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

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

#101

Post by paxys »

wpietri wrote: post #6

This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual k…

You can't discount first mover advantage. From your own example, Swype had immense mind and market share for many years, even after Google, Microsoft and others released their own alternatives. They were eventually bought out for over $100 million.

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

#102

Post by cthalupa »

tedivm wrote: post #27
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).

AWS bandwidth costs are obscene. They compete on price so well on most other fronts, but for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth. It makes using them without a CDN cost prohibitive and drives a lot of use cases away from them.

>for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth

People say this about AWS/GCP/Azure. They are so willing to compete on cost on everything else that it seems odd like this would be true, so I have a different theory:

OVH/etc are all able to massively oversell bandwidth. Most customers do not use it. This is fine, and not anything I think they're doing wrong!

But the "Big 3" are all about automatically scaling resources. With my own applications, I find that if I am scaling up/out, my network traffic is growing at a commensurate rate. Whereas back in the day when I was using SoftLayer or other places where I leased dedicated servers, I was not using anywhere near the included bandwidth.

It's easy to sell 1TB at the price of 100GB if people, on average, are only using 100GB. But then you have to sell 1TB at the price of 1TB if people, on average, are using that 1TB.

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

#103

Post by cedivad »

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…

RIP /managerv3/

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

#104

Post by cthalupa »

ddorian43 wrote: post #12
wpietri wrote: post #6

This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual k…

Netflix used other things for CDN($$$), and is doing shows themself($$$). Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.

>Never really used fancy aws expect for pay vps-per-second and out-bandwidth-per-byte.

This doesn't seem true, based on all of the things they talked about using at Re:Invent last year.

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-at-aws-re-invent...

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

#105

Post by Vindicis »

brandon272 wrote: post #75
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…

I use OVH's So You Start line and I think my biggest complaint is that they don't allow automatic renewal. Every monthly renewal means manually keying in my card number every month. The only alternative is to pre-pay in 3, 6, or 12 months in advance. It is the only online service I use that doesn't handle auto-renewal.

I use their dedicated servers and they just implemented automatic renewals in February. I don't know if that covers all their offerings though.

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

#106

Post by wpietri »

oblio wrote: post #46
gav wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? Over the last year I've seen a huge push to move away from AWS from retail clients. Azure is a lot more appealing because Microsoft doesn't compete with them.

Yet :) Microsoft was famous for doing the same thing: http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html > There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find…

Yeah, the notion that Microsoft is now the safe, cuddly tech company is mindblowing. They fucked so, so many people over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private

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

#107

Post by foepys »

cthalupa wrote: post #102
tedivm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS bandwidth costs are obscene. They compete on price so well on most other fronts, but for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth. It makes using them without a CDN cost prohibitive and drives a lot of use cases away from them.

>for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth People say this about AWS/GCP/Azure. They are so willing to compete on cost on everything else that it seems odd like this would be true, so I have a different theory: OVH/etc are all able to massively oversell bandwidth. Most customers do not use it. This is fine, and not anything I think they're doing wrong! But the "Big 3" are all about automatically sc…

But that's how the internet works in general. An ISP doesn't have a 500,000 * 100 MBit/s connection in a city to enable simultaneous downloads from all customers at once.

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

#108

Post by adventured »

ironjunkie wrote: post #96

As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH. AWS, Azure and GCloud are all so good at Marketing themselves that a lot of people don't even hear about alternatives. I used a lot OVH both for private reasons and pushed it into my company. It is by far the cheapest (by a factor of 3-4* in my case), and it is shockingly easy to get to talk to core engineers in case you have any real…

> As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about OVH.

Where would you get that impression? OVH is clearly well known in the tech world of the bay area / SV. They've been regularly discussed on HN for at least ~5+ years that I'm aware of.

One problem has been that they only have one North America location and it's in Canada (not necessarily ideal depending on what you're doing and where you're located in the US).

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

#109

Post by wpietri »

paxys wrote: post #101
wpietri wrote: post #6

This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters? I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual k…

You can't discount first mover advantage. From your own example, Swype had immense mind and market share for many years, even after Google, Microsoft and others released their own alternatives. They were eventually bought out for over $100 million.

Sure, but their products were killed off. Their ~20% APR rate of return is decent, but not stellar. And you have to wonder if Nuance really go $100m worth of value out of the acquisition; in retrospect it looks like buying at the top of the market

Regardless, I think it's inarguable that they would have been worth a lot more had they not been killed off by the platforms they did so much for.

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

#110

Post by Sukram21 »

paxys wrote: post #97
opencl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Browsed the entire website but can't figure out how to donate. There's no link anywhere, even on the Twitter page.

When you look at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z2wGsh... (Google Webcache from 25th March), there was a donation button on the "Why" page, but it seems to have been removed now. Not sure why though...
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