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

I use both OVH and AWS extensively, and have done so for quite a while. OVH is actually quite popular; they're big enough to have their own TLD, which says something about the quantity of money they have just sitting around.

There are a few big issues that I have with OVH, all of which keep me from moving my most critical infrastructure there:

* Their support is very hit-or-miss. Sometimes they're great; other times, you'll be stuck with a dead disk that they're not willing to replace, for whatever reason. Sometimes they swap out the wrong disk. Sometimes they just screw up your server for seemingly no good reason.

* Behind-the-scenes, they operate mostly in French. I don't speak French. Not many of the people I work with are fluent in French. But whenever you hit an edge case, or some unusual part of the interface, or really, anything off the beaten trail, the message is going to be in French. Error messages? French. Recovery prompts? French. Important status announcements? Quite often French.

* Not a single US datacenter--which, being a US company, is a bit annoying.

* The Canada datacenter, the only one close to our physical location, has serious network issues far too often. Once every couple years, their network will just... die. There's always a good reason, but excuses don't keep my customers happy. Maybe construction was taking place nearby and someone busted a fiber line, while the other line was down for maintenance. Whatever the reason, it ends up down for unacceptably long periods of time. I still have nightmares about the last time it was down for what felt like a whole day, but was probably more like 12 hours (so much better, I know). They keep insisting they're improving their peering. Apparently they have a lot of trouble getting permits to run lines across the US - CA border. In the time it took them to get those permits, they could've built a whole new datacenter in the US to completely mitigate the issue. It's not like they don't have the money. But they keep saying it's getting better. It's not going to happen again. Everything's fixed. More peering, more connections. But it Keeps. Happening. I've seen more reliable hosting providers that are an order of magnitude smaller--it's beyond the point of ridicule.

* Until very recently, their billing was a joke. There was no way to automatically pay invoices; each month, you had to pay everything manually--which wouldn't have been so bad if the interface were less buggy and confusing. They added automated payments but didn't fix the interface, so everything works great until it doesn't.

But they're cheap so we plop some failover infrastructure there and pray we never have to use it.

Edit: I should probably note that if we were building our primary infrastructure on OVH, it would probably actually be more expensive because of the increase in man-hours we'd have to spend managing it ourselves, even if we used their cloud services. It's been a long time since we crunched the numbers on this one, but last we checked, AWS won hands down, no contest.

Disclamer: working at OVH.

both right and wrong.

Yes we provide fully automated services and it's out goal.

We have three levels of service support. One that is free (hotline, email, social, ...) and one where you can subscribe VIP support, and one where you can have a dedicated technical account manager. (Maybe we're not good at communicating)

For this example, if there is an issue with a DDoS profile, we are able to adjust it given you're workload. Most common use cases are not causing issues. Keep in mind that a "VPS" is not really something you should use for business because it has shared resources and very small sizing. This is probably why your workload was identified as suspicious on the DDoS side. Instead you should pick a cloud instance : more sizing choices and dedicated resources.

> Keep in mind that a "VPS" is not really something you should use for business because it has shared resources and very small sizing.

That's exactly what I meant. The problem is, that people expect OVH VPS to be a direct alternative to Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr – when it's not. And the free support service doesn't always make this clear enough to the users. It only becomes clear, when you read the docs yourself.

Agreed - DO isn't a PaaS. That's was silly of me.

Took a look at Provakil and it seems interesting.

May I ask how much a typical engineer startup salary is in India? I had heard they got pretty high with all the US companies opening offices there (like 50-60k USD+)