New cheap cloud from Kimsufi (Ovh)

[pkirk]

For those who do not know: OVH is a cheap French provider, and Kimsufi is the brand for their economic server&service line.

This morning I received the newsletter (I use them for a couple of project) showing this new cloud service called miniCloud: the price starts from 0.01€/hr.

Another news is the lowered price for the lowest server: Celeron D/215/220 now at 14.99€/mo from 19.99€/mo. (I still have a plan, now gone, @ 29.99€/mo)

I linked the .co.uk but there are also .fr .it, etc.

[MikeW]

I can't speak for their Cloud offering, but I have been using their Kimsufi Large (2.6GHZ) dedicated servers for around a year.

It's renewal time next week and my plan is to stick with them and drop my Slicehost.

Pros: - Pricing is great. Hardware performs well. The value for money is far better than anything I can get in my own country. - Most countries now have local sales/support teams so you can deal with a friendly local representative and they will deal with France and Octave. - They're very fast with getting new Linux distros prepped for their manager system.

Downsides: - Routes from your ISP to OVH may not be optimal. I've seen reports from people here complaining of routes going right around Europe the long way, from various ISPs. - Pulling a large file from Novell to my Slice in the US I was getting around 2MB/sec but to OVH it was just a few hundred K/sec. Decide the value of bandwidth and where your customers are. - I've had an unexplained reboot that I haven't been able to track down. It didn't bother me enough to track it down with support. - The Manager user interface seemed to be a machine translation from French into English. Quite often the statements made no sense at all. This has improved quite a lot within the last 12 months though.

I've had more positives with them than negatives. Their Kimsufi dedicated offering suits me well and I'm incredibly impressed at how Octave has grown the company

[pierrefar]

So what is Ovh's reputation as a host? Anyone use them? Any problems?

The prices are amazingly cheap, so might be worth trying them just because it won't cost much.

[ned]

I've had dedicated servers, shared hosts and individual domains with them for a few years. I had a hardware failure on a server once, the HD died, they replaced it in a few hours, it was handled pretty efficiently. The price is really low. The connectivity in Europe is good (although my customers are mostly based in France, so I don't have real benchmarks from elsewhere).

Two caveats:

- They have no taste and are really bad a interface design. Their administration tools are notoriously confusing, even after years of using them I'm still blown away at how they manage to make something simple so complicated. The boss (Octave) will post product announcements in the forums, and not in the official newsletter, encouraging a cult following of enthusiats/amateurs (that can be seen as both good or bad I guess…). Don't expect good documentation either.

- support is sub-par. I only contacted them a couple of times, and my carefully worded questions were met by a standardized reply, as if they had only read half of my email.

tl;dr : if you're a good sysadmin and don't need any hand-holding, they are good.

[madflo]

I've been using the MiniCloud service for a few weeks during the beta (the service was then offered) and for a few days as a paying customer.

Well... everything is working pretty smoothly. I'm using their manager to upgrade/downgrade my host's RAM on a daily basis, as I'm using the cloud as a pre-production server for a webapp. The manager UI is quite ugly, to say the least, but sufficient to start/stop and upgrade/downgrade the virtual host.

I did not had to ask for help from the support team so I cannot offer any advice on them.

[dtf]

I don't quite understand that page. What does 8GHz mean? Would these nodes be suitable for compute-intensive work (eg ray-tracing)?

[madflo]

That's 4 cores running at 2Ghz each. I agree that the 8Ghz notation is quite confusing.

[_Lemon_]

I feel I could write an essay on the pros and cons of OVH but it basically comes down to bandwidth quality.

You're only really paying for the cost of the hardware, the rest is a heavy reliance on peering with no or little transit links (you'll see they only sell to some EU countries).

[Loic]

I don't know what kind of bandwidth you really need, but I am running a couple of services on dedicated servers with them and all my customers are very happy with them. In fact US East coast customers often find my services faster than equivalent hosted in California.

On the forums the only person complaining where people doing NSFW hosting or radio streams. For web app stuff (including Git/Subversion hosting) it is really really good.

You can check the backbone here: http://weathermap.ovh.net/

Also, for people not aware, they have their own servers with liquid cooling and they are crazy with respect to optimization of their processes, think TPM and Toyota.

[_Lemon_]

I have 307 servers from the smallest to the largest and thousands of customers all round the world so I see the bandwidth problems first hand. There have been a couple of occasions when there network just hasn't been available to parts of America (measured in number of complaints I have to deal with).

The concern is, just because it works for you, doesn't mean it will work for all of your customers. Especially if they're not in the EU.

I'm not so sure on the cooling either -- their hard disks are very hot (I admit I don't know enough about hardware to say whether this is a problem) but generally I don't see many hardware failures.

I do however see plenty of random reboots -- only the HG servers (and strangely a few 19.99 servers with over a year uptime) seem to survive these as you'd expect.

[Loic]

Just wondering, you seams unhappy but at the same time you stay with them, is there a reason? I am adding new servers to my infrastructure with them on a regular basis and may end up having that many too. The question is serious, when you do your analysis between cost/quality/service, why is it still good for 300+ servers and why are you not going the collocation way?

[_Lemon_]

I believe I've come up with an effective solution to the problem: to not have all my eggs in one basket. I realise I do lead a bit of a love/hate relationship with OVH though.

I've taken new servers with Leaseweb and I'm building up with them now, I also have a few with 100TB in the US too. So now that when a customer says they are having poor speeds I just need to verify that it's to do with the bandwidth and explain the situation and this works very well for me. I can then move them to a new server and everyone is happy, it's an easier way to deal with something other than "err, sorry, would you like a refund?"

Although I realise I'm unique in that I can just move them around (well, 95% of the time). What would concern me is running a business critical website on a provider that doesn't provide international bandwidth.

[gregorym]

They're french. They are very popular here.

[ErrantX]

Gandi.net are another French host I recommend.

For small servers they are pretty comparable price wise (more RAM, less CPU) but I prefer their interface :)

[loup-vaillant]

Plus, they let you send mail. As far as I know, all ports are open.

EDIT: Why the down-vote? Is my comment wrong? Is it out of topic? I can understand the random up-votes, but I thought the down ones should be justified.

[_Lemon_]

There's a comment beneath you that quotes the page (near the bottom) "you can not send emails (you can receive them)."

Although I agree with you, a comment explaining would have been better than a down-vote -- best not to take those personally!

[loup-vaillant]

Total misunderstanding.

The comment below (to which I was implicitly refering to), talks about Kimsufi. I checked before I talked. This comment speaks true. I knew it.

Now, my comment was replying to a comment of ErrantX, which were talking about GANDI. So was I.

I thought there was absolutely no ambiguity, but now, I'm not so sure: namely, which interface ErrantX actually prefers? His "but" puzzles me.

[kierank]

OVH are famous for cheap bittorrent seedboxes.

[cl3m]

1 month = 730.484398 hour

730.484398 * 0.01 UK£ = 10.6570369 U.S. dollars

[paraschopra]

>you can not send emails (you can receive them).

Seems like a deal-killer to me.

[mahmud]

Not at all. If you're using email as notification, move your MTA to another port, or use something else.

[loup-vaillant]

Not being a spammer doesn't mean you don't want to send your e-mail from a machine that you control. If you want to do just that, a closed smtp port is a deal breaker.

If you're happy to have Google send your e-mail for you, or control another machine that does that job, you're not in the same situation, of course.

[ptm]

Is this for UK customers only ?

https://www.ovh.co.uk/order/mcloud.cgi

[_Lemon_]

The .co.uk site is, they only sell to some EU countries.

You can see a full list of their languages and sites at the top here: https://www.ovh.co.uk/managerv3/login.pl