[tombrossman]

I use and recommend hosting with OVH if you are worried about DDOS and serving a Western market. No affiliation, just a happy customer.

OVH include DDOS protection by default[0] and they have a very robust backbone network[1] in Europe and North America that they own and operate themselves (this is how & why anti-DDOS is standard with them).

For quick side-projects I still fire up a DigitalOcean instance or two because their UX is so slick and easy. If I needed huge scale and price didn't matter I would probably go with AWS (their 'anti-DDOS' is their vast bandwidth + your ability to pay for it during an attack). For everything else, I put it on OVH.

[0]https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/

[1]http://weathermap.ovh.net/

[Urgo]

As a word of caution for OVH their anti-ddos protection can be a little too strict at times. The nature of traffic on our site is such that we often get big spikes of traffic via social media. We were testing out OVH earlier this month to see if offloading part of our site to their servers would work well and they ended up shutting our vps server down for an hour when we got a big spike. After working with their support team they did say if we purchased a dedicated server they would possibly be able to set up a rule to account for this, but their vps at least couldn't be fixed. For what it's worth before they blocked the traffic the vps was handling the traffic just fine. So if you're thinking of getting a dedicated server you may be okay, but just use caution if you expect any sort of spike in traffic as OVH's algorithms may block it as a DDoS even though you are sure its legitimate. Edit: Also again, to be clear, they blocked 100% of the traffic when the "attack" happened. Their solution wasn't to block the "attack" but to just null route the ip.

[tombrossman]

This contradicts what they claim on their DDOS explanation here: https://www.ovh.co.uk/anti-ddos/mitigation.xml First question to ask them is why was their response different from what practice they advertise? That isn't cool. I would open a new support ticket with them and ask for an explanation since that happened to you recently.

If you need something low-cost and dedicated try their SoYouStart range, which is just their last-generation hardware. Going from a VPS to SYS is a huge performance jump for minimal cost. They have a higher guaranteed minimum bandwidth throughput than the VPSs and may get you better support possibilities. Cost is similar to a mid-size VPS.

[Urgo]

Here is the result of the support ticket I had with them explaining that the traffic was not an attack and is expected to spike from time to time. Edited only to remove their upsell links.

"After looking into the matter, it would seem that our VPS do not have a profile that would accomodate your traffic spikes. However should you switch to a dedicated server, we would be able to apply a a custom profile to your server that we better suit your needs.

Our Kimsufi server are extremely affordable and do not cost much more then what you are presently paying. However they do have limitation, among other things, you cannot order additional IPs on the server. I would advise you to think carefully before purchasing such a server.

Another alternative would be to move to our mid range server, our Soyoustart servers, which offer many of the same benefits as our OVH dedicated servers, however at a very competitive price."

[justinclift]

Sounds like their "Anti-DDOS protection" is bullshit for their VPS plans then, unlike the marketing statements all over the OVH website saying otherwise. :(

[kalleboo]

Have you been DDoSed while on OVH? I've heard there are a bunch of providers who claim DDoS prevention, but what that means in practice is just "we'll take your site offline right away and not charge you for the incoming bandwidth!". Super helpful.

[r1ch]

I've had several attacks hit my services on OVH. Not once did they null route, and as far as I could tell the majority of attack traffic was filtered with only a minor service interruption before mitigation kicked in. Granted these were shitty $10 booter services hitting me and not a "real" DDoS.

Be careful using services like game servers or VOIP or anything else using UDP though, since UDP is subject to much more stringent filtering at OVH and may get affected during mitigation.

[cpncrunch]

I've also been DDoSed while on OVH. It happened twice and was a non-event. I would never have noticed if they hadn't told me. Now the asshats don't seem to even bother DDoSing us any more.

On iWeb, however, they null-routed us for half a day.

[Kephael]

OVH's DDoS protection is the real deal, they do not simply null route your IP like many other providers do.

[rmdoss]

I do use OVH and recommend them from time to time.

The main issue is that I lost a bit of faith in their support and reliability. vracks going down for hours with no updates. Connectivity issues. Servers disappearing.

Besides that, their DDoS protection works well for l3 attacks, except that they force a TCP reset on every connection. So if you are picky about extra connect times and having your clients re-establish their connections, they are great.

[cpncrunch]

What kind of server, and which data center? I've been using a dedicated server at BHS for over a year with no problems at all.

[dineshp2]

Tangential, but how do you find OVH? Their hardware, bandwidth, uptime, customer service? I ask because of the conflicting reviews of OVH that a quick google search reveals.

[tombrossman]

I'm living next to France and in talking to local geeks the name kept coming up (OVH is a French company). I had been using DigitalOcean but needed more storage space so I tried Kimsufi and SoYouStart which are both OVH-related, and then I started A/B comparing performance of VPSs for OVH and DigitalOcean and saw that the VPSs at OVH were consistently out-performing the same size machines at DigitalOcean. So, I moved everything I plan to keep online for more than a month to OVH. OVH's dashboard for creating and managing machines used to be really horrid but it has improved recently.

I don't know what to make of the bad reviews you found, my personal experience has been great for several years now. Multiple products used, the occasional support ticket with quick response, and decent pricing.

[roblabla]

I found OVH's offer to be very good on every point, except customer service. I'm mostly using Kimsufi dedicated servers, and let's just say that when shit goes wrong, you're left alone in the dark.

Anecdote: I had my dedicated server suddenly go down because it overheated. Wouldn't come back to life. Two days after submitting a ticket and getting no input, the machine suddenly came back up without any explanation. A day later, I got a mail saying the motherboard was broken and got replaced. Overall it was a very unpleasant experience, but it's to be expected given the low price of Kimsufi.

[PerfectElement]

I'm surprised people think it's acceptable to be 2 days in the dark just because it's cheaper. Even really low end companies like nocix (former datashack), 1&1, etc. will reply to your tickets in a few minutes.

It's good to know that this stuff happens with OVH. I'll make sure to stay far from them.

[chmike]

It's up to you to chose the product that fits your needs. Slow support is part of the deal. And do your own backups because they may switch the disks any time if they detect that something is wrong with it.

This thing happens with Kimsufi servers, a side brand of OVH for cheap dedicated servers. The real OVH servers are more expensive, but you get all the bells and whisles that come with a professional server hosting offer.

[cpncrunch]

Kimsufi is a completely different service to OVH's, even though they are owned by the same company, so you can't really compare the two. Kimsufi is dirt cheap and has a reputation for terrible support.

[chmike]

This is a marketing strategy. Kimsufi are for people to try out dedicated server hosting. It provides a low entry barrier. When used to it, people switch to real server once their need develop.

[chmike]

This is because kimsufi are the cheapest dedicated server of OVH. They do provide support but its delayed and restricted to hardware issues. These servers are intendent for playing around and testing, hence the low price. The offer is also minimal. I use it for some toy web site hosting and mail hosting. It's good for boostraping.

[quicksilver03]

At work we're using OVH for our production, we've been with them for several years. The key point is that the price-performance ratio is very difficult to beat, and it offsets the problems we've had.

We've had very few hardware-related issues, a disk failing or a motherboard to be replaced. In all of those cases, the component were swapped promptly and we've been kept informed of the progress.

Where we're unhappy is with the network, especially with their vRack offering. Looking back at our production incidents of the past 6 months, about 50% of them were caused by some vRack problem where at the same time the public interfaces were up and running just fine.

We're generally happy with customer service, but we pay for VIP support and we speak French to OVH's support agents (I believe that the latter helps a lot).