IAM and the various sdks/aws cli are worth the price alone.
Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#32AWS may be the most flexible option out there. And if you need flexibility, that matters. But If you are more established, without changing needs, and can define exactly what yhose needs are, other vendors often will be cheaper.
Startups therefore like AWS - they have too many unknowns. (And too many "don't know what they don't know" factors). More established, mature organizations have more of an option to lose flexibility in exchange for a lower cost.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the tune of $10k.
We also came to the same conclusion. Moreover, being an Indian startup, these dollar bills are burning a huge hole in our pocket :D
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#34Personally, the 'free tiers' offered by the big PAAS and cloud providers are good enough for small projects and MVPs-- can't beat free. If and when extra resources are needed, it's usually easier to just start paying at that point rather than to switch platforms entirely.
Free tiers are are extremely effective (albeit crafty) in a "the-first-one-is-on-the-house" kinda way.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#35AWS, GCE and Azure solve problems that OVH, Hetzner, Online.net etc do not. For many businesses there is a lot of value here. Some of it is because the businesses do not spend that much on server hosting, some because the problems that AWS solves are very valuable.
If you do want to use a bare metal provider like OVH, keep in mind the differences from a service like EC2. You have physical disks. So you either need to implement network storage, or raid, to improve reliability and uptime, or make your software tolerant of data loss. Restoring a bare metal server from a backup has some considerations that a virtual server will not. You also have physical memory, cpus, nics, but in practice these do not fail often. Other areas of the infrastructure are less redundant or reliable because they are a budget provider. You do not have nearly as many physical locations to choose from.
A lot of older businesses are used to buying servers and collocating them instead of renting the whole server and could be saving a lot of money. Or businesses that insist that everything is on prem and never consider the whole cost of power, cooling, security, and connectivity. There are a lot of newer businesses that never really considered something like OVH because they started in AWS, and have only ever considered services like EC2 and competing VPS services, and not bare metal providers like OVH. You also have businesses that know that OVH etc is cheaper, but want to use some new thing for other reasons. It could be to improve their resume, or because this is what investors expect, or because this is what they think the companies that will eventually acquire them will want.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#36Managing your own servers instead of managed services is hard! It requires admin skills in addition to dev skills on your team, gets seriously hard with increasing levels of security, makes planning and spikes much harder, ... but can also be highly rewarding in terms of costs, mastering your environment, optimization and dev quality, ...
The choice is mostly about how much time and will you have or plan to have on your team for it. You'll have to handle files and database replications, you'll have to update the systems (with reboots), you'll have to fix very tricky issues, ... that would have been handled otherwise.
OVH (and some others like Online.net) have great products with amazing pricings. I have seen a few startups relying on many of their (rather small) servers and it was all great.
One thing to remember is that human time costs much higher than cloud time.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#37OVH support is atrocious. If you have a problem, fasten your seatbelt.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#38I think it is because many people's bill is not primarily in EC2. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure's biggest value add come from managed services, like auto scaling databases and VMs. It makes it a lot easier for a small startup to build out their services without thinking about scaling challenges. Snapchat, for example, was built on google app engine and to this day has billions of dollars in contracts with Google Cloud…
Interesting that you say this. In my experience EC2 instances have been major part of bill. Can't comment on Snapchat scaling with just 2 guys but I have seen people trip up with managed services as well for eg. DynamoDB (https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throug...). Similarly for EMR - lot of issues where you still needed to understand how Hadoop was managed by EMR (Spark and HBase versions, jar mismatch, classpaths). So if you are getting into something complex you still need to hire people to manage infrastructure of course not at the same level as building your own DC but OP is talking about using a cheaper cloud provider.
My personal opinion is to use EC2 and then take managed services from cloud agnostic vendor (preferably Open Source at core providing services on all major clouds). Does not lock you and lets you move fast - ex. Managed Kafka/Hortonworks
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#39Before moving to GCP we actually did experiment with putting some of our services on a VPS at OVH as well as other providers to see how well they would handle our traffic. The issue we had with OVH specifically was that whenever traffic got high they thought there was an attack in place and automatic firewalls went up that took us down for hours at a time. Upon contacting support we were told "After looking into the…
You should have used OVH Public Cloud[1] (= AWS EC2), not OVH VPS (limited to 100 Mpbs).
[1] https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/instances/prices/
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#40AWS is the new "nobody has ever been fired for buying"...
Further, given that having AWS experience is valuable, both the non-technical and the technical people are incentivized to use it.