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0 pointsmdasen10y ago0 comments

For me, there's a combination of reasons.

First, they weren't in North America until recently. Having a server in France means high ping times for me and latency for the vast majority of my visitors. OVH started operations in Québec in 2013. So they've had less than three years to establish themselves. EC2 is 9 years old.

Second, it's hard to figure out what to buy. With EC2, they're all Xen instances and you decide on the right CPU/RAM configuration. DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, etc. all are easy. With OVH, what am I supposed to buy? Do I want a dedicated server or an infrastructure dedicated server? And then if I click for dedicated, I need to choose from Hosting, Enterprise, Infrastructure, Storage, Custom, or Game. I know computers - tell me the processor, RAM, and storage without breaking it into categories. So, I go with Hosting and half of the options are for "Delivery from September 30". Ok, that's more than a week out. Maybe I want more flexibility like hourly billing on VPSs. I can go to Cloud -> VPS. And now I can choose SSD or Cloud with different prices. Why is the SSD so much cheaper? $3.50 vs $9 and they're both 1 core, 2GB of RAM, 100Mbps network link KVM boxes. Then I wonder if these are the same things as the RunAbove labs vs regular. The labs ones shared the processor cores, but this seems to indicate that both don't have the noisy neighbor problem. So I check RunAbove. Wow, everything has changed. Looks like they don't offer the SSD of Ceph instances anymore, but they have SATA backed instances. So, they're running all sorts of different combinations. And should I be looking into Kimsufi or SYS brands? Do they still exist? What if I want object storage. Ok, the US site takes me to RunAbove which tells me that it's now part of OVH proper which brings me to their UK site with apparently no way of loading it on the American site. Compare that to DigitalOcean where you just get a very simple, "here are the plans, there's no complex stuff with weird names or categories, buy what you need." Even Vultr manages simple with SSD VPS, SATA VPS, and Dedicated Cloud. Perfect. Most likely I want the SSD VPS, but maybe I need more storage or maybe I want metal servers sold to me like cloud servers. Easy.

And to be fair, OVH used to be a lot more complicated and a lot worse. It looks like they're streamlining a ton. But they should still simplify a lot more.

Third, OVH is terrible at marketing. I want to define what I mean by marketing. DigitalOcean is a king of marketing. You go to their site and you see brief comments from the creator of jQuery, the creator of RailsCasts, the creator of Redis, and a Rails core member. You might not use those technologies or even like them, but you recognise that DigitalOcean can't be total crap given that these are people with options and a reasonable amount of taste. DigitalOcean sponsors hackathons like woah. Giving students a dozen or so dollars in credit makes them well-known and an easy service to try. DigitalOcean's site inspires confidence in its simplicity. You don't feel like there's some hidden thing because it's just simple plans that increase rather linearly. Finally, try searching for VPS + some tech term. "VPS Ansible" has a DigitalOcean blog article as #3. "VPS elasticsearch" has DO with the top two spots. The point is that you see that and it's an indication that they're part of the community (supporting some free content) and kinda get it.

OVH, on the other hand, inspires none of those good feelings. OVH has a generic site that you can't tell apart from other generic sites. It has the kind of "throw everything at the user and see what sticks" design that I don't think users want. We want DigitalOcean to say "this! this is good!". OVH is like, we have a lot of different things and someone has written "enterprise" or "cloud" on some of them without really indicating how some options are more "enterprise" or "cloud". And there are stock images of network switches and RAM and such like a pizza place that has a stock picture of a pizza on their take-away menu that isn't their pizza. Do they get it?

I really wish OVH well. More providers means downward pressure on pricing which is good for me. I mean, 2GB of RAM VPS for $3.50? Awesome! Glad to see that graduate from RunAbove. But OVH still has a ways to go. Lots of the time you have to wait for servers. If I want a dedicated SSD box, they're quoting a 10 day wait for all except one model. The entire "hosting" range has quotes of 3-12+ days. "Enterprise" has one box for 120 second provision, two that are 3 days out, and two that are 10 days out. It seems like OVH is a place to get a good deal if you're willing to deal with complicated process, waiting for a box, and them switching things up on you. But maybe OVH is stabalizing. I'm hoping their VPS offering will be a lot more stable than it has been. Seems like they're cutting down on using alternative brands like SYS and Kimsufi.

I can see OVH being a good company, but it's no surprise to me that they aren't as well known as AWS.

0 comments

ksec10y ago

Agree with everything above. Especially the complexity.

Runabove, OVH, VPS all those. The worst part is they keep posting about their streamlining and deep thought into reorganization. And yet no body understand "their" why.

To many it seems more like a reorganization for the sake of reorganization.

Then there is their Network. Which could range from Very good to VERY VERY bad.

And the final final thing? Is their lack of support or communication. You fire a email or ticket at least other host gives you a reply. OVH? None.

And when you add their non active support, unable to talk to sales or people for inquiry, and their overall complexity it is not hard to see why they dont pick up as much customer as they should have.

Matheus2810y ago

Adding my personal opinion about them:

Their current "10 days" delivery time is quite unfortunate, but I believe that's explained from the fact that they just started upgrading all their machines to DDR4 (and unfortunately, as I've been hit with it, a price increase for dedicated servers still on DDR3).

In the past I have used their 120 seconds delivery time extensively, but it has a few problems: 1. You have to verify your account first. 2. That's only guaranteed for one single server, try ordering 20+ of their top of line servers and it'll take a few days to get all of them.

Their control panel is also very confusing and feels very sluggish, and I'm talking about the one they released quite recently.

They also have tons of country specific domains (perhaps for tax reasons?).

They're pretty great on hardware, but I've experienced a bit of downtime with them, but as long as you have enough redundancy, you should be fine. I'm hosting game servers in there, with an automatic fallback to some cloud providers if those go down, so I'm not too worried about that. Still, seeing some servers randomly lose connectivity like this: http://i.imgur.com/9uMOHnH.png doesn't inspire confidence.

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