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

OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

datacenterdynamics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 198 posts

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#51

Post by truetraveller »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #33
truetraveller wrote: post #28

Important notes about OVH: -I'm a customer for about ~2 years. -I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services. -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap" -OVH is super-cheap, which is good. -I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because.. -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything. -website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. -feels…

> website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. No, not a European thing. They are just special.

Okay, that's good to know. However, I had a quick glance at Hetzner (an OVH competitor), and it looks to be using esoteric design.

I was thinking about using Hetzner, but I dread it may be like OVH. Anyone with first-hand experience with Hetzner?

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#52

Post by djhworld »

jpswade wrote: post #20

So what can we gleam from this? OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise. Having AWS in the hosting market means that right now, it's become a cottage industry for anyone else other than the big names in tech. Meanwhile these big names in tech know that they can make money from their platforms. They simply can't compete on the same level and now they've decided that's what ma…

> OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle surprise.

I think they're more talking about companies hosting on AWS, e.g. Amazon Video is a competitor to Netflix

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#53

Post by icebraining »

freehunter wrote: post #30
thejosh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah their UI is beyond useless. Their support is beyond useless. Can't even cancel my servers, but everything else was great. Ended up having to use their API to cancel the server, since support wouldn't cancel the server for me - here is an actual email they sent me: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large

It's weird because in every article I see about DigitalOcean, there's people saying "DO is stupid, they're overpriced, everyone should use OVH", yet in every article I see about OVH there are people complaining that OVH has some serious customer support and UX problems.

It probably depends on how much you interact with them (by choice or luck). My interactions (via Kimsufi) have been: creating a server once, then paying them four times a year. So far that's been flawless :)

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#54

Post by pixard »

truetraveller wrote: post #51
tokenizerrr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. No, not a European thing. They are just special.

Okay, that's good to know. However, I had a quick glance at Hetzner (an OVH competitor), and it looks to be using esoteric design. I was thinking about using Hetzner, but I dread it may be like OVH. Anyone with first-hand experience with Hetzner?

YMMV but I've had a very pleasant experience with Hetzner. On the same level as many US DC's when it comes to server and account management.

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#57

Post by elnygren »

truetraveller wrote: post #28

Important notes about OVH: -I'm a customer for about ~2 years. -I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services. -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap" -OVH is super-cheap, which is good. -I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because.. -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything. -website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. -feels…

The credits are probably because it’s a way to get to you to pay in front rather than after the billing period. Some other cloud companies do this too so it’s not too far out.

However, it’s a better UX and less hassle to just bill customers in actual dollars/euros than in “MyCompany Credits” (that probably map 1:1 or 1:100 or 1:1000 to USD)

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#58

Post by notafxn »

meowface wrote: post #14
thejosh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah their UI is beyond useless. Their support is beyond useless. Can't even cancel my servers, but everything else was great. Ended up having to use their API to cancel the server, since support wouldn't cancel the server for me - here is an actual email they sent me: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large

OVH is also notorious for being very slow to respond to abuse reports. They've been one of the favorite VPS providers for botnets, exploit kits, and other cybercrime activities as of a few years ago, and may still be.

As a client of them, that's good. And they are so big that nobody would blacklist them.

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#59

Post by kilburn »

truetraveller wrote: post #28

Important notes about OVH: -I'm a customer for about ~2 years. -I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services. -I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap" -OVH is super-cheap, which is good. -I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because.. -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything. -website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know. -feels…

Most of these GUI differences came during OVH's huge expansion around 2014. At that point they split into several "business lines" (kimsufi/so you start/ovh dedicated/ovh cloud...) that operate mostly independently, and hence the separate logins and interfaces. I'm not saying that it isn't a mess, because it is, but at least there's an explanation.

Also, part of the bad interface design seems due to them building public API's first and then the GUIs. This leads to the same kind of "impedance mismatch" problems that many frontend apps suffer where the backend functions aren't well suited to provide good UX. Of course this is also their fault for either not improving the APIs and/or not putting enough effort to work around the limitations in their GUIs. However, it has the upside that you have APIs for everything.

Also... we've been customers for a very long time, mainly of their dedicated server offerings. After dealing with their support a non-trivial number of times, our learned procedure is: just get a new server and migrate, without renewing the old one. Sadly, this also means that we don't trust any managed service from them.

Re: OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”

#60

Post by opencl »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #39
QUFB wrote: post #15

I run https://wtfismyip.com on OVH. Egress bandwidth exceeds 8TB a month, which on AWS could cost ~$1000/month, not including the cost of the beefy EC2 instance I would need. For some bandwidth heavy use cases, OVH makes a lot more sense than AWS. In my case it was $150/month versus $2000/month (bandwidth + EC2).

Care to explain what the business model is here?

https://wtfismyip.com/why

There is literally an entire page explaining that there is no business model other than a donation button. There are shockingly people than run websites either as a hobby or to provide a useful service for others with no expectation of making money from it.

Post reply on HN