500GB/1TB, but they don't really have any of those in stock left, if your drive fails they replace it with a 2T - so far this has been my exp) for $5.

All of this is powered by automation, you don't really get any support and you are expected to be competent. If your server is hacked you get PXE-rebooted into a rescue system and can scp/rsync off your contents before your server is reinstalled. OS installs, reboots, provisioning are all automated, there's essentially no human contact.

PS: Scaleway, in Paris, used to offer $2 bare metal (ultra low voltage, weaker than an Atom, 2GB ram), but pulled all their cheap machines, raised prices on existing users, and rebranded as enterprisey. The offer was called 'kidechire'

--

It is kind of interesting that on the US side everyone is in disbelief, or like "why not use AWS" - while most of the European market knows of OVH, Hetzner, etc.

My own reason for using OVH? It's affordable and I would not have gotten many projects (and the gaming community I help out with) off the ground otherwise. I can rent bare metal with NVMe, and several terabytes of RAM for less than my daily wage for the whole month, and not worry about per-GB billing or attacks. In the gaming world you generally do not ever want to use usage based billing - made the mistake of using Cloudfront and S3 once and banned script kiddies would wget-loop the largest possible file from the most expensive region botnet repeatedly in a money-DoS.

I legitimately wouldn't have been able to do my "for-fun-and-learning" side projects (no funding, no accelerator credits, ...) without someone like them. The equivalent of a digitalocean $1000/m VM is about $100 on OVH.

Just as a side note, the name "kimsufi" comes from the French "qui me suffit", which roughly translate to "enough for me".

Ha! You can see they localise it too https://www.ovh.com/world/support/terms-and-conditions/

Like kimsufi equivalent brand "isgenug"

I like scalingo too. If you need a bit more, they have DBaaS, APP Containers and Networking.

Scalingo is €552.96/m for 16GB of memory.

32c xeon/256GB ECC/500GB SSD 8TB HDD is $100/m at OVH. The difference is amusing.

you're comparing a PaaS with a piece of hardware. It's absolutely not comparable.

Yann, CEO at Scalingo

Kimsufi has tiny cheap Atom servers with self built or made to order racks and hardware:

(This is 2011, I think it looks fancier now)

https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-...

Edit: Seems like they stopped publishing videos for that datacenter, but this seems to be a video for the burn down datacenter in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y47RM9zylFY

It's not a typo. OVH runs Kimsufi, which has bare metal servers for as low as 5$. It is pretty insane.

Thank you. TIL!

OVH STARTED as a budget VPS service some 20 years ago... but they grew a lot since 6-7 years, adding more "cloud" services and capabilities, even not on par with the main players...

Why not use AWS/GCP? From my personal point of view: as a French citizen, I'm more and more convinced that I can't completly trust the (US) big boys for my own safety. Trump showed that "US interest" is far more important than "customer interest" or even "ally interest". And moreover, Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner (AWS look better for this).

price, also elaborate hardware customizations are not possible and then you are still running on hypervisor vs baremetal.

> Google is showing quite regurlaly that it's not a reliable business partner

Interesting, any examples?

I'm not the OP, but I'd imagine it is the combination of no support line and algorithmic suspension of business accounts. It is a relevant risk.

Yeah, I was thinking about all the horror stories that can be found on this site.

As a customer (or maybe an "involontary data provider"), I do as much as I can to avoid Google to be my SPOF, not technically (it's really technically reliable) but on the business side. I had to setup my own mail server just to avoid any risk of google-ban for example... just in case. I won't use Google authentificator for the same reason. I'm happy to have left Google Photos some years ago, to avoid problems of Google shutting it down. And the list could go on...

As a business, I like to program Android apps but the Google Store is really a risk too. Risk to have any Google account blacklisted because some algorithm thought I did something wrong. And no appeal.

Maybe all this doesn't apply to GCP customers. Maybe GCP customers have a human direct line, with someone to really help and the capacity to do it. Or maybe it's just Google: as long as it work, enjoy. If it doesn't, go to (algorithmic) hell.

Nope. I was at a company with a $1M dedicated spend contract w/ GCP and what that got us was support through a VAR. It then became the VAR’s job to file support tickets that took two weeks to get the response “oh well that’s now how we do it at Google. Have you read these docs you already said you read and can you send logs you already sent?” instead of my job to do that.

no, OVH has dedicated servers, lot of big companies use it to build out private clouds, much cheaper then amazon or google