Thoughts on OVH?

[Floren]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if any of you hosts their "large" forum with OVH?
I'm looking at their prices and I have no idea how they can offer dedicated for so cheap. Thank you for your input.

Regards,

 

[Jarod]

Hello ,

I have 4 dedicated server on ovh. Im french satisfied client since 2004

 

[Marcus]

Their prices are comparable to other reliable european companies.

 

[Floren]

Well, I'm comparing to other North-American reliable providers and the OVH prices are nearly half for real physical machines, not VPS or other half baked solution. I'm interested on real hardware that I can control to my liking. Example:
http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/eg_24g.xml

Xeon W3520/24GB RAM/2TB RAID1/IPV6 /64 for USD139$ ??? WTF
Just the IPV6 will allow me to set zillions of IP's the way I like it and link it to my home network.

 

[AlexT]

OVH is very popular among spammers for reasons I don't know. If it's important to you that neighbors to your IPs are not blacklisted, it's something you should consider.

There are quite a few inexpensive European hosters. Hetzner.de is one from Germany with excellent connectivity.

 

[hellreturn]

Hetzner is horrible in terms of network. U pay for 100Mbps and I am barely able to reach 70Mbps.. and if u use 60Mbps for an hour or so.. u get notice. With choopa i can easily use 70Mbps constant.. no problem.

Also the support of Hetzner sucks and if you get any hard ware issues ex. hard drive.. u are on your own.. and in replacement they even give you 3 yr old hard drives.

3 hard drive died within last one month with Hetzner.

 

[Floren]

OVH is very popular among spammers for reasons I don't know. If it's important to you that neighbors to your IPs are not blacklisted, it's something you should consider.

Probably because the price?
I'll use IPV6, so is technically impossible to match a /64 against spammers? They probably still use IPV4... Well, I want American hosting, not European. OVH do have offices in Canada and States.

 

[ManOnDaMoon]

OVH prices are low mostly because of industrialization and fiscal optimization among their subsidiaries: they have the biggest server farms in North America, and the products they sell are internally charged from one subsidiary to another. This is totally transparent to you.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/15/ovh-is-largest-web-host-with-100000-servers/
http://www.ovh.com/us/all/a803.160lhomme_reste_la_base_de_notre_metier160

I don't know how reliable dedicated servers are, I'm on OVH shared hosting.

 

[WSWD]

I will start by saying I have never used one of their servers, but the only issue I have really ever seen is that support is non-existent. Had a colleague using them who had a RAID card fail, and that took 4 days to get a replacement. The failure wasn't detected by their automated system (RAM and power supplies and such probably would be), and Support wouldn't answer.

On the contrary, we had a RAID card fail on one of our VPS nodes back in December, and our datacenter had the issue diagnosed (the error wasn't pointing to a card failure) and the card replaced in under 1.5 hours.

At the end of the day, you have to give up something to get a server at those prices. But if you aren't hosting a mission critical site, why not use them? I'm seriously considering buying a few to hold our backups. If they break, we don't really care.

 

[Marcus]

I think you can rent two servers and sometimes its still cheaper than one server at the other expensive hosters. So you have a very secure fail-over system.

 

[Slavik]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if any of you hosts their "large" forum with OVH?
I'm looking at their prices and I have no idea how they can offer dedicated for so cheap. Thank you for your input.

Regards,

Its cheap because the hardware is pretty much WYSIWYG. Make sure to read all the specs carefully, small things change from package to package you may not realise.

I think Mike Edge uses them as his provider for xfhost.me

 

[Biker]

I tend to block every OVH IP that hits the server. Spammers and worse tend to use their services. One of the more recent root kit exploits was linked with OVH systems as well. It's obvious they don't care who pays for services, just as long as they get paid.

 

[Kent]

Read the service level agreement, and expect no more than what is described.

Things I've experienced:
They require an uncomfortable amount of information to verify your identity as they are a common target of spammers, scammers, and general Internet scum. You might want to go through a reseller.
When a victim of DDoS, your affected server(s) will be temporarily blocked. This is a good thing, but can be annoying.
Their documentation is poorly translated from French and can be difficult to understand. It isn't always clear what it is referencing, which will most likely lead to you configuring the network incorrectly... but the network will work, leading you to believe everything is fine. And then you get an email telling you the network is configured incorrectly and the server will be blocked if it isn't fixed in three days, which leads to a massive headache of trial-and-error hoping the emails stop before you either find the solution or go to support which, depending on your SLA, may not reply in time.
The network does tend to go offline or spotty sometimes, typically this is due to them upgrading hardware or preforming maintenance. I'm not aware if they have any sort of alert or notification system for this, so if things are getting weird, you should to check http://status.ovh.com/


That said, I'd still recommend OVH.

 

[Mike Edge]

Its cheap because the hardware is pretty much WYSIWYG. Make sure to read all the specs carefully, small things change from package to package you may not realise.

Yes and no, you can select other servers on other global sites and select Canada for data center location. All server models are aval in all locations, they just higher stock different ones depending on which data center website you order from. Ordering from France for Canada is 12-72 hour set up though.

I think Mike Edge uses them as his provider for xfhost.me

Yes, the Canada network is great. It includes Sprint, Level3 and HE among others. Surprisingly, I have not seen any signs of Cogent with the premium bandwidth packages we use. Doing cPanel transfers, I have seen bursts of over 600mbit in my graphs, so it is a true gig-e unlike a lot of providers that claim it but your lucky to see 30mbit transfering. Only downside on OVH is, if you don't know Linux, this is not the data center for you. Any issues, server is put into rescue mode and your on your own unless you can prove it is hardware related.
We use servers

 

[emc2]

I think you can rent two servers and sometimes its still cheaper than one server at the other expensive hosters. So you have a very secure fail-over system.

Wow, incredibly cheap - I pay 4 times those prices for my dedicated server! I very much like your idea Marcus.

 

[Jarod]

Hello,

In France or other countries (spainn Morocco ..) They have much cheaper servers

http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/

In French, Kimsufi means "which is enough for me"

 

[RandallC]

OVH is decent but like its stated they are in Canada not US. While that should be fine I prefer US Data centers.

I colo a server in Chicago because of the central location and connectivity. You could look at some other locations but it depends on where your users are from. Most of my users on my forum are US, Canada, and some in UK so I wanted to make sure to have a central location.

Cheap is not always good. BurstNet has cheap servers but charge for everything from management to backups, some Dedicated servers providers offer some stuff for free.

 

[Floren]

Update: I'm currently running my site on a $49.00 K2 server.
Since OVH does not offer a custom (minimal) installation, I had to "hack" my way through their network setup and perform a remote CentOS 6.4 x86_64 minimal install based on my standards. Their "stock" CentOS install is bloated with useless software (starting with their custom kernel and finishing with a ton of useless rpm's that eat resources), stay away from it.

Tasks: 166 total,   1 running, 165 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.3%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.5%id,  0.9%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  7770.422M total,  980.523M used, 6789.899M free,   49.145M buffers
Swap: 8191.992M total,    0.000k used, 8191.992M free,  179.324M cached

The memory usage is minimal. I'm going to create 2 RAM disks, it will help speeding things for Nginx cache and MariaDB. Not that the current setup needs it... but I want to use that free memory. The custom partitioning I performed on the minimal install:

# vgs
  VG    #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vg_os   1   6   0 wz--n- 930.88g 807.88g

# lvs
  LV      VG    Attr      LSize  Pool Origin Data%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  lv_home vg_os -wi-ao--- 10.00g
  lv_opt  vg_os -wi-ao--- 10.00g
  lv_root vg_os -wi-ao--- 10.00g
  lv_swap vg_os -wi-ao---  8.00g
  lv_tmp  vg_os -wi-ao---  5.00g
  lv_var  vg_os -wi-ao--- 80.00g

# df -ah
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root
                      9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /
proc                     0     0     0   -  /proc
sysfs                    0     0     0   -  /sys
devpts                   0     0     0   -  /dev/pts
tmpfs                 3.8G   72M  3.8G   2% /dev/shm
/dev/md0              496M   75M  396M  16% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_home
                      9.9G  157M  9.2G   2% /home
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_opt
                      9.9G  151M  9.2G   2% /opt
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_tmp
                      5.0G  138M  4.6G   3% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_var
                       79G  2.0G   73G   3% /var
none                     0     0     0   -  /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/etc/named            9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/named
/var/named             79G  2.0G   73G   3% /var/named/chroot/var/named
/etc/named.conf       9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf
/etc/named.rfc1912.zones
                      9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/named.rfc1912.zones
/etc/rndc.key         9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/rndc.key
/usr/lib64/bind       9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/usr/lib64/bind
/etc/named.iscdlv.key
                      9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/named.iscdlv.key
/etc/named.root.key   9.9G  1.2G  8.3G  13% /var/named/chroot/etc/named.root.key