Hacker News Reader

Comment by rosndo | Hacker News Reader

> Glad to have left that company years before the fire, never doing business with them ever again.

What alternatives are there? Not many good ones at a comparable price point. (Yeah I know about online.net, Hetzner and so on. OVH offers a much more polished product and vastly better network)

At the prices OVH offers, you can have your servers replicated in multiple datacenters for less money than many DCs would charge you for a single server with the same specs.

At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network is otherwise very reliable.

View on HN

Well, price are being jacked up and customers like myself are being kicked out on short notice. French providers become less and less attractive as electricity prices soar in France.

See my post here of how they are jacking prices up: https://rorodi.substack.com/p/sorry-but-due-to-the-high-cost...

They? I don't see OVH mentioned once at the above url. In fact, I see no provider mentioned.

Why wouldn't you mention them? Is it generic clickbait, and you don't want to get sued?

I'm not aware of OVH having jacked up prices recently at all (I have services with their SoYouStart and Kimsufi brands, and I'm sure such an occurrence would have started a bun-fight on the LET forums), at least some providers have.

The big one (that did cause considerable consternation) was Hetzner some weeks ago, though they are based in Germany not France. See https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/176802/hetzner-price-incre... for much complaining about that one.

As the problems causing price increases for power continue, I expect many cheap providers (who have very low margins so can't afford not to pass on significant increases in power costs), and larger outfits with budget lines, will have to change prices soon or fail.

I was so annoyed by that I actually started renting a new larger server from Hetzner because the old two would cost more and be slower, but since I’m a lazy bum and dislike the idea of losing anything, I haven’t actually decommisioned anything yet, so I’m now paying 250% of what I did before, instead of 125%.

It is not OVH, but you will see it happen there as well. Electricity prices have gone up by 500% in France. Cheap nuclear energy was the reason they were able to do low cost. That's gone now.

Oh, is this why I was kicked out of my OneProvider server hosted by Scaleway/Online in Paris?

You too. I didn't wanted to say the name but you did it for me.

This post is useless without naming the specific provider.

> At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network is otherwise very reliable.

That depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for sustainable options, this probably doesn't include companies that burn down datacenters.

I would argue Hetzner is much better than OVH price-wise and I've been using a multiple-datacenter scheme with them for several years now for several of my clients. And they're very happy because the cost is so reasonable.

Depending on what exactly you mean with multiple datacenters, make sure you take a look at the pictures of their DC sites - the DCs in one location may be right next to eachother. Like having your servers in SBG2 and backups in SBG1.

You would need to use multiple locations, not just datacenters, for durability. The network performance between locations just isn't as good as between datacenters in the same location.

This even goes for Amazon. Multiple DCs in the same AZ can fail together.

With AWS, the "datacenter" isn't a concept users have to worry about (or can even discover or manage). Each AZ comprises many datacenters, each region comprises many AZs, and AWS makes it easy to deploy most services across multiple AZs in a region. If one AWS datacenter goes down (and this happens occasionally), typically only one AZ in the region is affected.

Some of their DCs don't look particularly fireproof either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Public rates offered by Hetzner are definitely slightly cheaper than OVH, but OVH offers vastly better volume discounts to even fairly small businesses (talking like 10-20k/mo spend).

IME OVH also offers much better connectivity around the world (which makes sense, given that they operate at a much larger scale than Hetzner)

Oh, and Hetzner billing support is absolutely terrible. I had to fight with them for months to stop charging for servers which had already been cancelled, after tens of emails they eventually owned up to having a bug on their end. It was like talking to a wall.

I've had the opposite experience. OVH charged my creditcard twice for the same payment, then simply refused to see the issue. I sent screenshots showing both payments, they just kept reiterating there was only one invoice (which was exactly the point). And every interaction typically took about five days -- for each follow-up to the same ticket. Had to revert one with my creditcard provider.

With Hetzner on the other hand I've had technical support issues responded to adequately within two hours, multiple times. As a small individual customer no less.

> With Hetzner on the other hand I've had technical support issues responded to adequately within two hours, multiple times. As a small individual customer no less.

Hetzner has very good technical support, definitely no complaints about that. It’s their billing department which is downright unpleasant to work with.

I had the opposite experience - OVH support not responding for several days for fairly simple cases. They even forced me once to send a fax to them..

I also had several outages with OVH (Exchange and Dedicated Server) - none yet with Hetzner. Right now planning to finally leave OVH for Hetzner and Microsoft (Exchange)

Netcup has excellent pricing[1].

[1] https://www.netcup.de/

They might, but they fail to disclose any kind of pricing for dedicated servers on their website and just send you to a “contact us” form instead. Hardly promising.

Note that OVH is primarily focused on dedicated servers, a VPS host isn’t comparable.

relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1737/

At Google scale that would be if a service is not working, we just deprecate it...

Hetzner

But… Hetzner offers an even lower quality service at an even lower price point. (But only to low-volume buyers, OVH offers vastly better volume discounts)

It would be strange to expect them to deal with the situation any differently if there was a catastrophic event in one of their DCs resulting in destroyed servers.

When working with dedicated servers at this price point, you’re very much expected to deal with your own backups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com