
Kimsufi: the affordable dedicated server - fh973
https://www.kimsufi.com/en/
======
andmarios
Probably one of the worst services I ever tried to use.

Last week I ordered one of their small servers (PS-1). Although their site is
in English, the registration form was in French and despite giving me a drop-
down to choose another language, there wasn't one. I complete the process and
I am asked to email them a copy of my ID and a utility bill for verification.
I did so and never heard back from them. This is _unacceptable_ and I can't
think of many worse cases of contact from companies. I sent you a copy of my
ID and you do not even reply back? Even a Nigerian prince would be more polite
than this.

Also in the past, I gave them a try with the €2.99 offer. They just canceled
my order because it couldn't be "validated". I can understand if they have
problems, but I expect them to be more straightforward.

~~~
rak
I got them to validate my account with an email and a copy of a statement but
I was later told I could not purchase this because it wasn't available to
Americans. Before I realized this was the case, I received an e-mail saying
that my paypal payment wasn't accepted because the order couldn't be
validated.

I just ended up going with Digital Ocean instead. It would've been nice to
have a cheap dedi but it isn't worth this kind of hassle.

~~~
codexon
Digital Ocean asked for similar verification papers after a couple months of
usage. I am also located in the US.

~~~
rak
Linode and Digital Ocean have never asked me for any kind of verification.
They have just wanted their bill paid so far.

Maybe I'm just small potatoes compared to what other customers do with their
infrastructure?

------
mackwic
Ok, there's mainly negative of mitigated feedback here. Let's go further in
the discussion with positive feedback.

So, I personally own some kimsufi's, and I run a hosting structure for CS
students with another since 4 years.

The things you have to know about Kimsufi is:

\- they are full dedicated servers, fully capable of handling a decent charge

\- they are second hand hardware, already made profitable (that's why the
price is so low)

\- you should change change them every 4 years so that you won't run into
hardware issues

\- you can do whatever you want with them, there's really no chance to lose a
kimsufi thanks to the remote control console which can make a reboot on a
minimal image

\- you can do whatever you want with them, really. The bandwidth is really
free and unlimited, no bullshit.

\- the OVH network is really strong. In 5 years of use, I've never seen any
downtime of any of my servs.

For me, that's the best choice for non-critical hosting. They are unbelievably
much cheaper than everyone around (except online.net, who has a weaker
network), with twice as many features, their greatest community manager is the
CEO (checkout @olesovh), things just work everyday. When they don't, just
check [http://travaux.ovh.com](http://travaux.ovh.com) . No bullshit about the
problems (cc PlanetHoster, DreamHost and the like).

I'll be happy to answer questions if you have.

~~~
tehf0x
I can only agree, you just have to know what you're getting into, there's no
SLA, but that's the deal and why these are so cheap. If you want high-quality
hosting then you can go with OVH's main line or the SoYouStart line, but
what's nice with these is you get to take advantage of OVH's nice network and
reliable infrastructure, for really rock-bottom prices. ...I swear I don't
work for them, I just really enjoy this company... they even have a bi-monthly
newsletter which I keep in my bathroom to read about how they deploy their new
DSL infrastructure, or their international fiber backbones!

------
TacticalCoder
I really don't get all the hate directed towards OVH.

I've got two Kimsufi dedicated servers at OVH since years and years and, to
me, it's an amazing service (at a price which apparently nobody can beat).

One of my Kimsufi on which I installed Debian reached an uptime of four years.
Four years of _uptime_. The smallest of the Kimsufi, which is already the
cheaper of the dedicated servers OVH provides. Four years.

A pretty stock Debian, with only SSH and Tomcat and not a single (known) root
exploit forcing me to install a patch that would have required me to reboot
the box. Meanwhile I had two very serious DoS Java bugs requiring me to patch
the JVM / JRE (IIRC the Tomcat version I had could do with just the JRE, no
need for the JDK). One Java exploit was the infinite floating-point parsing
bug and the other the hashmap not being O(1) anymore (the attack consisted in
submitting very long URL with carefully query paramaters).

Now the real funny thing: one day I got an email from OVH saying my server was
down and that it "would not reboot". What happened is that the motherboard
died and they moved my stuff to a new system. But the Debian version on my
Kimsufi was so old that it wouldn't recognize the new motherboard...

That's basically how stable Kimsufi are: they can happily crank up for years
and years and years and years.

Now I'll have to look into it: because I pay 20 EUR / month for mine (VAT not
included) and apparently the new ones at 17 EUR / month are already more
powerful than the ones I have, so I may want to switch to a beefier machine
for a cheaper price.

Also note that during summer time (month of august IIRC), they launched a
Kimsufi at 2.99 or 3.99 EUR / month (don't remember, but several people here
point the number of 2.99). But it got so successful that they had issue and
were forced to remove the offer. And "Octave" tweeted that OVH would come up
with an entirely new offer. I'm glad to see they're now offering Kimsufi at 8
EUR / month.

That's 8 EUR for your own dedicated server. Seems quite a good deal to me.

~~~
codexon
I have a few issues with OVH. In no particular order:

\- In summer 2013, they used their customers as beta testers for their anti-
ddos service. This was mandatory for ALL customers, there was no way to opt
out.

This caused false detections on some of my servers and ended up blocking ALL
dns requests until I uploaded the deb for PDNS (because apt-get wouldn't work
anymore) and configure TCP dns lookups.

\- Multiple times in August and September all servers that detected a DDoS
attack in the past 24 hours became disconnected from the internet or the US
for an entire day.

\- Also in summer 2013, they upgraded their offerings as usual. Their website
said it would come in a week but I waited for over 60 days before I finally
told them to cancel the order. This was for their midrange server.

\- They removed the ability to pay for less than a month because everyone was
extending the rent on their old server until their new ones arrived. This was
very scummy coming from OVH.

\- Later I found out they were complaining about "turnover" even though when I
asked support if I could upgrade my server, they said the only way to do that
is to cancel the old server and get a new one.

\- They removed e-mail support for Kimsufis even though some of them cost more
than their new mid-range line that has it. Now they expect you to use a forum
where responses have gone unanswered and everyone can see details on your
server. They didn't even reduce the price.

\- There have been a few sporadic cases throughout the year where the server
just lost connection to the internet for a minute. Support had nothing to say
about this, but sometimes I could find some related message on travaux.ovh.net
(this page gets more updates than status.ovh.net)

------
tiles
Is it possible to beat 1TB of disk storage space for just € 12.00+VAT ($16.64)
a month? There aren't many backup options out there that you can rsync to and
reach Glacier-like prices.

~~~
blibble
will it be there in a month though?

~~~
nolok
The Kimsufi brand is 8 years old now, and they are part of OVH which is 15
years old and the biggest dedicated hosting company in Europe with over 700
000 clients.

They have more chance to be there tomorrow than most hosts.

------
neverminder
I've used Kimsufi for over a year now. So far no complaints, granted that I'm
not doing much with it. The main point I suppose is that in dedicated server
market there are not a lot of players that can match such prices - in fact I
couldn't even come up with an alternative except Hetzner, but they don't have
the lower range servers like Atom.

~~~
STRiDEX
I'm on Hetzner and servers are as advertised. Purchased from their server
auction and got a very good deal. Some of them are not good deals, you have to
know what you're shopping for. Available to americans after proof of ID, paid
with paypal that converts your US dollars to euro's for you. Beats the pants
off of a digital ocean in price/performance in the above $40 price range.

[https://robot.your-server.de/order/market](https://robot.your-
server.de/order/market)

~~~
codexon
Hetzner is really bad.

If you get a tiny ddos attack for a few seconds, you'll get null routed for 24
hours. Any longer than that and they'll potentially kick you out.

If you've never been ddosed, your really don't have a lot of users. Multi
gigabit attacks are available for the price of a cup of coffee.

[http://hackforums.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=232](http://hackforums.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=232)

~~~
STRiDEX
I've read similar stories, but I figured for the price I'd try it out. I'm
only on month 4 of using them and I don't have any horror stories to share
yet.

Although, I do only have 1k daily users and I sit behind cloudflare.

------
chm
Le nom provient-il de "Ce qui me suffit"?

~~~
asterfr
Yep it does, it's a French company and it's crystal clear for us.

~~~
chm
It was clear to me as well, but I wondered if it was just a cognate/false
friend between French and another language.

------
kijin
Judging from this thread and previous discussions on other sites, the main
problem with Kimsufi seems to be that they're picky about the country where
you come from, and so far it's not easy to tell which countries are allowed.

Last year, everyone outside of EU who ordered the €2.99 deal were canceled
without any mention of the rules. Some non-EU customers were told to order
from their Irish site (kimsufi.ie). But this year, it seems that they merged
all the ccTLDs into a single multilingual website. Anyone have any idea which
countries they allow/deny?

------
electrotype
Last time when their servers were 2,99$ or something I bought 3 and they were
all cancelled without real reason.

Why should I trust them now?

~~~
JoshGlazebrook
That 2.99 euro deal was a disaster for them. Instead of new customers flocking
to them, a large amount of their current customers were cancelling their
existing servers that were more expensive and ordering the cheaper ones. And
if I remember correctly it was in the tens of thousands of order backlog for
that deal.

------
ericd
OVH's US site (ovh.com) is rage inducing. I've never tried this hard to give a
company my money and still been unsuccessful. I'm stuck in some sort of login
loop, where it refuses to accept credentials I just set up, and for my older
account, rather than completing my order, entering credentials on the last
screen of the checkout process boots me to the main landing page.

They've got some perfect matches for server setups I need right now, but if
their checkout process is this bad, I shudder to think how much of my time
dealing with any actual problems with the servers might consume.

------
crypt1d
I switched from Hetzner to these guys few months ago. They are in the same
price range but offer DDOS protection (Hetzner just null-routes you in such
situations), which can be handy. Basically you get what you pay for. Not much
of a customer support, but quite cheap compared to rest of the market. Useful
for playing around or as a development box. The servers are in France (you can
choose from a few datacenters), so good latency towards Europe's visitors. If
anybody wants to tests them let me know, I can give you temporary access to
one of my boxes.

------
adamseabrook
I have used a few of the Kimsufi boxes and had no issues with them. At
meanpath.com we use 40 SoYouStart servers and 5 big OVH servers and have never
had any issues. Excellent support was provided when we did run into problems
with quick hardware swap outs or whole server replacements.

If you want to test out the speed of the network feel free to download some of
our publicly released crawl files on
[http://archive.meanpath.com](http://archive.meanpath.com) which is on a 2gbps
burstable pipe.

------
wusatiuk
I was on kimsufi server for the last 3.5 years for all european projects from
small to medium sized and we never had any problem with one of the servers.
the last few weeks we are switching partly into the cloud and partly on an OVH
Host-32 server.

price-performance ration at Kimsufi is fine from my point of view. I guess
anybody who is ordering a VPS for 8€ / month should know that he will not get
the latest technology in his box, but for the one or another usecase, such
boxes are awesome.

------
ezequiel-garzon
Last time I checked they seemed to have an unlimited bandwidth usage policy,
but this was buried in a forum. Could anybody using the service please answer
this? Thanks!

~~~
valinor4
Mine does. I don't know about the new ones.

------
dlau1
A lot of bad experiences with Kimsufi here. Does this extend across the board
for OVH in general?

Their 'enterprise' dedicated servers look really attractive.

$109,$174 for 64gb,128gb ram with really nice e5-16x0v2s. 2x 240gb intel S3500
ssds for $35 more a month.

[http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-
servers/enterprise/](http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/)

Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?

~~~
mackwic
> A lot of bad experiences with Ovh.

The customer support goes up with the bill. You can't ask the same support for
a 3e/month server and a 100e/month.

> Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?

Yes. Ovh is one of the main Isp actor in Europe at the Wan level. Moreover Ovh
is full ipv6 compliant, unlike hertzner, and bandwidth is totally free without
quota.

Ah, and Ovh building itself their servers, they are the biggest PC
manufacturer in EU. They don't even play on the same field.

------
asterfr
I'm using them, it's descent until now however:

* No phone number nor contact form for any kind of support. * No way to change to change my password (or I didn't find it). And I don't like to be forced to keep those "randomly" generated password. They seem to have reduce everyextra to 0, their lean customer service is way too lean to my taste. Destroying obvious features to make your customer upgrade is bad.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The Ryanair of dedicated servers if you will.

~~~
asterfr
You name it

------
Axsuul
I use Soyoustart, another branch of OVH, and so far no complaints. The 32 GB
memory is a godsend when you need to run 200 unicorn workers.

------
axyjo
Please don't run anything 'at-scale' on these. You get exactly what you pay
for with these desktop-grade processors.

~~~
vomitcuddle
The main advantages over something like a VPS are having a dedicated full-
sized hard drive and being able to run any OS you want on bare metal (they
support remote iso installs via kvm and vnc). If you choose a non-atom
processor you can also run your own virtual machines on these.

~~~
shuzchen
Any reliable VPS offering should support custom kernels -linode, prmgr, and
ec2 do. While it's not "any OS you want", they support any kernel that runs
under Xen, which pretty much opens the door to most distros you'd want to run
a server with. Really, the only thing you're technically locked out of is
Windows.

~~~
Illniyar
ec2 has windows.

~~~
joshstrange
Right but you have to pay extra for Windows instances. I think shuzchen is
saying you can't install windows yourself at the linux box prices (EC2)
whereas with a dedicated box can run whatever you want.

------
fredsanford
More Slashvertising? :/

------
CSDude
But why 100 mbps?

~~~
jauer
a) 100M switchports are insanely cheap

b) It limits the damage you can do when your box gets owned.

b.1) It limits the amount of damage you can do if your business/usage model
assumes more traffic than their business model assumes you'll use.

------
mnml_
online.net is better to be honest

~~~
rguldener
Care to elaborate? In what way are they better?

~~~
itooo
Kimsufi only uses second hand/refurbished desktop hardware, built "in the
garage" and installed in low cost datacenters. Imagine a desktop motherboard
just sitting on a metal sheet in a rack : that's it.

Online.net only uses branded hardware and server hardware (except the 'SC'
product range) : Xeon, ECC, Hardware RAID, ...

I'd say the price/quality ratio is better at Online.net but you just might not
need that higher quality if you are running a personnal blog.

Speaking about the support, OVH has been internationnaly selling for much
longer than Online.net, it's still quite 'fresh' at Online.net.

About the network, OVH's one is wider and it has a datacenter in Canada,
Online.net only has datacenters in France and their network has gone
international last summer with many peerings/transits (they used to rely on a
French ISP before). Online.net servers are all gigabit connected. Both network
are DDoS protected. OVH has a mandatory SMTP filter which has its pros and
cons.

------
notastartup
16gb of ram for $37 CAD? what does the ipv6, 128 mean, 128 ip addresses? what
is this 4c/4t mean?

~~~
emocakes
4core 4thread, /128 block of ipv6 addresses. google pl0x...

