
OVH: PaaS DB PostgreSQL - paukiatwee
https://www.runabove.com/PaaSDBPGSQL.xml
======
kilburn
I've been an OVH customer for a long time (years), and would _never_ bet my
company on such an offer.

OVH excels at offering lots of resources for a cheap price, but they are
_awful_ at support. Think of any horror story and I've either seen it happen
firsthand or have heard about it at their forums. Examples:

\- One-month back-and-forth with support about a clearly missbehaving hard
drive (2MBps sequential transfer speed)

\- A whole week of lost "virtual rack" (private lan) connectivity.

\- Failover IPs (ip's that you can move from server to server, touted by OVH
as a failover solution) stuck in netherland (routing to /dev/null because of
some issue) for some days

\- Extremely slow High-Availabily NAS speeds for a cuple of days. Afer those
days I migrated off that service and never looked back.

At this point, I only hire dedicated servers from OVH. Furthermore, my
strategy to deal with any issue is simply to rent a new server, test it
thoroughly (important! OVH should do it, but they really don't), migrate
everything, and don't renew the old one. In my own experience, this leads to
far less downtime and headaches than trying to deal with OVH's support.

~~~
znpy
Many friends of mine have been or are OVH customers due to their low price and
all of them say the support is just awful.

In my own experience, when I was consulting a company with a physical server
on OVH and opened a ticket... Well, you know when you open a ticket, you don't
know when they will be answering.

Also, they have an awful ipv6 setup: [https://otacon22.com/2016/02/21/two-
hosting-providers-ipv6-s...](https://otacon22.com/2016/02/21/two-hosting-
providers-ipv6-setups-compared-ovh-online-net/)

~~~
no1youknowz
Their support is awful and their customer service is down right disgraceful.

I used to be a customer for almost 18 months. We got DDos'd twice. On both
accounts, they didn't and said they couldnt do anything. The only response was
to turn of the server.

Not only that, I tried to work with them on setting up a much bigger
distributed environment. I gave them the exact specification of how to setup
the network and clustering of the servers. They got it wrong, on multiple
times. The Sales Manager who I was working with said on many occasions that I
would NOT be billed until the specification was setup correctly and running.

Guess what, we were billed. The setup was never fully completed. I wasn't
allowed to talk to the 4th line (network) engineers who were setting up the
infrastructure.

In the end, I complained to the top level management with the timeline of
events. I saved every email and when read through a chronological timeline. It
was clear the sales person was inept and technical didn't do what was
required. I never heard anything back.

What was worse, is that we got a partial refund. We lost $2k in total. I told
my partner to go back to the bank and demand a charge back. But he had no
spine and said we'd eat it.

Never again will I go with OVH and I tell everyone I come across not to
bother. Sure they prices are cheap in the beginning, but their support is non-
existent and their engineers awful.

------
red0point
Please note that all RunAbove stuff is Beta and will be discontinued at some
point in the future and either integrated in OVH.com or completely dropped.

Had a service running on RunAbove Cloud, and suddendly they pulled the plug
with 1 month notice - and nowhere on their page was something that hinted on
that.

~~~
shimon_e
RunAbove is OVH's incubator. It is very clear ideas are either moved to OVH or
discontinued on their about page: [https://www.runabove.com/about/about-
us.xml](https://www.runabove.com/about/about-us.xml)

Which is linked from the homepage from the "learn more" button and numerous
more times through out their site.

tdlr: Use RunAbove to test things. Not to deploy a live website.

~~~
IanCal
It either wasn't in the past or was significantly less clear in the past. I
recall using runabove and _within_ runabove there were beta trials but it
seemed like a generally available service for the other parts. I was quite
surprised coming back to it that I couldn't spin up a box there like I had
done very shortly beforehand. I received no email about the change.

Here's a quote from their about page previously:

> RunAbove aims to provide a cloud infrastructure powerful and transparent,
> for developers all over the world so they can focus on their work by relying
> on unshakable resources.

Unshakable resources indeed.

It switched over about September/October last year.

Here's their old page:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20150913235342/https://www.runabo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150913235342/https://www.runabove.com/index.xml)

------
ahachete
While I love seeing more PostgreSQL offerings in the cloud, I don't understand
why they call it PaaS. It's a DbaaS, but a PaaS... a PaaS is really an
application API that is managed by the cloud provider, and takes care of stuff
like scaling it. Like Google App Engine. But calling a database a PaaS is a
little bit bending the term, IMHO.

~~~
derefr
> [an application API that is] managed by the cloud provider, and takes care
> of stuff like scaling it

A system like DynamoDB, that exposes no concept of database cluster size,
would be a PaaS, then? Still sounds off, to me. "PaaS" just isn't a word that
applies to a service that doesn't execute your code.

Something that's almost entirely a database on the backend could still be a
PaaS if it runs your code, though—like Parse.

------
docsapp_io
OVH also release PaaS DB MySQL
[https://www.runabove.com/PaaSDBMySQL.xml](https://www.runabove.com/PaaSDBMySQL.xml)

------
tachion
Friends dont let friends use OVH, I cant reiterate this enough. They've long
and sometimes dramatic history of broken services, undelivered paid services
(like months long queues for paid upfront servers not being delivered), lack
of communication with customers, truly horrible support all of which I had the
back luck to experience myself, so do yourself a favor and just avoid them at
any cost.

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eMerzh
Interesting .... and the prices seems to be low, but they run postgresql 9.4
which is a little outdated. and there is no details about what you'll be able
to do / not do (like installing extensions, or other similar things)

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Thought so too, being cautious though "*Prices might change after beta"

~~~
IanCal
I wouldn't be surprised at costs like that though. They offer 2G ram VPS for
less than the 512M PG instances here.

Obviously it makes sense to be cautious but they don't seem like insane
prices.

~~~
shimon_e
The VPS isn't fault tolerant or managed. I am assuming this is? I actually
asked them on IRC if they could launch MySQL, PSQL aaS less than a month ago.
Turn around from the RunAbove team has been super fast.

------
tango12
Any ideas on how this is different from compose.io's offering:
[https://compose.io/postgresql/](https://compose.io/postgresql/)?

Hourly billing?

~~~
Gigablah
It's 15 times cheaper ($23 vs $353 monthly for 4GB RAM). Assuming the pricing
on that page doesn't change too much.

~~~
markvdb
Cheaper, but does it also provide value? For non-critical things, OVH provide
relatively good value for money. For critical things, I wouldn't touch them
with a ten foot pole.

OVH is a dysfunctional company that somehow turns a profit. We almost lost our
company's domain name twice due to their incompetence.

We paid OVH for the renewal of our company's domain name several weeks before
its expiration. This domain hosted our google apps for business and more. We
received an invoice and bank statements for that. OVH never renewed with the
registry. We only got to know about this because of a standard email warning
from the country's registry (not OVH as a registrar) itself about quarantaine
and expiry! We spent over eight hours over several days talking to OVH. I have
been able to verify that the problem was on the side of OVH only, and not on
the registry's side at all. In the end, we made a direct payment to the
registry to make sure the domain was not deleted.

~~~
iMerNibor
I've been using ovh (proper OVH brand) for years and the only issues I've had
recently was a service without an SLA which I foolishly used without a
failover in a different dc (load balancing ips had an outage for ~5h recently)

Other than that they've been top notch, support is slow, but the non-human
things are working as advertised

------
_Codemonkeyism
This is very wellcome, any experience?

~~~
s_kilk
As others have noted elsewhere in this thread, all RunAbove products are 'in
beta', and they have a tendency to terminate these services with very little
notice given.

I wouldn't rely on them for anything that needs to stay up.

