Ask HN: Why are cheaper hosting services like OVH not very popular?

OVH is massive and very popular in Europe because it's a French company with datacentres primarily in Europe. Meanwhile AWS is popular with startups from Silicon Valley who set the tone for this site and startup culture in general.

The other difference is that AWS has the first mover advantage in cloud services. OVH has always had the strongest presence in the dedicated server market and is only now catching up their OpenStack-based cloud offer.

I very much enjoy access to raw hardware and use OVH a lot.

Have you seen their new storage servers? These are basically hard drives attached to a calculator (ARM) with a NIC, amazing and I haven't seen anything like it elsewhere: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/server-storage/

They also have a top notch DDoS protection that is not based on your wallet outlasting the attackers.

I've tried to some extent or another most of the cloud providers. What keeps me going back to AWS for my own needs and when I'm working with startups or larger companies.

* Free tier - you can't beat free for very small companies, and you can scale a t2.micro surprisingly well.

* Credits - it's pretty easy for startups to get $5-20k in credits for a 1-2 years. This is a great time to fire up a couple of EC2 instances, some RDS instances, CDN, auto backups, monitoring, etc etc. You don't have to worry about costs so you can always have duplicate dev, staging, prod environments. If you're still worried about budget in two years when the credits run out, you can scale down pretty easily -- hopefully at that time you're ready to scale up rather, and if you need the extra functionality it's right there instead of migrating clouds.

* SDK support - AWS command line tools, Python (boto), Java, and pretty much any language you need can integrate really easily with most of AWS.

* Documentation - it's not great, but there's a lot of it. You can find the official documentation on how to integrate the various services together, and best practices for security and scaling them, plus a gazillion third party tutorials that you can follow line by line or download third-party libraries if you need to do something in a hurry.

* Support - even on the free tier where they don't officially offer it, the giants have incentive to provide really good technical support to help you spend more money with them.

* Experience - you can find more developers and other technical and non-technical people who are used to the AWS console and terminology.

* Region support - even here in South Africa I can have an edge location for my CDN. Hoping for an actual data centre here too in the near future.

* Versatility - whether I want to scale a web app, or fire up a quick P2 GPU instance to try out some image classification, I can use the same interface and toolset. If I suddenly want to view my Apache logs in the cloud, I can send them to the same dashboard as my heartbeat alarms in * Performance - I won't go find them now, but there are a lot of benchmark blog posts out there showing how the smaller providers sometimes cut costs by using more shared hardware than they make obvious from their marketing - not all cores are equal and for sustained usage, AWS does a pretty good job of being predictable.

* Security - IAM is useful. S3 has sane defaults (now) which make it very hard to accidentally make data public. EC2 instances come with all the ports closed and you have to manually open the ones you want.

Maybe I sound like I'm trying to shill AWS (I did work for them a few years ago), but it's honestly one of the products I am happy to pay for. They've done a great job. GCE is really fantastic to use too, and Azure to a lesser extent. I still keep around a couple of Digital Ocean instances because I'm too lazy to migrate them anywhere and I love the simplicity of the platform and a Scaleway one because it's EUR2.99/month and it's useful to have a box that's just there to play with when I need it.

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, database engineers, machine learning engineers, mobile developers, etc., that are not just very good in their particular application domain, but also competent to operate self-service AWS tooling in an optimal way, despite having to contort around and fight with org-wide cloud policies that inhibit them for no actual cost, security, uniformity, or other benefit.

What I mean specifically is that there is not even a reason to think that shifting to managed services with a cloud provider will allow you to cut costs in IT workforce or “not think about it” like you say.

It’s just marketing snake oil that CTOs continue to believe this sort of thing at all.

I left OVH years ago after several outages (network, electricity and sometimes hardware failures) Also the OVH support was between horrible to nonexistent. All our servers went to AWS, cost more money for the hosting but a lot less in staff and no more downtimes since years! If you have serious workload and critical systems to run OVH is a joke

OVH is probably a bad example, they targeted mostly French and East Europeans willing to setup file sharing among friends.

They are still rebooting your servers if you happen to block ICMP requests, in an attempt to bring them back to live.

Yes, they diversified, but the spirit stayed.

Hetzner is much more professional, they targeted big file sharers and the porn industry from the inception.