OVH is an absolutely horrible company.<p>I was in business with them years ago and they kept my account all that time. When they got hacked a couple years ago (or was it last year?), I remembered I had an account with them and asked them to delete it.<p>I had to go back and forth with their customer service, and in the end, they asked me to send them a signed letter to their offices in France for them to even consider deleting my account.<p>Arseholes. I couldn't be bothered to take this anywhere, but damn it I hope they get hell for this.<p>I can't comment on their actual services at present myself - all I have is negative hearsay (nothing positive anyway).
One of the best things about DigitalOcean is that they charge per hour, which means I can spin up several servers, test things out and then tear them down, incurring just a few cents of costs in total. OVH asks me to pay for 12 months up front.<p>Also, their support is awfully slow. I'm in the slow process of moving to another host/registrar.
It's nice that all these hosting companies are dropping their prices so much. However, I've found it extremely hard to compare them against each other.<p>I wish someone would put together a site that compared each cloud provider when it comes to specific workloads -- for instance: Postgres and Mysql performance, Redis and Memcached performance, apache-bench, and so on. Even the performance of each virtual CPU is unclear.<p>Does anything like this exist?
Someone already pointed out that DO's selling point are SSD drives. There's also a difference in the underlying technology. OVH uses OpenVZ, which are containers more than VMs, whereas DO is based on KVM.
You get what you pay for. Oh, and by the way, this isn't the most affordable VPS. CloudAtCost's cheapest plan is $1.00/month, and in USD, VPS Classic/OVH is around $2.75, give or take (<a href="http://www.cloudatcost.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudatcost.com/</a>). (current exchange: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&oq=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&aqs=chrome..69i57.2691j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&...</a>)<p>However, you do get what you pay for. I'm a CloudAtCost customer, paid for their $35 one-time fee because I figured it would be nice to not have to worry about yet another recurring payment (however small) for stupid things like having a Linux machine to test new apps on and run my IRC bouncer. When they had some downtime, they did alert us but I didn't find out my server had failed to power back on until I opened my laptop one day and couldn't connect to IRC. Given their impossibly-low prices[1] and lack of history in our community, I'm probably always gonna be a little paranoid that my server is just going to die one day and there's nothing I'll be able to do about it.<p>That said, I think OVH is in a similar boat. Crappy customer service, but low prices, so my advice for anyone wanting to take a gamble on this is to definitely NOT host anything important on these low-cost VPS services. They're really best for staging and light internal use, and they're not to be trusted with the architecture of your whole company.<p>[1]: CloudAtCost is essentially a big Canadian ISP's server hosting brand. Basically, their parent company owns the datacenter they're hosting you in, so the service they're offering is practically cost-free to them. If this is true, the money they get from you must be 100% profit, or they wouldn't be able to keep themselves in business. (<a href="http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php</a>) Go ask a record label owner sometime about how profit margins on the fraction of a dollar, even when new sales come in every day, work out for his bottom line ;)
Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.<p>They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.<p>I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.
Personally, I am still sticking with Linode. I absolutely love their support. I contacted them today and got an answer in minutes. This is a Sunday, mind you.<p>Sure the low prices on OVH and DigitalOcean seem lucrative and I have used DigitalOcean for a while, but I still came back to Linode. The Linode interface is another thing that I cannot do without especially when you see the alternatives.<p>YMMV.
An Anti-DDoS protection ! That's a god-send ! I had a terrible experience recently with Digital-Ocean. A VPS of mine with a fresh launched project was knocked down with some basic ddos attack. The support nodded and pointed to use CloudFlare. My server was down and they didn't do anything, that really sucks, you can't use a VPS without a DDos protection for anything serious. It can go down anytime when some script-kiddie opens a hunder of sockets.<p>It's really sad that DDoS protection didn't become ubiquitous yet. It's unacceptable that you can get down a server, even VPS with not-so-much bandwidth. All VPS have limited number of sockets and resources and it's trivial to knock them down. Absence of a DDoS protection makes them extremely vulnerable.
I set up a cheap dedicated server with OVH a few months ago. it took 48 days to get it set up and the OVH flavor of linux I went with was some bastardized version of gentoo so inbred that after two weeks of trying to get it upgraded to a sane version I just canceled my account.
If you're after bargain basement VDSes, as far as I know the place to look is <a href="http://lowendbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lowendbox.com/</a>
It's OpenVZ.. IMO you can't compare KVM with OpenVZ, even tho DO thin provisioning of their KVM is far away from "true KVM" (own ISO installs etc..)
For me, the main reason DO beats other VPS providers is its large collection of tutorials. For people new to managing their own web server, these tutorials are a major asset. I even went back to their tutorials section when i was testing the service of one of their competitors
Over time, I realized I don't really want to manage services needed to run my apps on a VPS, like Apache, nginx or MySQL configuration and upgrades.<p>Is there anything like WebFaction, but cheaper, that can handle sysadmining for me?
Why go for a VPS when you can get dedicated hardware for a similar and sometimes better price - <a href="http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/</a>
This really isn't news, OpenVZ isn't the same virtualisation as DigitalOcean are using and you're effectively tied to a kernel provided by OVH. It also isn't SSD-based.