[tombrossman]

144 comments as I type this and I can't believe no one has mentioned OVH yet. I'm a happy customer of DigitalOcean, AWS, and OVH and my default choice for a while now has been OVH. DigitalOcean beats everyone in ease of use and UX, and AWS obviously has huge potential for scaling, but OVH consistently beats DigitalOcean in VPS performance and they include DDOS protection as standard.

Test for yourself, fire up similarly sized VPSs at both DigitalOcean and OVH and benchmark them running identical tests. The DigitalOcean VPSs are pretty fast but the OVH ones consistently perform better for both CPU and disk speed.

OVH supports startups just like the rest of the companies mentioned elsewhere in the thread too - see https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ for info. I have no affiliation with any of these companies except as a customer.

[tajen]

OVH is a French group, submitted to the new Jan 2015 law about spying. Read this for more information: https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillan...

[kuschku]

So, they have the same situation as DO, practically (where we can be sure that the NSA has some backdoor in the systems).

[rtpg]

No, it's worse than that. The French spying apparatus has way less legal boundaries because the government basically doesn't want to acknowledge the spying even happens.

At least you can argue in an American court that you have standing if you have proof the NSA is spying on you

[davidandgoliath]

... and? "Way less legal boundaries" — the NSA doesn't even have a published budget. If you're on the internet, you're in their database(s) and so is your data. If you're interesting to them, your sysadmins are already exploited.

Court? Legal avenues? Legal boundaries?! Surely you jest.

[rtpg]

and do you think the DGSE is some sort of transparent body?

They're obviously both groups you don't want to have as buddies, but the NSA has lost court battles before, and ends up complying with the rulings most of the time.

The French surveillance services openly gloat about working in a "judicial vacuum": basically all the rules of its operations are decided by the Prime Minister and their pals, and basically have no legislative boundaries.

[chinathrow]

AWS and DO are US - FISA 702 would like to say hello.

[BinaryIdiot]

Interesting; I had never heard of OVH before. I currently have a bunch of stuff hosted on AWS and have been looking at digital ocean pricing; I'll add this to the list of places to check out. Thanks!

[joeyspn]

OVH is well known here in Europe, they were the counterpart to USA's "The Planet" (merged with SoftLayer). If you wanted dedicated servers in the EU during the early 2000s, the preferred option was always OVH...

[_urga]

See also: http://hetzner.de

[5ersi]

I second Hetzner. See their "server borse" for best value: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/

I just snatched a 6-core Xeon E5-1650v2 with 64GB RAM and 2x240GB datacentre SSD (samsung 840 Pro) for 70eur/month, no setup fee. A steal.

[sschueller]

Also checkout https://www.vultr.com/. They let you boot via iPXE and have many locations.

[Veratyr]

Seconded. I ran some basic benchmarks and found that Vultr outperformed DO rather consistently.

Vultr: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/0972fc51f49d90fb37af

DO: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/81aa3f413b99aaab1f0d

[fabiandesimone]

I use this guys, an initiative of OVH: http://www.soyoustart.com

Been with them for a year, no downtime, great prices.

[gizmo]

A note of caution: the non-professional line of OVH (that includes soyoustart) comes with basically no support and no uptime guarantees. It's still terrific value, but you've got to think carefully about what you're signing up for.

[z92]

Looks like OVH starts at $34/month. While, at DO you can start at $5/month.

[preynal]

No, they start at $3.49/month, https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/

[gionn]

That's what happens when website structure is decided by marketing people.

[xeromal]

Yeah, I was in the Cloud section and like how the fuck can this compete with DO???

[ybx]

There's also https://www.kimsufi.com/en/

[mbreedlove]

I've just migrated most of my servers to OVH and could not be more pleased.

[sauere]

I use OVH and i find it horrible. The user interface is a total disaster. At times, it is half-french, half-german, half-english. Plus they redesign it every ~6months.

[ultramancool]

You don't use OVH for the UI, you use it for the cheap and reasonably stable network. Do a quick bandwidth cost comparison between OVH and Amazon and you'll see what I'm talking about, unfortunately I'm unable to load the AWS pricing on mobile under Firefox or Chrome.

[ultramancool]

Quick off the cuff assuming I use about 10 TB of bandwidth per month -

AWS 10 TB = $899,

OVH 10 TB = $89,

SYS (OVH SoYouStart) 10 TB = $30, (warning about 250mbit limit and minimal support applies)

DigitalOcean 10TB = $50 (using 10 $5 nodes which is admittedly less than optimal, just trying to get a raw bandwidth estimate though)

Perhaps this isn't a fair comparison, but if you're in an industry that can be bandwidth heavy it might be something to consider. I am and it's why we couldn't look seriously at AWS. For whatever reason AWS bandwidth is extremely expensive compared to the competition.