
OVH plans massive cloud expansion - Sami_Lehtinen
http://enterprisetimes.co.uk/2015/09/24/ovh-plans-massive-cloud-expansion/
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buffoon
I've never heard a good story about OVH. I've moved three clients away from
them in the last 2 years after they were crapped upon by OVH. Their support is
terrible and there are constant problems. They're trying but just not there
yet. Moved them to Linode which is absolutely rock solid and enough for their
needs.

However the WORST company I've ever dealt with for support is Amazon AWS which
I was using for backup (S3). My account got locked due to a card expiry
problem. I had updated my card details when I got a new one and their UI
confirmed that the details were updated but nope, they weren't. Eventually
consistent - not! Took over 48 hours to get a support contact.

Host Europe (circa 2005, Beeston) are just in front of them when we rolled up
to extract some dead kit and found that our colo'ed kit was just piled up in
the bottom of a telecoms rack, not a proper server rack. Cables everywhere 2
inches deep. Try getting the bottom HP DL380 G3 (27kg a piece) out of a pile
of 8 DL380s without taking your site down or dinking some other poor sod's
network cables or power trailing everywhere. Four people and piles of O'Reilly
books to act as makeshift jacks. Total fucktards.

~~~
0x4a42
What kind of hosting solutions your clients had picked?

For their lower products OVH's support is pretty terrible. But for their
professional solutions the support is good and reactive, but you need to get a
premium support contract.

It's an option that you have to select when you choose the product and that
the reason why they are able to offer such low costs for naked hosting
solution (like super cheaps dedicated servers).

~~~
buffoon
Dedicated servers. Even for cheap dedicated servers the support was crap.

6 days to change a blown disk for example...

~~~
0x4a42
I know I had the same exact problem for a personnal dedicated server. But as I
said, for business use you absolutly need to pick the option entitled "for a
professional usage" when you pick a server if you want to have a decent tech
support from OVH. And also one need to stick to the enteprises/business
solutions and avoid the starters and gamers servers.

Online.net (the other big french hosting company) has the same problem, you
can get cheap servers but if you don't also susbscribe to a support contract
you are screwed. :-/

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KaiserPro
So for me, they are a "ronseal" provider. (they do exactly as they say)

I use online.net for the [http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-
xc](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc) Its a dedicated
8core machine for £15 a month (including extra IPs)

What you don't get is fancy hand holding. So if you're not comfortable
provisioning machines, they are not for you.

However if you are able to run real steel, then this is the shop for you.
Faster and cheaper than amazon, but no real s3 offering.

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vruiz
What's your opinion on their network? Back in the day they had poor
interconnectivity reputation. Do you have any experience about responsiveness
to hardware problems?

~~~
KaiserPro
My sample size is limited, however I've not had an issue. I'm getting >
100megs. latency isn't bad either. 9-10ms between paris and the Midlands in
britian, and 6ms to amsterdam

I think it depends on your offering, I understand that different parts of the
company (online.net appears to be a subsidiary of OVH) have different specs.

They do have a rather sexy graph though:

[https://status.online.net/weathermap/](https://status.online.net/weathermap/)

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ju-st
online.net is the biggest competitor of OVH!

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0x4a42
Well, just in France. :)

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corobo
You can't tease like that without supplying said competitors! Are we just
talking Hetzner or are there others I don't know of in the budget dedi market?

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digiwth
OVH is one of those companies that are great.... if you never have an issue
with their service. Had a ticket open for over a month now (routing issue) and
they continually deflect and blame everyone but themselves (even though you
can see the problem on their network weather map).

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scrollaway
I have no love for OVH. When I asked them, quite a while ago (couple years
now?), to delete an old and unused account of mine they dragged me in tickets
and calls for over a week, until they finally asked me to send them a written
letter to their offices in France, asking for the deletion of the account.
They flat out refused to close down an account that hadn't been used in years
unless provided with that...

Two months later, massive OVH breach. Grrr.

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bhouston
I have dealt with them a fair bit and they have been responsive and reliable.
Then again I give them money, rather than just having an empty account.

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mahouse
Not my case. They are usually slow when resolving issues, and downtime and
restarts without a reason are common (I use a VPS)

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
They have different VPS tiers with different service levels and guarantees.
With higher tiers they're pretty quick to deal with issues.

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perlgeek
> new data centres will all be self funded by the company who has said that it
> will be able to pay for these though its current cash on hand and current
> revenues.

If they really don't take any loans to build 12 data centers at once, that's
really impressive. Or does that only mean "without taking investments"?

Let's say it takes 40M USD to build and stock a data center, built over the
course of 3 years, that would be an extra drain of 120M USD per year.

Of course there is huge variabilty here: if they don't start from the green
field, but buy/rent/lease existing buildings, they can go to market much
faster. And it all depends on the size of the new centers, which hardware they
stock it with etc.

UPDATE: Just found [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-
pa...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-part-2/)
which claims that some Google data centers cost USD 600M each, so it seems
there's not much of an upper limit, and/or my estimates were hopelessly low.

~~~
darkr
40M might cover capex & rent on a reasonably sized imprint in an existing DC
for three years (say 100 racks/2000 servers)

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throwaway41597
I think it's good news as OVH is very competitive with its pricing. With 12
addtional datacenters, I hope they can deflate the prices outside their
current markets. Last time I looked, South America and Asia were like an order
of magnitude more expensive.

I worried they'd try to spend all their money on distractions, like an AWS
competitor, an ISP in France, a conference, a magazine with a headshot of the
founder, ..., which they're all still doing. Now I can hope most of the money
is used for scaling the good part.

They really have issues with product bloat, always adding new stuff, never
cleaning things up. For instance, their previous admin web UI lasted for like
a decade. It was full of icons for obscure features (but icons are so user-
friendly, you know) and hyperlinks were javascript-activated because DHTML was
all the rage back then. The new UI is better but already suffering from the
dozens of things it has to support to reach parity with the previous feature
set.

They seem to be pretty good with building datacenters and getting
peering/transit deals, not so much with software. I hope they realize it.

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proactivesvcs
Will they plan any expansion of their abuse department, alongside?

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mahouse
I hope not. ;P

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andelica
I have most of their CIDRs blocked due to years of spam and phishing emails
from them. They need to clean up their act first.

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z3t4
Is it just me or is there very high margins in the hosting business"?

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based2
[https://www.ovhtelecom.fr/overthebox/](https://www.ovhtelecom.fr/overthebox/)

