Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#21

Post by nik736 »

cik wrote: post #18

The reality is that they solve very different things. Part of what you're getting with AWS, GCP, Azure (DO, etc) is API support, and a big set of features. I view the big ones as a PaaS, and 'smaller' players as IaaS. Ultimately IMHO selecting a provider is either a risk mitigation strategy. OVH in particular is really just phenomenal for dedicated hardware at a very reasonable price. They deploy very quickly (anywhe…

That's simply not true. OVH launched their cloud lineup years ago with locations everywhere around the globe. Sure, you get bare metal servers, but similar to EC2 you also get your "cloud" machines that are spawned within seconds via their API.

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#22

Post by nik736 »

blibble wrote: post #11

their website is awful, when I last paid them they still didn't do recurring billing, so for each service (i.e. virtual machine) you have to remember pay them monthly for each VM, each month or you pay annually... then if one of your VMs dies good luck getting their CS to do anything about it (or even ever finding out why)

First part is not true for their cloud offerings, I think it was only for their cheap brands like Kimsufi and SoYouStart.

If your VM dies you are better off spawning a new one and migrate to the new one.

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#24

Post by leevlad »

To add to many other valid points others have provided, OVH is a discount provider and they use second-hand / refurbished hardware at their data centers to keep costs low. I used to manage hundreds of servers on OVH and found that their hardware failed much more frequently than even us-east-1 on EC2. Most common issues were memory and disk related failures. A few times, their techs tripped over a power cord that took a few of our racks down, and they used to have frequent issues with network connectivity (I believe it's gotten better since).

On top of it, you will find that they cut costs on some of the less obvious things. For example, one day we found that their vRacks are not redundant, so a failure in one of them caused hours of downtime of our intranet.

As far as customer support - our account manager was always very helpful and understanding.

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#25

Post by berns »

> Edit: I would add that we have moved to OVH dedicated servers not VPS.

This invalidates your other points. Your question actually is why are dedicated servers providers not as popular as cloud providers among startups. And I'm sure you'll come with the answer yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#27

Post by dhnsmakala »

rgun wrote: post #20
jtokoph wrote: post #4

The big cloud providers all give a massive amount of credits for startups to use. Massive meaning multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it’s easy for startups to hop on for the free credits and a couple years later be too busy on product cycles to make time for a move. The “lock-in” is strong.

We did receive large amounts of AWS and Google cloud credits. I did not mention in the question for brevity, but we moved to Google Cloud (GCP) after exhausting AWS credits to utilise GCP credits. We came to know of OVH a couple of months back and having burnt through our GCP credits, we are again making a switch.

How much did you receive, on the order of $10k or on the order of $100k?

If it's really that easy to switch for y'all that you can be doing it to save money in cloud expenses, then either you really are best off with something like OVS/renting servers in some facility.

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#28

Post by cvandebroek »

whitepoplar wrote: post #17

For me, it's how the hosting provider handles stuff when things go wrong: - How reliable are their datacenters? - Do their servers use good hardware? e.g. Hetzner is known to replace HDs on their budget servers with used HDs that have been "retested." Whatever it is, they fail more often than HDs at other hosts. - Do they have organized procedures I can bet my business on? (DDoS response, hardware failure, power fail…

We are running our services with Hetzner for years now. The less critical things run on low budget servers, for which we don't care too much if they break (everything is redundant - however, we had one hdd crash in 6 years).

The real important things run on dedicated server hardware. While these servers are more costly, they also are more powerful and unbelievably cheaper than AWS and alike.

I admit we do have dedicated people to work with our servers, but I can't imagine that other companies running on AWS don't have sysadmins to take care of their business critical services.

As for the support: It's always a question on how much you are willing to pay. Cloud services provide almost nothing unless you sign up for a dedicated support plan. We do have this with Hetzner, too. In case shit hits the fan, we can call them 24/7 (luckily this was never needed).

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#29

Post by krn »

> I am aware of the following drawbacks of OVH:

They are all false. OVH is a Public Cloud provider, just like AWS, GCP and Azure.

> * No disk replication i.e unlike EBS or Google disk, if my disk fails, I am at the mercy of my backups (given no RAID)

https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/storage/additional-di...

> * No private network for all the servers by default. Unlike AWS security groups or Google Cloud private networks (which are setup by default), I will have to pay for vRack to setup a private network and is more complicated.

https://www.ovh.com/world/solutions/vrack/

> * Decreased flexibility i.e I may not be able to spin up instances instantaneously or shut down instances to save costs in off peak times.

https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/instances/features/

Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

#30

Post by rgun »

berns wrote: post #25

> Edit: I would add that we have moved to OVH dedicated servers not VPS. This invalidates your other points. Your question actually is why are dedicated servers providers not as popular as cloud providers among startups. And I'm sure you'll come with the answer yourself.

Can you please elaborate? (Apart from the points I have already mentioned)
Post reply on HN