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TL;DR from today's French blog post:
Our offers were so competitive that too many customers wanted them, and we're loosing money if we don't keep customers for at least 2 years. Sadly, they migrate to new offers before that. We're halting dedicated servers until we figure out what to do.
[edit] Link: http://www.ovh.com/fr/a1186.pourquoi_160sold_out160
I'm looking at this as an option vs a small AWS deployment. Seems to offer a lot of the flexibility of virtualization at a much better price/performance point than AWS.
I can't imagine building a complete business model around AWS, but using it to begin the growth period seems reasonable.
I am planning to move from AWS to Linode mainly because of performance. My app is CPU intensive. I think for such apps you need to take high end EC2 instance.. I tried with small and medium instances but found them quite slow. With linode 8 core small instances, I could handle 2-3 times the traffic. However from management perspective AWS rules.
To be fair, the negatives I have experienced so far are: hetzner's management console is pretty poor compared to linode's (but it gets the job done), and linode is a self-serve almost instant provisioning while hetzner seems to take about 12 hours.
Just so you know, OVH has just _halted_ its dedicated server offer. TL;DR from today's French blog post: Our offers were so competitive that too many customers wanted them, and we're loosing money if we don't keep customers for at least 2 years. Sadly, they migrate to new offers before that. We're halting dedicated servers until we figure out what to do. [edit] Link: http://www.ovh.com/fr/a1186.pourquoi_160sold_out16…
Just so you know, OVH has just _halted_ its dedicated server offer. TL;DR from today's French blog post: Our offers were so competitive that too many customers wanted them, and we're loosing money if we don't keep customers for at least 2 years. Sadly, they migrate to new offers before that. We're halting dedicated servers until we figure out what to do. [edit] Link: http://www.ovh.com/fr/a1186.pourquoi_160sold_out16…
In summary: Their main problem was no "installation fee" meaning the barrier to hopping to a newer server every couple of years just wasn't there. If their new offerings were priced competitively to attract new customers they would also be priced similar to how older hardware was priced when sold a couple of years ago, so anyone on the older hardware would jump to new boxes.
AWS isn't really a solution for people trying to run a "small" project on a fixed amount of servers 24/7. It's great if you want to be able to: - provision lots of machines without delays - launch and terminate new instances to cover load spikes - do geo-redundant failover (aka: a datacenter in Europe, Australia, the US, ...) - have 'plug and play' components like load balancers (ELB), storage (S3), databases (RDS),…
EC2 was designed for elastic computing. On demand high computation (low memory) that are elastic. With that in mind, pure EC2 is a terrible choice for general web application hosting. If using the complete AWS set (S3, simpleDB, etc) then it makes more sense as stuff like db hosting can be pushed out to their services designed for it, but if you're gonna fire up a windows box, stick SQL server on there and use it as…
"Terrible" is seriously overstating it. There are a lot of advantages to AWS (I understand you said "pure", but that really makes no sense in the context of AWS) that can justify the price premium -- ELB, elastic IPs, the ability to spit out AMI images (and machines from them) at will, the private networks, the firewall, etc. The fantastic network capacity (I am always wary of services like OVH that offer "unlimited" anything, because it is always limited, and unlimited means that your peers will be saturating switches because it's "free").
There are a tremendous number of flexibility reasons why EC2 comes at a premium, and it is an easy justification in many shops. Even if you aren't using ELB today, and won't have to spin out machines, etc, that flexibility has significant value.
I say this having machines at AWS, Digital Ocean and OVH. OVH is very, very bare bones, and you'd better have an escape hatch because the simplest configuration error can leave your machine incapacitated and beyond reach (adding the KVM option is usuriously expensive -- like $350 per month per machine).
From experience, I have seem that the price of performance on AWS is much higher than companies that buy their own hardware. Knowing what resources your service needs as a baseline can be helpful when picking which machines should be reserved instances, but still you may as well just buy your own hardware if you want the best perfomance/price.
If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…
1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time
2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot.
3. They're expensive.
4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess.
5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) that they blame on "upstream routing issues" despite supposedly having multiple redundant upstream carriers.
6. They'll randomly reboot your box without notice. If you open a ticket there's an almost certain chance they'll just reboot your box no matter how much you ask them not to.
7. The IO on the boxes is really bad.
8. They don't proactively monitor any of their servers, and their "new fancy" monitoring product only goes down to 5 minute resolution, so it's worse than Pingdom, for example.