Latency to Europe is a non-starter for US companies.
Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#52There are all kinds of good and valid business reasons why, and all kinds of good and perhaps valid counterarguments to those reasons. None of which are the real answer. The real answer is that the CEO/CTO/CxO doesn't want to have to think about these things, or getting expertise in-house for these things. They want it to be like electricity or water; something they have to pay for, but don't have to think about. Whe…
This is effectively false because you just shift the burden of understanding infrastructure intricacies from a nominal infra team to a bunch of fractured developer teams, and they often have fight through idiot org-wide cloud policies to get anything done. Whatever you think you save by not having to hire or retrain AWS expertise on a nominal infra team, you lose far more by now needing to hire web developers, databa…
It is entirely possible that you are just shifting the problem around to a place where it is less visible. Answer to the original question would still be the same. But, fwiw, I think you may sometimes be correct, especially since Amazon's flotilla of services is ever-expanding, resulting in having to know just as much as before, just for a proprietary domain. One is reminded of how corporations get talked into putting their businesses into SAP-world, and then discover that they need to hire SAP specialists to run it.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#53The 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.
They have their instances, sure but that's different than being a PaaS. It's about more than just compute now. When it's not then commodity is commodity, like Atlantic and Viper - they both have Api supports.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#54> 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…
You realize that you replied to a point saying "I will have to pay for vRack to setup a private network and is more complicated." with a link to vRack, right?
Right, because his claim is false. You can get up to 10 Gbps vRack for free, and it's included with Public Cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize that you replied to a point saying "I will have to pay for vRack to setup a private network and is more complicated." with a link to vRack, right?
Right, because his claim is false. You can get up to 10 Gbps vRack for free, and it's included with Public Cloud.
True. I failed to mention that I was talking about dedicated servers. In which case, the servers with vRack enabled are costlier.
I did not check for their VPS offering.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#56To 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…
> they use second-hand / refurbished hardware at their data centers
OVH manufactures its own servers in France[1]. That's as "first-hand", as it can be.
[1] https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/1009539890005118976
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, because his claim is false. You can get up to 10 Gbps vRack for free, and it's included with Public Cloud.
True. I failed to mention that I was talking about dedicated servers. In which case, the servers with vRack enabled are costlier. I did not check for their VPS offering.
That's true. But OVH provides a free private network with all public cloud instances, just like AWS and GCP. If we are comparing apples to apples.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#58AWS 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.
Never thought about it like that, but you are exactly right.
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#59I host some (personal/hobby) stuff on Scaleway. It's dirt cheap (a couple bucks a month for a Tor node pushing ~100 Mbps) and I like them, but they often have stockouts (can't start any new servers because they're out of servers, IPs, or some other resource) or other reliability issues (e.g. a server taking forever to start/stop). I can highly recommend them for hobby stuff, but wouldn't dare to use them for something that will cost me my livelihood if it goes down for a week.
I've heard various horror stories about OVH in terms of internal network reliability, but that was 5+ years ago.
Other reasons:
* The managed services (starting with the various file storage solutions, but extending to databases etc.)
* The list prices you see on the web site may not be the prices bigger companies actually pay.
* It's easier to find people who know how to use them, or tools that work with them.
* Possibly better service (if you have the appropriate plan - running your prod on a cloud provider without a service plan is a good idea until shit hits the fan, and a bad and possibly company-ending idea once that happens).
Re: Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?
#60Latency to Europe is a non-starter for US companies.
They got data centers in North America you know. Canada and US.