
Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway - nik736
https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-comparison-2017/
======
trelliscoded
I've been messing around with Scaleway lately and found out a few interesting
things.

Scaleway is part of the Iliad family of companies, which you probably haven't
heard about if you're outside of Europe. This includes Online, a networking
provider and Scaleway's parent, and Free, which is a huge French ISP with a
fairly hackery internal culture.

Online makes their network map public:

[http://map.online.net/](http://map.online.net/)

Based on the names, it looks like it's 100% Cisco with a mix of Nexus 9000s,
Catalyst 4500e edge, and 4900 ToR switches.

Scaleway is one of the only cloud providers I've seen that is using NBASE-T
technology. The Intel Avoton SoCs used by their C2 instances support 2.5Gbps
link speeds using an appropriate external PHY.

Their C1 instances are Marvell Armada 370 XP parts, datasheet here:

[http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-
xp/assets/...](http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-
xp/assets/ARMADA-XP-Functional-SpecDatasheet.pdf)

These are using 1 gig connections. The instances I've spun up connect to a
gateway with a Cisco MAC address.

The C2 instances connect to gateways with MAC addresses registered to Freebox
SAS. Figuring this out took some digging. It turns out that Scaleway/Online is
_manufacturing their own 2.5G capable switches_. Because Free, the ISP,
already has an OUI registered and was the only company in the conglomerate
which made hardware, it looks like Online had Free make some custom switches
to deploy in their datacenters.

They're also making their own BIOS for the C2 instances. dmidecode reports the
following cutesy BIOS data:

Manufacturer: Online Labs Product Name: SR Version: (^_^) Serial Number: 42

The root devices for C1 and C2 instances are both NBD. Performance was better
than I expected; I get wire rate I/O throughput on both (>90MB/sec on C1 and
>250MB/sec on C2). Of course, the disk bandwidth is shared with the Internet
connection on both instances, so there might be contention for some
applications.

~~~
cknight
I didn't know Online was related to Free! I used their insanely cheap €2-per-
month mobile plan when I lived in France for 6 months last year. Amazing
value, they seem very popular for DSL too (though I didn't use that). Back in
Germany now everything seems so damn expensive. The internet, the mobile
plans, the electricity...

Anyway, thanks for doing this digging, it's interesting. Scaleway has its
shortcomings but I find it to be one big fascinating experiment.

------
tombrossman
After seeing positive Scaleway mentions here on HN several times I opened an
account to test performance. Damn it was slow, and I had set my expectations
very low.

I can understand for a site that didn't need CPU-heavy performance (I intended
to use it for a personal Nextcloud instance) but my main issue was with reboot
time. Change any settings in the control panel? Reboot needed. Applied kernel
updates and need to restart? Wait for that reboot. It was agonizing, I had to
abandon the process and check back an hour later to see if starting or
stopping the machine had completed.

Even when I decided I was done and ready to cancel, one more wait of 40+
minutes for the machine to shut down so I could delete it and release the
reserved IP. I admire the fact that they decided to try something very
different, but forcing every customer to copy the entire contents of their
drive to a second device and then copy it all back again to restart is nuts.

Currently on OVH for most things (by far the best performance/price ratio for
my usage) but still keeping a couple DigitalOcean VPSs due to concerns about
OVH's 'special' version of Ubuntu[0], which has me concerned. Hope that's
resolved soon or I'm back to DO + AWS as a Plan B.

[0][https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/12/01/taking-a-stand-
agains...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/12/01/taking-a-stand-against-
unstable-risky-unofficial-ubuntu-images/)

~~~
m_sahaf
I didn't even get that far with Scaleway. Their lack of two-factor
authentication is a major turn-off.

------
jaequery
All these benchmarks seems to fail in the regards that whenever they spin up a
VM, the performance will vary hugely depending on the host machine's hardware
and capacity. If they want to do it right, they need to spin up atleast 100's
of them by regions, at every single hour, and then maybe, just maybe, you can
get some kind of an accurate measurement.

------
simplehuman
I love DO but they deleted all my backups and servers because of a billing
problem with just 15 day notice. Ever since I make sure to do backups outside
DO.

~~~
developer2
"Just" 15 day notice? Really? 15 days is quite generous for a delinquent who
is getting free service because they can't manage to pay a bill on time.

~~~
simplehuman
I was a paying customer for 2 years. I was gone on a vacation where my cc was
stolen and I canceled the card. When I came back, my server and backups are
gone. I understand if I was a new customer but I was using the service for 2
years. Fine, kill the server but why delete the backups for which I pay 5 USD
a month extra?

------
sfilargi
I am a big fun of DO. Their performance is consistent and their support is
simply awesome.

However I do find myself using Linode lately as I get double the memory for
the same price. I hope DO follow and increase the memory on their nodes.

~~~
tedivm
I sent them a message saying exactly that- I've moved all my machines to
linode because the price for the speed (both memory and cpu) is much better.
They responded back saying that they are competing on platform, not price.

~~~
Hexcles
> competing on platform, not price

I believe it'd be more appropriate for Linode to say that, which has long had
good reputation in terms of the variety of regions, the quality of network,
etc., and which used to be on the more expensive end. DO, on the other hand,
actually debuted with the low prices, if anyone remembers.

~~~
braveo
I would jump away from Linode in a heartbeat if I found something comparable.

The article mentioned dataloss with Linode... I experienced the same problem.
Well, technically the data was there, but there was a corruption problem and
the disk was being mounted read-only. Their default settings for ext4 in their
arch linux offerings was not 'data=journaled', and it should have been.

Well... I say it should have been, but I found out why it wasn't their default
when I went to rebuild that VPS. Apparently something in their infrastructure
doesn't work well with ext4 journaling because everytime I tried to set it to
journaled (so I could avoid a repeat of the corrupted disk issue...) it would
reboot lmounted as readonly and there was no way to fix the issue except to
rebuild.

When I contacted them about it, they told me it was a "known issue" that would
be fixed in the next 3-6 months.

That was the SECOND issue I found with them, the first is that doing a 'pacman
-Syu' on a completely fresh install would hose the install... again, something
to do with their infrastructure not working well with arch linux.

It took me days of fidding around and learning what I could, and could not do,
before I was able to successfully rebuild that VPS.

I would absolutely love to find another VPS provider that offered arch linux
with comparable performance.

------
debian3
"What we really miss for all of those providers is some kind of transit map
per location, where we can see what transit providers are connected in each
location."

For OVH [http://weathermap.ovh.net](http://weathermap.ovh.net)

~~~
nik736
Ahh, great, now that I see it I think Online.net has something similar.

~~~
basvdwollenberg
Yea they do: [http://netmap.online.net](http://netmap.online.net) (link for
anyone else looking for it).

------
ranit
Off-topic. What's up with Frankfurt? 3 of 5 cloud companies compared here have
Frankfurt listed as their European data center location.

~~~
detaro
Location of DE-CIX, primary european internet exchange (according to
themselves the one with the largest throughput worldwide, but AFAIK that's
disputed)

~~~
ranit
Thanks. This explains.

~~~
darkhorn
And why european primary internet exchange point is here? Because this city is
an international financial center
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798598)
I've been there. Men and women in suits leaving work at 8 pm. Heartquaters of
some big German banks etc. International buisness center.

------
fermigier
I'm glad someone included the two leading French hosting providers in their
benchmark. I have ~10 servers hosted by both OVH and Online (not Scaleway yet)
and I believe they do a very correct job for a terrific price.

BTW: both have more expensive offerings if you need strongers SLAs. What I
don't like with OVH's offering is that they have 3 different brands (OVH, SYS
and KS) and you need 3 different accounts, control panels, and even invoicing
is not consistent over the three brands (which means more work when doing my
accounting every month...).

~~~
ar0
I will second this. I have two of these very cheap VPSes from OVH mentioned in
the article, one in France and one in Québec, and in my experience they have
been very reliable and have good performance for their price. In my
experience, for "hobbyist" use cases having more RAM is more important than
having a 1 Gbps connection - most of the time your stuff will not be that
popular to the outside world, but you might want to experiment with different
tools which will explode if you only have 512 MB of RAM (as Vultr offers on
their new 2.50$ plan).

I will also second the comment on the confusing offerings of OVH, though.
Their three brands are one thing, the other thing is that even their main OVH
website looks totally different (with different products being offered)
depending on which country you select on the top right. I have the feeling
they are working on this right now (their different country websites are
beginning to look more and more similar), but it can be really confusing.
Also, chances are high that you will end up in some French configuration menu
eventually. (I can understand that they will find this a bit unfair, as all
the other players of course can just develop their websites in their native
language and don't have to worry about this. But still it's not that
professional.)

On the other hand, for a German test I find it interesting that they didn't
include netcup, which also offers very cheap and high-quality VPSes from
Germany (although they suffer from the same confusion regarding their websites
- when you switch to English the products are different and for some reason
much more expensive than on the German version).

And then, of course, there is also time4vps.eu if you want to go really cheap.

~~~
nik736
For us the requirement is hourly billing and being able to get a working
machine within a minute, so no Netcup :). Also, only the network test was
performed mainly in Frankfurt. All other tests were Frankfurt, Strasbourg,
Haarlem (Location 1) and New York, NJ, NJ, Canada, Paris (Location 2)

~~~
ar0
Ah, okay, I overlooked the "spin up a new virtual machine within seconds" in
the article, sorry for that, and the requirement of multiple locations makes
sense too! That way the choice of providers makes much more sense to me (as it
also excludes Hetzner, for example).

~~~
mark_lee
hetzner is a badass predator, competitors murder.

------
nodesocket
The article is very detailed and does a great job, but they don't mention
DigitalOcean load balances.

Load balancers are a must have infrastructure puzzle piece these days. DO did
a fantastic job on their lb offering and for $20 a month they are quite
powerful (http and tcp) with configurable health checks and failover.

~~~
emilyfm
I've been using a Linode load balancer for three years now (it's also $20/mo),
in front of a bunch of vps's.

Allows me to have zero-downtime upgrades by switching servers out of the
rotation, and also not be concerned if individual servers die or are rebooted
(which is very rare anyway).

------
andrewaylett
My browser tells me it won't connect to this server:
NS_ERROR_NET_INADEQUATE_SECURITY

Qualys gives the site an A, but says of some browsers: "Server negotiated
HTTP/2 with blacklisted suite" so I imagine this is the cause of the problems?

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.webstack....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.webstack.de)

Edit: This was with FF48 on Linux. Restarted Firefox to get v49 and it's
working now.

~~~
nik736
Someone on Reddit reported the same, I am not really sure what causes it,
since it looks good on my end (server), maybe an issue with Firefox itself?

~~~
captn3m0
This thread on Qualys forums might be helpful:
[https://community.qualys.com/thread/16055](https://community.qualys.com/thread/16055)

~~~
nik736
Thanks, will look into it :)

------
beerbaron23
I live right near OVH in Quebec, most of the data center was retro-fitted
inside an abandoned factory. It's also apparently the biggest data center in
the world and features it's own hydro-electricity station (although I'm not
sure if that still holds true). Amazon AWS is moving in there too. They have a
little youtube clip of the project!

[https://youtu.be/f4NgsUiCJ8c](https://youtu.be/f4NgsUiCJ8c)

------
debian3
"They have had huge problems with their regular cloud instances though (not
the local storage ones), they are based on Ceph and were from time to time
unuseable. Also it's sometimes a gamble if the system creates your machine or
if it will get stucked, we also had the problem that we couldn't delete
instances, they somehow where stuck. Their whole system is based on OpenStack
and it seems they have problems managing it (who doesn't)."

I'm curious to learn more about this. I'm currently using OVH public Cloud,
and before doing so I was trying to find some review about it. I must say that
so far I have no issue with it, but I have been using it for 2 weeks only.

When you say unusable, do you mean it was down or simply too slow? I read a
lot of complain about the speed of the storage, but nothing about the
stability of their cloud.

Any details would be appreciated.

------
superasn
I think you should also add another table for hosting services that offer
load-balancing.

I read recently that Digital Ocean added that but not sure about the others.
It is one of the reason why we're still on AWS.

~~~
cuu508
Yep, usually also looking for

* IPv6

* floating/elastic IPs

* API, wrapper libraries, CLI tools

~~~
cschmittiey
I know Lunanode will do load balancing, ipv6, and floating IPs, if you haven't
found one to your satisfaction yet.

Not a shill, just a happy customer.

------
neurostimulant
A while ago when I was trying to sign up for an OVH account to test their VPS
offering, they asked for government id/passport and proof of address in order
to activate the account.

I'm ok with uploading those documents when signing up for an account on
financial-related online services (btc exchanges, online debit card, etc), but
I would never comply with that just for testing some cheap VPS. Why would they
need those info when other vendors don't is beyond me.

------
kureikain
I have used all of them to cut cost. I run some several personal side project
all them and I can say that vultr.com is the best among these provider
considering price per computation power.

1\. OVH: OVH is great, cheap and very reliable. I have used a $3.49 instances
there. The only thing with them is a very complicated control panel to use.
But the disk space is kind of expensive to get extra space.

2\. DO: DO is the worst I have used. They are lock my account forever and I'm
unable to get any data out. The issue is I have tried to create two account
that using same credit card. I tried this to take advantage of their free $5
credit. It's my fault I know. But at least they should merge the account, not
suspending me.

3\. Scaleway: Scaleway is great but not very consistent, sometime they seems
very fast. But then suddenly the instance is not reachable for a short amount
of time(30-60seconds). It happens several times a week. Doing anything there
will require shutdown servers which may take more than 10 mins. Such as
shutting down server to create snapshot.

4\. Vultr is the best among these. Its offer great, consistent performance(CPU
plus network). I used them to run monitoring agent which fetch thousand of
websites to monitor them without any issue. Their control panel is the best
too.

~~~
developer2
Re #2, anyone who tries to abuse a company for a lousy $5 deserves what they
get. It looks to them like a stolen credit card being used fraudulently. For
$5, you're not worth 10 minutes of a customer service rep's time trying to
determine whether you are a fraud risk.

~~~
wdb
Clearly, OVH has enough time to do this.

------
daurnimator
I feel like my comment (praising vultr) from a couple of weeks ago is
validated:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678441)

~~~
jrapdx3
I've been using Vultr for a couple of years and have been satisfied with the
service. I initially went with Vultr because at the time it was one of few
providers that offered FreeBSD and the lowest cost. In contrast to comments in
the article I've found Vultr tech support to be responsive. Haven't needed it
much since they maintain a good database of tech info which has answered
almost all questions.

------
lwhalen
I'd be curious to see how the numbers from wholesaleinternet.net stack up -
auto-provisioned bare metal hosting for the same (monthly) price as cloud VMs.

~~~
alexforster
> Our datacenter is fed by redundant fiber feeds from Hurricane Electric,
> Cogent Communications, and the Kansas City Internet Exchange (KCIX).

Ouch.

~~~
patrickg_zill
[http://www.kcix.net/](http://www.kcix.net/)

Scroll down and you will see they peer with Google Fiber, Google Cache,
CloudFlare, NetFlix, Yahoo, etc. and others.

I used them for a client about 18 months ago I think, no problems and could
get continuous 80Mbps over many hours to/from the servers the client rented.

------
tribby
after seeing the announcement about vultr in another thread, I took a closer
look at ipv6 support and it looks like DO and scaleway do not provide a proper
/64 for IPv6 -- or even a /112, which means you can't use openvpn.

~~~
JensRex
Why do you mean by "proper"? I have a /64 with DO.

~~~
tribby
did you have to request the /64?

unless it has changed or varies by datacenter, DO issues a /124 by default --
I've confirmed this on my own droplets just now. issuing a /64 is "proper"
because it is RFC[1].

1\. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3177](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3177)

~~~
JensRex
Super late reply, but I just wanted to correct myself. I don't have a /64 on
DO. I was confusing my DO config with something else. I'm sorry about that.
You are correct.

------
peterwwillis
What's the target market for this "showdown" ? Hopefully not an online
business, as all of these providers are the cloud hosting equivalent of shared
servers from the early 00's. I've used DO and Linode and both have serious
reliability problems that you have to engineer around yourself, and I can't
imagine the other providers are any more robust.

Linode was too pricy for what they provided back when I tried them, too. At
this point I would only use these providers for a personal website, but I
would choose the cheapest, and get an identical second provider and dual host
for redundancy.

Even if they were more reliable systems than they are now, the bigger they are
the more they attract attacks on their core. Only the giants like Amazon and
Google, or more professional (read: expensive) providers have the resources to
deal with it.

~~~
azinman2
I've never had problems with linode... yes there are the occasional hardware
problems that require restarts, but certainly better than AWS in uptime. For a
while my VMs were going on a year+ of uptime. What issues did you see?

~~~
peterwwillis
To start? Customer data exfiltration, credential compromise, mandatory kernels
(security problems), system downtime, network issues, ddos, and unusual
performance problems. They may have a couple lower cost options now, but
you'll probably still pay out the nose to upgrade them as before.

------
mrmondo
Alongside others, I've been using a combination of Vultr and Ramnode and I've
found both fantastic, especially Vultr.

~~~
fapjacks
Yes, I've been a consumer of Ramnode for years and have had nothing but good
to say.

~~~
mrmondo
Not just their performance and uptime but how good is their support right? (if
you've even had to use it)

~~~
fapjacks
I've been using them for a number of years and had some administrative things
which they handled phenomenally quickly. Just a great job.

------
RubyPinch
What is meant by local storage?

edit: oh I see now, that difference for scaleway should probably be placed as
a footnote of the table

------
Aissen
Missing here: normalized performance with price. If anyone wants to do the
tables ... :-)

------
ijafri
FRANKLY! these posts, had trigged a management response! who seem to be in
deep love with DO :) [https://tron.pk/page/how-digitalocean-is-helping-small-
entre...](https://tron.pk/page/how-digitalocean-is-helping-small-
entrepreneurs/)

------
matunixe
Scaleway is shit, I use it since the closed beta (I live in France) and even
if they are good to host simple websites with no big trafic their service is
very disappointing. First they surfed on the ARM bare metal hype for a while
and then changed everything to sell x64 VPS. They lack a lot of features as
they don't provide backup system or even snapshots. Their staff think of
themselves as fucking gods and do not give a shit about customers request.
They have been out of order many times and don't communicate at all about it.
You are definitely just a running billfold in their eyes, never spend money
for them.

~~~
cknight
By "changed everything to sell x64 VPS" I guess you mean "Added VPS offerings
alongside their bare metal ARM servers"?

I have snapshots of my Scaleway servers sitting there right now. I've also
never experienced any downtime (6 months and counting).

I'm not saying anecdotes are completely without merit, but they don't pair
well with rhetoric.

~~~
matunixe
Their business plan was using the revolutionary ARM CPUs to make cheap offers
with real hardware. That was clear, that's what they sold us in the beginning.
Know they are stuck with it because of their lack of knowledge: the C1 server
doesn't even support IPV6!

Stop kidding about "snapshots". They don't offer snapshots at all. Period. You
should shutdown your server through the fucking dashboard before you can click
the snapshot button. Snapshot is an instant backup made on a running server,
otherwise it's useless.

Tell me what you want but I know what I've seen for 3 years with them. Now I
and my company are running DO servers, which is way better for the price.

~~~
laumars
I've not used Scaleway but for what it's worth Digital Ocean's snapshot
feature only works offline too (and takes forever to run). I'd also made the
same complaints as yourself that an offline "snapshot" isn't really what I
would class as a "snapshot". A "clone" would be a more apt description.

Anyhow, semantics aside, I seriously wouldn't recommend DO for any serious
work. It's fine if you freelance in Wordpress or other off the shelf products
but if you have any serious work to do then just don't even waste your time
with DO as it's solutions are slow, inflexible and, in my professional
opinion, immature when compared to other leading cloud providers.

~~~
misframer
You can take snapshots of DO droplets online.

------
XERQ
I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc., which is a bootstrapped SSD-based hosting
provider for startups that I've been working on since 2011. Some of our
clients have posted benchmarks showing great performance, such as 800MB/s+
throughput and 292K IOPS: [https://lowendbox.com/blog/ssdnodes-high-ram-ssd-
vps-startin...](https://lowendbox.com/blog/ssdnodes-high-ram-ssd-vps-starting-
at-59-99year-dallas-tx-seattle-wa-montreal-ca/#comment-638121)

Direct link to the benchmark:
[https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw](https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw)

Special pricing for startups: [https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-
specials/](https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-specials/)

/shameless plug

~~~
nik736
If I would be able to downvote you, I would. My benchmark/review is about
hourly billing providers where I am able to spin up a server within a minute,
which is not the case for your company. You are simply one of the 10000
companies that offer regular Virtual Private Servers.

~~~
XERQ
Thanks for taking the time to respond, really appreciate it. You mentioned
hourly billing, but the OVH plans you reviewed are monthly[0], and all the
pricing you listed on the site is monthly.

We're trying to go in a different direction from hourly, and instead offer
very deep discounts for annually. So customers can get 8GB RAM for $6.49/month
($77.99/year) and have stellar performance with a provisioning time of about
10 seconds.

[0] [https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-
ssd.xml)

~~~
nik736
OVH offers hourly and monthly billing. The hourly billing is a bit more
expensive but it is there. The pricing is monthly to get a better overview and
be able to compare it better.

I understand your direction and it makes sense, but please don't advertise in
a post that is reviewing providers with a specific use case (hourly billing)
that you don't offer. Thanks.

