[peterangular]

As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability.

Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.

[JohnTHaller]

I'm using OVH for downloads from PortableApps.com as their un-metered VPS was one of the better and affordable options. Haven't noticed any issues (knock wood). Is there something else I should look at?

[leca]

Man I used PortableApps.com so much back when I was in high school to get around the "you can't install anything on this computer" rule... Thank you for your service.

[JohnTHaller]

Sure thing! Still goin!

[wiether]

First, thanks for PortableApps!

Still use it as soon as I'm forced to use a Windows computer.

Otherwise, as long as you make sure that no billing issue can arise from your side (like an expired card...), you should be fine.

[JohnTHaller]

You're welcome! Thanks for the advice.

[utopiah]

> They never had any major downtime for me

One of my server was lost to a fire so...

That being said, only happen one and I had no data on it so I didn't mind.

I switched to Hetzner too.

[hinkley]

How many data centers have had a server room burn to the ground?

We had a halon system in an on-prem data center twice the size of my bedroom. We had to knock out a wall because the volume was too small for the smallest cooling system we could get installed in the building. That was 20 years ago, and we had to do it for insurance reasons. In the United States, which I know you Europeans like to make fun of for being sooo amusingly Neanderthal.

What the absolute fuck, OVH.

[everfrustrated]

I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread.

OVH is about cheap, not quality.

Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.

[hinkley]

And I will say again, we couldn’t get insurance without the halon system.

[jon-wood]

I rent a dedicated server from OVH for various self hosted services and for the price I really can't complain. If there's been any outages they happened at times when I wasn't interacting with it so I didn't notice. I'm not entirely sure I'd trust a server that mattered to them but for what I'm doing they're fine.

[ge96]

I'm pro OVH granted I've not used Hetzner before and only used DO briefly. I too remember the burn but they gave credit. I like the emails saying "your service is under DDOS attack".

[htx80nerd]

Hetzner is the most unintuitive UI / service I've ever used.

[iberator]

DO is amazing. Easy to use and clean

[ac29]

Too bad they stopped investing in new equipment around the time they IPOd in 2021.

As near as I can tell, the newest "premium" CPU you can get from them is a ~2021 era Xeon. The shared and "regular" CPUs are even older.

[Taek]

Isn't Hetzner strongly associated with OVH? I thought they were under the same umbrella.

[liotier]

Competitors on the same market segment - France vs. Germany.

[alephnerd]

Nope.

OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].

Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.

HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.

In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).

I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, entrepreneurs, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.

[hjouneau]

OVH is not backed by Xavier Niel. Niel is behind Scaleway, which is OVH’s main French competitor.

[everfrustrated]

>Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France

While started by two French founders, Datadog was always an American company. It was only post IPO they started hiring in France (for more than local sales roles).

[Octplane]

In 2017 (so really before the IPO), the Paris office was already at at least 50 people, most of them in engineering.

[wiether]

Xavier Niel is behind Scaleway, not OVH

[quesera]

OVH operates three hosting brands:

OVH, SYS (So You Start), and KimSufi. It's a bit confusing!

IIRC they bring the newest hardware into OVH and push it down the line to SYS and KS as it ages.