
OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you” - krn
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/99939.fullarticle
======
truetraveller
Important notes about OVH:

-I'm a customer for about ~2 years.

-I was "just" using OVH object storage, and was considering other OVH services.

-I'm all about "cheap,cheap,cheap"

-OVH is super-cheap, which is good.

-I want OVH to "win". OVH doesn't want to "win". Because..

-OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything.

-website uses esoteric design conventions. A European thing? I don't know.

-feels as if they went the extra mile _to_ make it confusing. Defies belief!

-they have separate websites for different countries, which use different login credentials.

-they have "OVH credits". Why???

-they use OpenStack (Yay!). Unforuntely, they have a confusing implementation of OpenStack dashboard, AND on a separate site, with separate credentials.

Bottom line: I'm a tech-savvy guy who can absorb some pretty bad UX, but OVH
made me cringe. Seriously, I do not exaggerate. Anytime I need to log on to
OVH, I get an uneasy feeling. So, I _gladly_ paid extra and switched. I use
DigitalOcean now. It's not as cheap. Digital Oceans's UX is good, but not
_amazing_. But believe you me, it is BREATHE OF FRESH AIR compared to OVH.
Update: may post a video if you guys want me to. Let me know!

~~~
brandon272
I use OVH's So You Start line and I think my biggest complaint is that they
don't allow automatic renewal. Every monthly renewal means manually keying in
my card number every month. The only alternative is to pre-pay in 3, 6, or 12
months in advance. It is the only online service I use that doesn't handle
auto-renewal.

~~~
joering2
Ask them to update your account to the newest version. I assure you they
handle automatic renewals and they handle them very strictly - I'm getting
emails blasted to both main and optional email account at the first time there
is a card decline.

Here some screen shoots from minutes ago:

Exhibit 1: huge yellow sticker to tell me to switch to auto-pay, which I
actually don't want to for some of my clients.

Exhibit 2: both bills for servers setup as autopay.

Actually the option to pay in advance is a blessing and as far as I know, only
known to me provider that does that. Last December where I was for $35,000 in
taxes, I was able to significantly lower that down for purchasing OVH services
for 12 months in advance. OVH rocks!!

[1] [https://ibb.co/enhmen](https://ibb.co/enhmen)

[2] [https://ibb.co/nGGJs7](https://ibb.co/nGGJs7)

~~~
brandon272
That's OVH, which uses a different control panel than their SoYouStart
division. I just submitted a ticket with them asking if autorenew was possible
and they replied right away confirming that autorenew is not possible,
unfortunately.

------
QUFB
I run [https://wtfismyip.com](https://wtfismyip.com) on OVH. Egress bandwidth
exceeds 8TB a month, which on AWS could cost ~$1000/month, not including the
cost of the beefy EC2 instance I would need.

For some bandwidth heavy use cases, OVH makes a lot more sense than AWS. In my
case it was $150/month versus $2000/month (bandwidth + EC2).

~~~
tedivm
AWS bandwidth costs are obscene. They compete on price so well on most other
fronts, but for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth. It
makes using them without a CDN cost prohibitive and drives a lot of use cases
away from them.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
What's the best cdn right now? Cloudfront is just expensive as hell.

~~~
tedivm
Alright, I'll go through the list.

* Cloudfront would be great for the North America and Europe they only charged for the bandwidth (those prices are reasonable), but charging for the HTTP request (and the huge premium on HTTPS). The bandwidth prices outside of those areas are absolutely awful though.

* Akamai makes Cloudfront look cheap.

* Cloudflare has ethical concerns that keep me away from them.

* Fastly is susceptible to DDoS's against the origin in some interesting ways.

* Limelight was great but then Goldman Sachs bought and destroyed them.

* EdgeCast was by far my favorite, but then they got bought by Verizon. Assuming Verizon hasn't fucked it up then they're definitely worth checking out, as their reporting tools were amazing and their performance was literally the best (my information is a few years out of date though on this one).

* If you want to serve people in China you will need to pay a China based (government owned) CDN or your traffic will get blocked for no reason once you get large enough. Conveniently enough one of their sales people will reach out to you about a day or two before the block goes into effect.

* MaxCDN isn't bad, but I haven't seen their higher tier prices (above 25TB) so I can't comment on that. Their South America and Asia coverage is pretty bad though- nothing in India, only one datacenter in Brazil for all of South America (with another being built, but also in Brazil), no Africa, no Middle East. If you're starting english only this isn't the worst, but eventually you'll need to go to a multiple CDN solution for broad coverage.

~~~
manigandham
What are the ethical concerns with Cloudflare?

~~~
judge2020
Some people are against Cloudflare's vast internet dominance with their "free"
CDN which proxies all content, but proxying content of a zone is no different
from any of the other CDNs storing your content for you.

~~~
manigandham
When did business success become such a problem? The basic CDN model is the
same with all CDNs that are pull-first reverse proxies, but they clearly offer
much better features for less cost which is why so many use them. There's
nothing stopping other companies from doing the same but most are still
nothing more than some nginx servers running in a few colos.

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wpietri
This is a nice PR bit, but I wonder if it really matters?

I would be very reluctant to do a startup centered on, say, GMail or Amazon
Marketplace as a platform. If you get too successful, it's too easy for them
to say, "Hey, here's a proven high-value business for us to get into." And
then they have my customer right there, so I'm screwed. (An example that comes
to mind is Swype. They invented the swipeable virtual keyboard and made a
great product. So great that Google added the feature to their own Android
keyboard. And then released it for free on iOS, too.)

But I'm not worried at all about using their infrastructure services, because
it doesn't give them much in way of competitive advantage. Netflix, for
example, has a lot of their stuff running in AWS. Amazon has Prime Movies + TV
as a direct competitor, but I don't think Netflix really cares. I as a
consumer sure don't; from my perspective Netflix and Amazon are completely
separate.

~~~
paxys
You can't discount first mover advantage. From your own example, Swype had
immense mind and market share for many years, even after Google, Microsoft and
others released their own alternatives. They were eventually bought out for
over $100 million.

~~~
sleepychu
Eventually, I get a new phone. I'm certainly not going to go after Swype if
Gboard has its only USP built right in (and better overall integration)

~~~
on_and_off
Pretty much this.

I used Swype for a while. IIRC they were not helping themselves : you had to
reinstall the app after a while because it would automatically stop working.

I also personally disliked how the keyboard looked with swype.

When the default keyboard started having this feature, there was no point in
installing this bothersome app anymore.

------
adamnemecek
I used to have a server with them however the UI was ...beyond words. It was
impossible for me to renew my subscription because the site was throwing a JS
error. Has this improved? Their offering was very good bang for buck I've
seen.

~~~
thejosh
Yeah their UI is beyond useless.

Their support is beyond useless.

Can't even cancel my servers, but everything else was great.

Ended up having to use their API to cancel the server, since support wouldn't
cancel the server for me - here is an actual email they sent me:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY2rWiLU8AA_mKt.jpg:large)

~~~
freehunter
It's weird because in every article I see about DigitalOcean, there's people
saying "DO is stupid, they're overpriced, everyone should use OVH", yet in
every article I see about OVH there are people complaining that OVH has some
serious customer support and UX problems.

~~~
icebraining
It probably depends on how much you interact with them (by choice or luck). My
interactions (via Kimsufi) have been: creating a server once, then paying them
four times a year. So far that's been flawless :)

------
arenaninja
I think it's safe to say that Amazon's ambition is unlimited at this point in
time. I fully expect them to jump into commercial banking in the near future

~~~
dmoy
So there are fairly strong regulations on what other things a bank can do. I
can't remember exactly what it entails. It's possible Amazon could get around
that with holding company structure or something, but I'm not sure.

I agree with your general point though, maybe just not the bank part.

Edit1: It's not reg W, damn I cannot remember which section describes this.
There's too many bank regs in the US.

Edit2: ok 12 CFR 225.21 &238.51 we're closer:
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/225.21)

Bank or bank holding can't own anything other than other fin, ag, or family
stuff.

I'm still at sure to what extent this would stop Amazon from starting their
own bank. (IANAL, but this was explained to me years ago by an expert on us
federal banking regulation so I have hazy memories of it)

Aaaand I just wasted 15 minutes of my morning looking through the CFR on
banking regulation, time to stop reading hackernews.

~~~
valenciarose
> wasted 15 minutes

I used to work in a securities firm owned by a bank holding company in a role
requiring being registered as a securities principal (legally responsible to
supervise). It _still_ took me several minutes to remember which regulations
to look up.

Amazon doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of working around these
regulations with the current administration. Trump hates Bezos. With a
moderate Republican in power, they might be able to lobby their way to
creating the precise loophole they needed (which would require legislation).

~~~
voxadam
Didn't Walmart try to buy itself some sort of bank back in 2006 or so? I have
a vague recollection of the venture and it not going Walmart's way.

~~~
dmoy
Yup 2005:
[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/17bank.htm](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/17bank.htm)

------
ironjunkie
As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know about
OVH.

AWS, Azure and GCloud are all so good at Marketing themselves that a lot of
people don't even hear about alternatives.

I used a lot OVH both for private reasons and pushed it into my company.

It is by far the cheapest (by a factor of 3-4* in my case), and it is
shockingly easy to get to talk to core engineers in case you have any real
issue.

The founder Octave Klaba is also a character. A Huge geek, that lives for OVH.

~~~
adventured
> As a European, I am sometimes shocked that people in the bay don't know
> about OVH.

Where would you get that impression? OVH is clearly well known in the tech
world of the bay area / SV. They've been regularly discussed on HN for at
least ~5+ years that I'm aware of.

One problem has been that they only have one North America location and it's
in Canada (not necessarily ideal depending on what you're doing and where
you're located in the US).

------
julienmarie
Indeed, OVH UI is slow and bulky. I moved to Hetzner for a lot of things. Even
cheaper, had one server issue, but quickly fixed by their support ( a bios to
upgrade ), their UX is simple but efficient. Any other opinion on them?

~~~
stevekemp
I use Hetzner, I like their server range and prices, but I am annoyed I pay
almost as much for a block of IPs as I do a single server.

(I run a bunch of virtual machines, each with a real public IP exposed.)

~~~
freeone3000
For IPv4? This really does reflect reality - IPV4 addresses should cost WAY
more than things like servers we can just keep making.

------
kelukelugames
I wish there was a website that collected all of the times a company promised
to "never do x" and then changed their word. Companies break promises all of
the time. It's impossible to predict what they or anyone else will do in a few
years.

------
merinowool
With Kubernetes now being mature and fairly easy to install, you can have
essentially your own AWS for peanuts using OVH. I absolutely see no reason why
paying such a premium to use "conventional" cloud providers when you can have
your own portable infrastructure nowadays.

~~~
paxys
Kubernetes only does service orchestration, which is a very small part of what
AWS offers overall. You still have to manage servers/NAS/networking hardware,
ISP contracts, CDN, edge caches, geo-distribution and more.

~~~
merinowool
I think there is a niche where it is too expensive to use AWS and it is
impossible to do with traditional hosting. You can do well with Flannel, Rook
and edge servers as nginx reverse proxies with caching. You need to write
scripts once (or use ready made recipes) and management isn't too hard -
definitely doable for one man project if you set your expectations right.

------
jasonlingx
I’ve been a customer of theirs for years. Till now I still have to manually
key in my credit card details to renew my servers every few months. So yeh,
their CEO’s probably right.

~~~
melkhior
OVH has auto-renew though?

~~~
zifnab06
Up until early this year autorenew existed in the UI for Canadian servers but
didn't do anything.

------
xstartup
We run 1K node ClickHouse cluster on top of OVH. In BigQuery, we had a latency
of 10-50s per query and it was costing us 400K per month.

ClickHouse costs us 100K per month, all deployed on OVH. 100-200ms query
latency.

~~~
manigandham
Why $400k for BigQuery? It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for
unlimited queries.

Also your other comment mentioned 50TB across 1000 Clickhouse nodes, why so
little data per node?

~~~
riku_iki
> It has flat-rate billing starting at 40k/month for unlimited queries.

plus storage costs?

~~~
manigandham
50TB of data is about $500/month on BigQuery. $0.02/GB for new data, then
$0.01 after 90 days of being unchanged.

------
jpswade
So what can we gleam from this?

OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle
surprise.

Having AWS in the hosting market means that right now, it's become a cottage
industry for anyone else other than the big names in tech. Meanwhile these big
names in tech know that they can make money from their platforms.

They simply can't compete on the same level and now they've decided that's
what makes them unique in the industry...

What should a hosting business to do in 2018?

~~~
djhworld
> OVH aren't about to start selling books or buy supermarket chains? Quelle
> surprise.

I think they're more talking about companies hosting on AWS, e.g. Amazon Video
is a competitor to Netflix

------
xmichael99
OVH won't do anything even slightly advanced, no BGP support, no firewall
beyond the very basic stuff and everything about OVH is super confusing. It is
like they got together and decided to make up nonconventional names to common
network terms to piss everyone off. OVH is pretty cheap, but very basic. Plus
good luck trying to understand an overage bill.

------
k__
Just yesterday I looked into some performance articles about cloud providers
and OVH wasn't in the top tier

------
scarface74
I was just listening to a Software Engineering Radio podcast from 2015 where
they were interviewing the guy who moved Netflix to AWS. He said that by being
on the best cloud provider (AWS), Netflix was neutralizing the advantage that
Amazon Prime Video had by being on the best cloud provider.

On the other hand, Dropbox had to leave AWS because they would never be able
to be a storage solution at a lower price and pay AWS fees...

------
kim0
Any such (low cost) provider offers a great hosted kubernetes experience?

~~~
tyingq
Maybe OpenShift online?
[https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html](https://www.openshift.com/pricing/index.html)

------
grumpwagon
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lgD1qCrWMA4J:www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-
tracks/colo-cloud/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-
competition-with-you/99939.fullarticle+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
kunthar
I’m not going to do anything you can do. Better? because i have no budget to
compete with these giants yet.!

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manishsharan
I work for a very large bank and our management refuses to use AWS as we see
it as a potential competitor. So we ended up using a cloud provider that
sucks. So it seems that this opinion expressed by OVH CEO is shared by a lot
of senior management.

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ddorian43
I thought the sentence would be "we'll never charge for bandwidth" which is
equally important.

*charge until a point. I don't expect them to go cloudflare.

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segmondy
This will be the undoing of the Giants. Lack of trust.

------
Vrains
That's what they all say at first.

~~~
icebraining
OVH has existed for almost twenty years.

------
fierro
title gore

------
StreamBright
Hi is right, but for different reasons he thinks. :)

