
OVH raises $327M to accelerate its international development - arthurd
http://www.ovh.com/us/news/cp1662.to-accelerate-its-international-development-ovh-raises-327-million
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martinald
I'm not surprised. OVH deals are insanely good, often less than 10% of the
cost of the equivalent AWS/azure/google compute costs in terms of the raw
power you get.

I'm consistently surprised that more people don't use them for workloads that
don't require super high reliability, but do use an enormous amount of
compute/storage/bandwidth. I think a lot of services fall into this category.

~~~
beachstartup
they're not insanely good, they're just very close to the cost of the actual
financed hardware.

AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their marketing,
which is cleverly disguised as spec sheets and technical documentation and
other things engineers who think they are not susceptible to marketing fall
easily for.

someone's paying for all those free AWS instances, and it ain't the low end
customers.

edit: if you want to know the true price of the hardware, take the purchase
price of your standard supermicro server, and multiply it by .025 - that's
what big companies pay per month for hardware, usually on 3-year leases.

i.e. $10,000 box = costs $250/month. A decent cloud provider can usually get
about $3000+ a month of revenue off of a box like that. even after you add
power, networking, staff, it's still a large markup.

~~~
tracker1
And, lets say you only need 3-5 of those $250/month instances... given AWS's
services (or azure, or google) it isn't really a bad deal. I'm not saying it's
for everyone. I'm still running some personal projects on smaller hosting
providers... but with a modest budget, AWS and the like are decent offerings
for what you get.

If you're designing for distributed data/services from the start, it's better
still.

~~~
beachstartup
i think you misread what i typed.

the entire $10k server costs _amazon_ $250/month.

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hashtree
There is some back and forth on the "best" approach to hosting infrastructure,
but there is no silver bullet or always right answer. There is a full spectrum
for hosting infrastructure options, and each company has to pick the
hue/tier(s) that delivers for them best a particular point in time and realize
that it will likely change as time moves on. At each hue/tier, you trade man-
hours and in-house expertise for cost. Typically, you see companies move
backwards down the choices as time goes on to find that optimal spot.

    
    
      - Multi DC colocation, building your own servers/network equipment
      - Multi DC colocation, buying servers/network equipment
      - Single DC colocation, building your own servers/network equipment
      - Single DC colocation, buying servers/network equipment
      - Dedicated servers
      - VPS servers
      - Virtualized servers as a service with barebone supporting 
      infrastructure (e.g. Digital Ocean)
      - Virtualized servers as a service with robust supporting 
      infrastructure (e.g. AWS)
      - Platform as a service (e.g. Heroku)
    

You do see companies get into "trouble" where they might have picked the right
hue/tier but haven't reflected upon the choice in some time. In those cases,
you might see a startup dropping 60k a month on AWS services when they would
have no earthly business spending more than 10k amortized on a multi-DC/added
hires approach (I've observed this exact scenario).

~~~
toomuchtodo
> You do see companies get into "trouble" where they might have picked the
> right hue/tier but haven't reflected upon the choice in some time. In those
> cases, you might see a startup dropping 60k a month on AWS services when
> they would have no earthly business spending more than 10k amortized on a
> multi-DC/added hires approach (I've observed this exact scenario).

I too have seen startups burning six figures monthly in AWS because they're
afraid of buying gear, renting colo space, and hiring sys|network|linux
admins.

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api
Just moved to OVH bare metal for my primary servers. Deal is insanely good, as
is performance. If you need to scale beyond commodity cloud or you need higher
single-threaded performance without the hypervisor overhead it's definitely
worth a look.

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tiffanyh
I hope this means OVH opens a data center in the USA.

Preferably someplace with the lowest mean latency, like Texas [1]

[1]
[http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/network_delay.html](http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/network_delay.html)

~~~
jedisct1
They plan to build a data center on the West Coast.

~~~
tiffanyh
Appears your correct.

>> "They explained to us that a key part of OVH’s growth strategy is growing
their US business, including establishing a data center on the west coast, and
attracting more US customers with an offering they call Dedicated Cloud."

[http://dailycloud.info/european-web-hosting-giant-ovh-
target...](http://dailycloud.info/european-web-hosting-giant-ovh-targets-us-
growth-with-dedicated-private-cloud/)

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asb
Runabove (one of OVH's brands) offers very compelling pricing for object
storage and transfer. $0.01/GB for transfer. It seems very tempting to store
to both AWS and Runabove, keeping AWS in backup in case Runabove has issues.

~~~
corobo
I hadn't heard of this brand, looks interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

Are there any other OVH brands out there aside from this, Kimsufi, SoYouStart
and Hubic?

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rmoriz
This is very interesting for the european market. I was downvoted for bashing
Hetzner and other German based hosting companies when Amazon launched its
Frankfurt datacenter. But at least OVH learned that they need to compete and
reinvent their business based on dynamic/cloud services.

I wonder what happens next with the competitors: 1&1/United Internet is
probably the biggest hosting company but they still don't show signs of a new
cloud approach. As far as I can see they just focus on their "website builder"
product which is something like Squarespace and probably the future of the
former "shared hosting" segment. They tried to build an infrastructure as a
service company called Profitbricks but it took them years to provide decent
API adapters to popular cloud connection frameworks like fog.io or Apache's
libcloud. There service is limited (couldn't find something like route53 or a
global CDN-option like Cloudfront, Akamai)

Then there is still Hetzner which tries to compete by price. They still offer
powerful dedicated servers but still lack any professional feature including
an API to order or cancel new servers.

Let's see, maybe both are going to acquire capital in the future and start
inventing again.

On the other Hand DigitalOcean with its Amsterdam and London based locations
is very cheap, powerful and can already be use fully automated. I would
probably build my SaaS business on their infrastracture and then scale out
using AWS or Google.

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hashtree
To anyone who wants to see a damn cool modular datacenter implementation they
have, and how your server fits into it, checkout this video of their newish DC
up in Canada:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnarvq0XpkA#t=100](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnarvq0XpkA#t=100)

When you use said DC for your servers and you see the severing naming
conventions and routing paths involved... its cool to kinda be able to
visualize how it physically is laid out.

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ck2
Not sure how any datacenter is building with ipv4 exhaustion.

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AznHisoka
Great, now can they spend some of that money to pay engineers to implement
multi-factor authentication for logging in?

~~~
geg
For sure ! [http://i.imgur.com/hArj2Ul.png](http://i.imgur.com/hArj2Ul.png)

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dvl
While OVH don't change their deprecation policy I'll never use their services
again.

Once I rented a server for 20€/month, few weeks later they launched a new
equivalent server for only 4€ and they don't allows me to migrate.

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jamroom
Spin up a new one, transfer your data, spin down the old one?

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dvl
I've tried, like when I needed a bigger server but everything was sold-out, so
I asked to customer services if they can apply the new price for my old
server, they refused, after this I waited for a 7 months for the new servers
begin available again, and then in dec/2013 they also discontinued the "new"
servers without anything else in place and I cancelled my account.

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jedisct1
English version: [http://www.ovh.com/us/news/cp1662.to-accelerate-its-
internat...](http://www.ovh.com/us/news/cp1662.to-accelerate-its-
international-development-ovh-raises-327-million)

~~~
dang
Thanks; changed.

