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by ev1 1924 days ago
This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted.

If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation.

I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodically, while large players that deploy sanely like Netflix fail over to another region seamlessly.

This [only owning a single machine at all] is what most of their customers whinging the most were doing. People that have actual sane production workloads on AWS or GCP are not going to be running 100% of their workload on a single EC2 instance with no backups.

People that are running on OVH are running often things like gameservers etc that monopolise 100% of a physical machine and don't support horizontal scaling. You quite literally cannot force a srcds/hlds server to "load balance" dynamically and fail over on heartbeat.

Often they are kids or students too, and the $30/m for a machine with 32-64GB ram is all they can afford (though this doesn't absolve them of paying $1-2/m more for offsite backups elsewhere)

You can provision more physical machines with the OVH API and have them be up in a different city in a minute or two. You get linespeed bandwidth between OVH DCs. It's up to you to use it.

2 comments

On the other hand, just about every month, there's a story on HN saying why are you wasting your money on AWS when OVH is so much cheaper (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028).

And well, I guess this is one of the reasons.

If you choose to run 100% of your workload on a single EC2 VM in us-east-chaos-monkey and put nothing in S3, only local mounted block storage that also disappears when you reboot your on-demand EC2, that is on you.
2 OVH dedicated servers in different countries are still cheaper than one AWS instance.

e.g. I've got servers at OVH SBG-2, Hetzner's Falckenstein, and Online.net's AMS datacenters — the total of which is still almost a magnitude less than the same cost on AWS or GCP (granted, that's including traffic)

Pretty much. Use 5% of the money you saved moving your workload from AWS to OVH to support failover, DR, and backups. You can probably buy like five or six machines of equivalent spec or more.
Not only that, but the OVH load balancer (API gateway) is enormously much cheaper at 2TB of traffic than AWS and they don't charge for the amount of requests.
No, it doesn't work like this. I have several bare-metal (with Heztner, I use OVH for DNS), it's been over 10 years already. I know that if I only rent one machine in one location, I'm asking for trouble. Based on my experience, I would say that every 2-6 years something dies in a server. A disk, a controller, a fan, you name it. It's rare to have servers running for longer than 7 years without any issues, and they're outdated by that time anyway so they need to be migrated to a new machine.

So, as a bare minimum, you rent at least two different machines at two different locations for each project and make offsite backups. It's still way less expensive than AWS.

If I don't need a powerful server and just need to spin some instances for testing or small projects, I use Hetzner Cloud, it's ridiculously cheap.

how so? using OVH and their bare metal servers doesn't absolve you from doing your own due dilligence.

As said earlier, their cloud service is unaffected.

Oh good to know. I don't use OvH, and my limited understanding were from their products page which lists VM style offerings. I had assumed VMs were the major use cases on OvH.
The pricing on their dedicated servers are cheaper than most 1-2GB VMs on cloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ - this is their flagship and most expensive brand, the cheaper ones are even less

The funniest tweets demanding their data and saying they'll lose everything are the people running:

https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 - GTA5 multiplayer gameserver that begs for donations. Running on one of the cheaper sub-brands of OVH probably (soyoustart, for GAME ddos-protection). $30-40/machine.

https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 - I can't tell if this is a troll

https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 - I can't tell if this is a troll

I can imagine a provider that offers "Disaster Recovery Plan" in the sense that you push a button and they spin up [whatever machines you subscribe to] in a different data center and restore your latest backup to it.

Or the button flips your DNS from your usual primary servers to a hot backup (or a cold backup that you brought online yourself).