I really don't get all the hate directed towards OVH.
I've got two Kimsufi dedicated servers at OVH since years and years and, to me, it's an amazing service (at a price which apparently nobody can beat).
One of my Kimsufi on which I installed Debian reached an uptime of four years. Four years of uptime. The smallest of the Kimsufi, which is already the cheaper of the dedicated servers OVH provides. Four years.
A pretty stock Debian, with only SSH and Tomcat and not a single (known) root exploit forcing me to install a patch that would have required me to reboot the box. Meanwhile I had two very serious DoS Java bugs requiring me to patch the JVM / JRE (IIRC the Tomcat version I had could do with just the JRE, no need for the JDK). One Java exploit was the infinite floating-point parsing bug and the other the hashmap not being O(1) anymore (the attack consisted in submitting very long URL with carefully query paramaters).
Now the real funny thing: one day I got an email from OVH saying my server was down and that it "would not reboot". What happened is that the motherboard died and they moved my stuff to a new system. But the Debian version on my Kimsufi was so old that it wouldn't recognize the new motherboard...
That's basically how stable Kimsufi are: they can happily crank up for years and years and years and years.
Now I'll have to look into it: because I pay 20 EUR / month for mine (VAT not included) and apparently the new ones at 17 EUR / month are already more powerful than the ones I have, so I may want to switch to a beefier machine for a cheaper price.
Also note that during summer time (month of august IIRC), they launched a Kimsufi at 2.99 or 3.99 EUR / month (don't remember, but several people here point the number of 2.99). But it got so successful that they had issue and were forced to remove the offer. And "Octave" tweeted that OVH would come up with an entirely new offer. I'm glad to see they're now offering Kimsufi at 8 EUR / month.
That's 8 EUR for your own dedicated server. Seems quite a good deal to me.
I have a few issues with OVH. In no particular order:
- In summer 2013, they used their customers as beta testers for their anti-ddos service. This was mandatory for ALL customers, there was no way to opt out.
This caused false detections on some of my servers and ended up blocking ALL dns requests until I uploaded the deb for PDNS (because apt-get wouldn't work anymore) and configure TCP dns lookups.
- Multiple times in August and September all servers that detected a DDoS attack in the past 24 hours became disconnected from the internet or the US for an entire day.
- Also in summer 2013, they upgraded their offerings as usual. Their website said it would come in a week but I waited for over 60 days before I finally told them to cancel the order. This was for their midrange server.
- They removed the ability to pay for less than a month because everyone was extending the rent on their old server until their new ones arrived. This was very scummy coming from OVH.
- Later I found out they were complaining about "turnover" even though when I asked support if I could upgrade my server, they said the only way to do that is to cancel the old server and get a new one.
- They removed e-mail support for Kimsufis even though some of them cost more than their new mid-range line that has it. Now they expect you to use a forum where responses have gone unanswered and everyone can see details on your server. They didn't even reduce the price.
- There have been a few sporadic cases throughout the year where the server just lost connection to the internet for a minute. Support had nothing to say about this, but sometimes I could find some related message on travaux.ovh.net (this page gets more updates than status.ovh.net)
Not going to lie, I've been a really happy customer with OVH and Kimsufi too. I had a motherboard die and they replaced it and helped me get it running in a day. Sure, not the best online time for something like a startup, but for what I was doing that was totally acceptable and fine. Their support was no hold and worked well; they spoke English; overall, an amazing experience.
I've got two Kimsufi dedicated servers at OVH since years and years and, to me, it's an amazing service (at a price which apparently nobody can beat).
One of my Kimsufi on which I installed Debian reached an uptime of four years. Four years of uptime. The smallest of the Kimsufi, which is already the cheaper of the dedicated servers OVH provides. Four years.
A pretty stock Debian, with only SSH and Tomcat and not a single (known) root exploit forcing me to install a patch that would have required me to reboot the box. Meanwhile I had two very serious DoS Java bugs requiring me to patch the JVM / JRE (IIRC the Tomcat version I had could do with just the JRE, no need for the JDK). One Java exploit was the infinite floating-point parsing bug and the other the hashmap not being O(1) anymore (the attack consisted in submitting very long URL with carefully query paramaters).
Now the real funny thing: one day I got an email from OVH saying my server was down and that it "would not reboot". What happened is that the motherboard died and they moved my stuff to a new system. But the Debian version on my Kimsufi was so old that it wouldn't recognize the new motherboard...
That's basically how stable Kimsufi are: they can happily crank up for years and years and years and years.
Now I'll have to look into it: because I pay 20 EUR / month for mine (VAT not included) and apparently the new ones at 17 EUR / month are already more powerful than the ones I have, so I may want to switch to a beefier machine for a cheaper price.
Also note that during summer time (month of august IIRC), they launched a Kimsufi at 2.99 or 3.99 EUR / month (don't remember, but several people here point the number of 2.99). But it got so successful that they had issue and were forced to remove the offer. And "Octave" tweeted that OVH would come up with an entirely new offer. I'm glad to see they're now offering Kimsufi at 8 EUR / month.
That's 8 EUR for your own dedicated server. Seems quite a good deal to me.