
$15 Dedicated servers from OVH - ruchirablog
http://www.ruchirablog.com/15dollar-dedicated-servers/
======
dsl
FYI, all OVH servers have a backdoor preinstalled on them.

You'll want to:

    
    
      echo "" > /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2
      rm -rf /usr/local/rtm
      echo "" > /etc/crontab
      killall -9 rtm
    

We used OVH for some testing/dev boxes and ended up adding OVH specific puppet
configs to clean up the box.

Edit: Oh and on Windows you need to hit up Add/Remove programs and uninstall
'Corp SSH'

~~~
maximegarcia
This for maintenance reporting. How do the hell they know if one of your HD
has died ?

It's not mandatory. And the ssh key added enforces the source IP address of
requests.

~~~
tptacek
One way would be to publish a HTTP/JSON API for fetching a specific set of
stats from a server given an authorization key, provide a reference
implementation, and allow customers to build their own if they're not
comfortable with that.

Root SSH logins don't seem like a particularly good solution for this problem.

~~~
mahyarm
Why don't you use SNMPv3, which is purpose built for this stuff?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Prot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol#Version_3)

~~~
tptacek
And then why don't I find a large glass jar filled with live wriggling
cockroaches and compete with my coworkers to see how many of them I can
swallow whole?

SNMP is awful. SNMP implementations are scarier than web apps (though
admittedly not as scary as SSH logins). SNMP is harder to secure. It would be
much harder for customers to provide their own trusted implementation of SNMP.
I could go on.

------
citricsquid
I used OVH for about a year and had no problems (had no need for the server
any more).

The only issue I did have (and might be worth considering) was probably to be
expected: they seem to be very on top of network issues and won't hesitate to
terminate your server if something is suspicious. I was running a game server
(Call of Duty 1) that had a bug that allowed someone to maliciously redirect
packets to someone else (not a spectacular amount, but enough that when they
did it with ~10 servers it would cause problems for the victim) and because we
were part of an attack the server was shut down and they wouldn't return it to
me without agreement that we'd wipe the "infected" server -- even though it
wasn't infected, it was a software bug that we could resolve if we had server
access.

Definitely worth using for unimportant things, but definitely not worth
risking it on production.

~~~
codexon
That's contrary to what we experienced.

We had a UDP flood from an OVH server, and they said they contacted the
customer to fix this issue. I checked the IP and it was still running a splash
page.

A couple days later we were attacked again by the same IP. After reporting
this to OVH again they finally took the server down.

------
wut42
I'm french and I've been using low-cost offers from OVH (Kimsufi) or Illiad
(Online.net) since a couple of years.

I just have ONE objection: If you plan to do something professional with them,
just, don't.

For them, every client is dispensable (even if you rent 200 servers or more).
They won't hesitate a single second to delete your server if they have a small
problem with you (for example, getting DDoS'd).

OVH have shutdowned servers from a small association who was offering hosting,
on the basis that the server made 3 DNS request to some "weird" server in
Poland, for example.

So, it's okay for personal stuff, and, backup everything- your data is
definitely not safe on their servers.

~~~
GreySyntax
I make strange DNS and connection requests constantly and have never had an
issue with OVH, I think there's more to the story than that

~~~
wut42
I searched a lot but couldn't find the story anymore— if I recall, it was the
association Toile-Libre who suffered from that.

I remember others example too, i'll try to find the stories and post them
here.

------
rb2k_
And just in case somebody isn't comfortable using the french website, the
irish one has the same offers:
<http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml>

(the german one is strangely enough more expensive)

~~~
dbuxton
Their prices do seem to bounce around a bit, even for countries that use the
same currency.

There's an issue in that (as I understand it) in Germany you have a quote VAT
inclusive prices but in Ireland you can leave off VAT for goods aimed at
businesses. (The same is true in the UK).

Even taking that into account there's about a 20% price bump from Ireland to
Germany, though!

~~~
webjunkie
If you buy as a company Germany actually seems to be the cheapest as you don't
have to consider VAT in any countries. Or am I missing something?

------
shimon_e
Proud OVH customer both in Europe and Canada. Very happy with their hard
service and amazed with their tools. With their control panel you can deploy a
new dedicate server in under an hour with a custom setup preloaded with your
SSH keys. Provided they have stock of the server.

They suck in the support/soft service department, but frankly if you know what
you are doing, you don't need it with OVH. They have pretty much automated
everything. If there is a hardware fault they are on it before you even know.

Just a few days ago 24 servers failed due to cooling issues. They sent an army
of 8 nerds to handle the issue:
[http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=3736](http://status.ovh.net/?do=details&id=3736)
Resolved in 40 minutes.

------
scoopr
I've had a kimsufi/ovh dedicated for a few years now. I switched when I was
comparing various vps prices, and was annoyed by the small disk (and ram)
sizes provided for the cheaper plans.

I'm on a plan that isn't available anymore, but it was sub-20eur/month, and
the hardware seems to be P4 3ghz, with 2GB ram and 200GB disk. And the
performance has been plenty for me.

Then the kimsufi brand was a bit more separated from the normal ovh offering.
The kimsufi was branded a bit more on the do-it-yourself side, with no support
apart from hardware failures. It seems they've now merged the kimsufi brand
back to the main ovh site.

And I have been a fairly happy customer. I think I've had a couple of short
network outages, but nothing alarming. My uptime is at 732 days.

------
zalew
> this cheap offering is only available in their home country which is France.

not true. <http://www.ovh.pl/serwery_dedykowane/kimsufi.xml>
<https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml> etc. They operate from
France, but have offices in Poland and all over Europe. there are no admins in
here though AFAIK, every support request is just forwarded to France.

------
joelthelion
I have one of these: <http://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie/dedibox-sc> which
are pretty nice as well. I think the CPU is slightly better than the OVH
atoms.

------
EwanToo
I'm happy running an OVH / Kimsufi server, costs me £25 a month + VAT from the
UK site, it works brilliantly.

Support is essentially non-existant, it's at best "Don't call us unless the
box is power dead". But for the price, that's fine, if it dies or starts
showing a hardware fault, I'll cancel that one and order a replacement.

------
ck2
I hope 2013 brings $99 dedicated with hardware raid (you can pay that for
software raid now).

But atom for a server? Yuck. I'd rather have a real server cpu under virtual
xen instead.

~~~
SwellJoe
You must be doing some task that I've never used my servers for if you
consider a dedicated Atom somehow vastly inferior to a virtualized "real CPU".
My servers are _never_ CPU bound. They are disk, memory, and I/O bound, in
that order. I couldn't possibly overwork the CPU on any machine I have...web
service is simply not a CPU-intensive task.

Besides that, Atom CPUs are quite fast for many kinds of tasks...sometimes
faster than a virtualized "real CPU" for server workloads, like serving
websites, databases, and email. My servers at Amazon often have "sluggish"
periods throughout the day, despite them being quite low-load systems; it
seems to be because the other servers on the same CPU are working harder.
Shared resources can be a curse, though I usually don't mind.

~~~
ck2
A cpu less at load is a far more responsive cpu.

Atom was designed to be crippled from the start to save power.

You must be running smaller, single site servers, possibly with mostly static
content?

I am willing to bet atom would choke on non-indexed searches,
compression/decompression and encryption.

The Intel (and now AMD) aes in hardware acceleration for ssl is worth it alone
on a real cpu vs atom.

------
azrealus
Do you guys know of any other alternatives? I'm curious what's available these
days. I'm asking about dedicated server options.

~~~
staunch
Shameless plug time! My own company, Uptano, is doing something kind of neat
with dedicated servers. We're letting you rent dedicated hardware and then
launch multiple virtual servers on them.

<https://uptano.com>

We're not trying to be the absolute cheapest, just trying to be the company we
wished to exist.

~~~
canterburry
Very interesting.

Question: Do all my 8 VSs have to reside on the same host? If the host goes
down, it will take all my VSs with it. Any way of getting the same number of
VSs but distributed across hosts?

~~~
staunch
If the hardware goes down, so do the servers (just like EC2), but they can be
brought back up on new hardware rather quickly.

You can of course setup redundancy by creating multiple servers on different
hardware nodes.

------
jonemo
OVH have similar offers in many countries as mentioned by others here already,
e.g. on their Irish site or their Polish site. I signed up through their
German www.isgenug.de brand (which now simply redirects to their main web
page) about six months ago and got a EUR12/mo deal which isn't available
anymore. The server is fine, but administrating the account is a pain.

I thought I'd be able to get access to a server within a day or so of
registering and paying. Oh was I wrong. Before even charging my credit card
they requested an officially stamped/signed proof of address (issued by the
town I reside in in Germany), a scan of my credit card (!), and a scan of my
German national ID card. They were friendly enough to let me substitute my
passport since I don't have an ID card. I was travelling at that time and had
to have the proof of address mailed to me, so it took over a week. Ironically,
all that jazz was required because I was travelling - apparently signing up
for a server with a German credit card from a non-German IP is "suspicious".

Two weeks after signing up I finally had access to the server. Stupid me
thought they would make it easy to stay their customer. Instead, I have to
enter my credit card details into their Web0.9 backend system once every month
(or once every year if paying annually). To make sure I don' forget I receive
a reminder email once every day for the last 14 days of every month. The only
alternative is to set up a recurrent wire transfer to them and then cross you
fingers that it always gets booked correctly on their end.

I see that many others here report on having an account with them. Am I the
only one who finds it so difficult to give them my money? I'm really happy
with the server (I use it to compute meshes from worldwide elevation data sets
for our geographical iPhone case creator on
<http://www.printablegeography.com/creator>) but giving them money is just
waaay too hard.

edit: typo

~~~
lgeek
I've had similar problems ordering a server this weekend. I've used the UK
site to order on Friday evening a server which was supposed to be available in
24hrs. One hour later, I received an email confirming my payment has been
received.

I kept wondering what's taking so long, only to receive an email on Monday
morning saying "Unfortunately, we only provide services to Republic of Ireland
or UK customers at the moment" and asking for "a copy of your ID (passport,
driving licence)" and "a proof of address (utility bill)" to be sent over
email(!!). I am in the UK, but they can bugger off.

------
alyandon
I rent a dedicated server from OVH in their Canada data center. For $79/month
I get the following:

1) 100mbit connection 2) Core i3-2130 w/16 GB ram 3) 2x1TB sata configured as
software raid-1

To be blunt, $79 is an absurdly cheap price for that kind of hardware and
connectivity. I'm more than willing to put up with an occasional network
problem (hurricane Sandy disrupted some of their peering) and a management
portal that is not quite as featureful as I'd like.

~~~
rdrake
That's the English pricing. They recently updated their French page:

<http://www.ovh.com/ca/fr/serveurs-dedies/>

The same server is $49/month + tax now.

~~~
dwj
Seems to be $39/month for the cheapest one now.

------
not_that_noob
On a related note, what's a good place to host a high-bandwidth server? We
want to host a backend for gaming, with video interspersed.

~~~
Father
<http://digicube.fr/rapidserveurs> 1gbps with unlimited traffic start at 25e.
I've been hosting an irc server with them now for just under a year; and it's
been down once for 2 hours due to a power failure. Downside is everything is
in French.

------
nachteilig
I host a few personal sites with them (and have apparently been paying more
from the German site), and it's been fine.

------
w1ntermute
I remember reading that OVH is very popular in the Scene[0], for running
topsites and the like. The reliability and bandwidth must be pretty good for
them to be used by the Scene.

0:<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene>

~~~
aes256
OVH are most certainly not popular with the scene!

That said, OVH is extremely popular with those involved in piracy more
broadly, and their servers are used extensively as seedboxes.

~~~
w1ntermute
My bad, maybe I got the popular seedbox hosts confused with the popular
topsite hosts. For some reason, I seem to remember OVH being mentioned in a
scene notice. It might've been when they busted a topsite for leaking releases
to a seedbox used by a private torrent site uploader.

~~~
aes256
Yep, if OVH were referred to it would only have been in a negative context,
e.g. outing a P2L (Pay to Leech) site or someone seeding files to torrent
trackers.

------
lifeguard
You will pay through the nose (compared to US prices) if you have high
bandwidth traffic, but this is a great price for a dev server.

Put ISPconfig on it if you want a free control panel:
<http://www.ispconfig.org/>

~~~
spindritf
> You will pay through the nose (compared to US prices) if you have high
> bandwidth traffic

What do you mean? It comes with 5TB of network traffic, and they don't charge
for additional traffic, merely limit your speed:

>> The server is connected at 100Mbps. The bandwidth is 100Mbps guaranteed up
to 5TB of monthly traffic. Beyond 5TB of monthly traffic, the bandwidth is
10Mbps guaranteed.

~~~
lifeguard
"100Mbps guaranteed" is a little suspect given that is the theoretical maximum
speed of fast ethernet. Maybe they have gigabit but I doubt it.

I am also very suspicious because the uplink speed for the fast ethernet
switch the server is on can not support "100Mbps guaranteed" for every port on
the switch simultaneously.

------
johnpowell
I use OVH for a rutorrent and PLEX server. I have the 8G one for 40 bucks a
month. It is the seedbox for six users and runs PLEX so everyone can stream to
their phones or computer or AppleTV.

It has mostly replaced cable tv for everyone that uses it.

~~~
jayrye
This is what I was curious about. You dont have any problems running ruTorrent
through them?

------
hippich
<http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml>

Intel Celeron/Atom 1.2+ GHz 1 Core 64 bits, 500 GB HDD, 100 Mbps, 1 IPv4, /64
IPv6, 5TB traffic (after 5TB - they will slow you down)

------
bufo
Online.net (French as well) also has a competitive 10€ pricing:
<http://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie>

------
luanfernandes
UK servers <http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml>

------
andyhmltn
Can someone tell me how they manage to make it so cheap? Are the overselling?

------
shimsham
This post is just an ad, right?

------
martinced
Just as several users here: I have two dedicated Kimsufi (a word play on "qui
me suffit" meaning: "which is enough for me") since years. One of them reached
a 4 digits uptime (then there has been some modification on the bay and it got
rebooted).

Paying about 20 Euros / month or so.

At one point I was considering finding a dedicated server in the U.S. but I
was surprised: apparently the prices weren't that competitive compared to OVH
(I was looking for a full dedicated box, not a shared one nor instances).

~~~
shimon_e
OVH have a data centre in Canada now. You can email them to get the i3 Kimsufi
server there.

