
OVH increases pricing with the rise of their next generation DDoS Protection - dx034
https://sinfulforums.net/t/ovh-increases-pricing-with-the-rise-of-their-next-generation-ddos-protection/90
======
rmdoss
OVH is one of the few hosting providers that used to offer DDoS protection for
free to everyone - and a good one.

The issue is that it became a refugee for sites that could not stay online on
other providers due to DDoS - so they were getting hit often.

The price change is not too bad considering how cheap they are. Still use and
recommend them.

~~~
aroch
>The issue is that it became a refugee for sites that could not stay online on
other providers due to DDoS - so they were getting hit often.

Eh...not really. OVH has and will just blackhole your IP(s) in BGP and
terminate your service......But not before logging into your server with the
OVH root key they install by default and seeing what you're up to of course
(yay backdoored by default)

OVH has a lot going for them, but reasonableness and consistency in business
are not one of them. They have no problems dumping larger BW clients even if
they're following the FUP/TOS.

------
ajnin
OVH already put up a mandatory DDOS protection in 2013, with about the same
price (article about the feature states 0.5 to 10€ per server :
[https://www.nextinpact.com/news/81703-ovh-protection-ddos-
ca...](https://www.nextinpact.com/news/81703-ovh-protection-ddos-capable-d-
encaisser-nimporte-quelle-attaque.htm)).

Before that, sites that were the target of a DDOS often were simply disabled
and their subscriptions cancelled.

At the time the practice raised a lot of criticism, since that was presented
as an "option" that you could not refuse to pay for, which seemed a bit
forceful. Now they're being more honest, the need to protect from DDOS has a
cost, especially considering that a DDOS makes a lot of collateral damage and
it is needed to protect innocent bystanders. Everyone pays a little bit, and
those who actually need protection don't have to pay anything more. Maybe
they've taken some inspiration from the French socialized health system :)

~~~
hackerboos
Hetzner used to have a bad rep for simply disabling accounts of people getting
DDoSd. The have recently claimed to have improved on this
[https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/ddos-
schutz](https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/ddos-schutz)

------
lorenzhs
That email was really bad, "New: Anti-DDOS Next Gen" is not a suitable subject
line for what boils down to a 20% price bump in my case. They don't even state
the new prices in the email, and the linked page
([https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml](https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml))
has a different product listing than when I ordered my server, and lists the
same model number with different prices because the model number doesn't
appear to specify the model anymore, there are different versions with
different amounts of disk space. OVH handled the whole thing really terribly.

~~~
dx034
And not just for kimsufi, also for the main brand. To figure out the price
difference you have to consult a PDF which splits prices differently than the
main page. They stated in the email that new orders will see the new price but
that's definitely not the case. The blog article talks about increases in the
range of 1-10€ while in reality, increases in public cloud are much higher
(20-30%). Selling that as a DDOS investment is questionable, I guess they just
miscalculated prices.

~~~
lorenzhs
Well at least they're consistent in communicating it badly!

At least for the kimsufi line, you still get the old price if you renew in
November. Guess who just renewed for another year ;)

------
squaresmile
Their blogspot where they talk more about the decision:
[https://www.ovh.ie/a2536.anti-ddos-protection-why-ovh-
must-k...](https://www.ovh.ie/a2536.anti-ddos-protection-why-ovh-must-keep-
investing)

The increase in price is €1 to €10 ex. VAT/month. It's pretty reasonable given
the anti-DDoS service they offer.

~~~
trevyn
FS-48T appears to be going from $355/mo to $395.99/mo.

------
maaarghk
Hah, I received this email and read about half of the first paragraph before
concluding it was a sales pitch to purchase something and deleting it. Talk
about burying the lede.

That said, the servers are so inexpensive that it's pretty hard to argue with
this "request".

------
x0ner
I'd like to see OVH take a stronger stance on actioning abuse requests for
hosts serving malware before hearing about some paid protection offering. For
those not fortunate enough to deal with OVH, if you report abuse, your
information and report often find their way directly to those committing the
malicious actions - the "customer". This results in the actor simply removing
their content to appease OVH and then continuing business as usual. In the
face of clear evidence, OVH will often cite privacy issues for why they can't
or won't take action. At this point, anytime I see their infrastructure in an
investigation, I know it's a waste of time.

~~~
tscs37
I think this is one of the strongest pros for using OVH;

 _YOU_ get the abuse letters and as someone operating a internet service it is
_YOUR_ responsibility, legal and otherwise, to deal with them.

This means if the abuse letters are ignored, the next step is the legal one
instead of having OVH deal with it. It's business between you and the hoster,
not between you and OVH.

~~~
x0ner
Unfortunately, the legal process has not caught up with the speed in which
malicious actors can conduct their attacks. In some cases, infrastructure is
used for merely a few hours before swapping to something new. It's a constant
game of wack-a-mole and without the provider's help, there's no way to stop
it.

------
abiox
incidentally, i found that ovh offers a kvm vps with 2gb ram and unlimited
traffic for a bit over $3.

2gb ram at digital ocean is $20, with limited traffic (3tb seems like a decent
amount, though). a ri on aws runs slightly over $10, but traffic costs are an
absurd tragedy.

i was pretty hyped when i found this, but sadly ovh didn't offer
private/internal networking for their vps last i checked. so if i want a web
vps to talk to a db vps, i have to give the db an internet-facing ip; this
increases risks and possibly latency if there isn't some router config
preventing public-ip packets from leaving the datacenter.

~~~
AlphaSite
OVHs networks are pretty terrible.

~~~
dx034
Why? I always found them to be quite reliable. Both latency and bandwidth is
pretty good to almost anywhere in the world, considering data centre
locations.

------
ttul
It’s about time that hosting companies raise the prices a little bit. The
industry has undergone so much consolidation, and service quality has suffered
as a consequence. Paying an extra euro per month to make sure that the
provider is properly funded to provide a good quality of service makes a lot
of sense to me.

------
raresp
I got a VPS at OVH which claims to have "triple data replication". One day it
crashed at root password reset (they forced me to reset the root password). I
contacted them but they said I have to reinstall the VPS. wtf? I told them
that they have the data replicated. They replied with "Yes, the data is
replicated but the data is corrupted. So you still have to reinstall the OS".
Never trust marketing quotes, do regular backups and never choose the lowest
price :)

~~~
dx034
Data replication only protects against hardware failure. For everything else
you need backups.

Raid increases uptime but don't rely on that as your only protection.

------
kyledrake
Great. This is a good thing. You want them to mitigate your DDoS instead of
black holing your site every time a 15 year old gets pissed off. Why is this
framed negatively? This is awesome news.

Have they started supporting recurring billing yet? I actually left because
they didn't let me do recurring billing. Everything else worked just fine. Not
having the ability to have a credit card billed automatically however is just
insane. WTF, seriously.

~~~
kyledrake
Just an update here for future travelers that OVH will start doing recurring
billing after Dec 4th 2017. Great news.

------
OzzyB
So what about those folks that use other DDOS protection services like
Cloudflare?

Do we still need to be charged more if we have other measures in place? Seems
a bit odd.

Hey, if you just want to raise your prices a bit, just do it (I understand
that) but doing it under the guise of needing to "fight the collective fight
of DDOS", (not so much).

------
samfriedman
From the email I got:

    
    
      For dedicated servers, the extra cost for Anti-DDoS will be applied to:
      * OVH servers w/ 1 Gbit/s network  
      * OVH servers with either 10, 25, or 40 Gbit/s network
    

So it seems like the older, lower-network-speed Kimsufi dedi boxes will stay
at the same price?

------
duskwuff
Surely there is some better source for this than an almost empty web forum...

~~~
cbg0
[https://www.ovh.ie/news/articles/a2536.anti-ddos-
protection-...](https://www.ovh.ie/news/articles/a2536.anti-ddos-protection-
why-ovh-must-keep-investing)

See the last paragraph of this post

> This is why OVH has decided to request a contribution from customers, via a
> €1 to €10 ex. VAT/month increase in the price of VPS, Public Cloud instances
> and dedicated servers (except Game). This increase will be visible on the
> OVH websites by the end of October and it will apply to new orders of
> dedicated servers and VPS. The same will be rolled out for Public Cloud at
> the start of December. Existing customers whose services are implicated in
> the price increase, will receive personal email notification of the revised
> pricing due to take effect on the 1st of December.

------
j_s
Show HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538)
(2017May:146comments)

This changes the landscape quite a bit!

