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by jawr 5088 days ago
I was introduced to OVH when they had a promotion where they gave 100 kimsufi servers away (free for a year). I was really impressed with the prices that they were selling real hardware at (and still do).

However, I have grown a great distaste to them in the last few years, namely because of this behaviour and it's implications; when I buy a dedicated server that I am going to manage myself it would be nice to at least have the option to install a clean distribution and not have to go the extra mile of bootstraping.
1 comments
_Lemon_ 5088 days ago
That's the only reason you've found so far? That's pretty good.

They have much worse things in place:- their anti-dos measures make it near impossible to put anything of value on their without a LOT of work. For example, once they detect a DoS (just 50 Mbps was enough but it varies) they will take down your server (not just its IP) for 4-12 hours at a time.

With that said, there are some great things about OVH: they drive down the costs and make everything quite efficient (e.g., hardware prices, support costs) but then seem to just forget that they need to reduce the costs for the customer as well (their anti-dos measures being an example of how they increase the cost).

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giulianob 5088 days ago
I wonder if that DOS policy will be the same for the new North America data center. I have a beta server with them and am enjoying their service but taking someone's service offline for a small scale DOS attack may be a game changer.
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_Lemon_ 5088 days ago
It probably won't change. Their US routers do not appear to be any different to the EU ones (e.g., they both intentionally rate limit ping to them so you'll see a lot of timeouts).
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giulianob 5088 days ago
Interesting does this affect monitor apps (e.g. pingdom) ? Also have any recommendations of something competitive but with better quality?
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_Lemon_ 5088 days ago
No it does not, it's only when you ping their edge routers do you see packet loss, they still pass all traffic (and thus ping) over them just fine. You can see this in traceroutes or running mtr.

I believe (not 100% sure) they put their anti-dos on these routers which is why I think the US servers will have the same anti-dos measures.

Have you tried asking them? I do not believe they would hide this fact (it would be interesting to know whether they mark it as a selling point or not).

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giulianob 5088 days ago
Asked on the new US forums: http://forum.ovh.com/us/showthread.php?t=35
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