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New cheap cloud from Kimsufi (Ovh)

19 points| pkirk | 15 years ago |kimsufi.co.uk

For those who do not know: OVH is a cheap French provider, and Kimsufi is the brand for their economic server&service line.

This morning I received the newsletter (I use them for a couple of project) showing this new cloud service called miniCloud: the price starts from 0.01€/hr.

Another news is the lowered price for the lowest server: Celeron D/215/220 now at 14.99€/mo from 19.99€/mo. (I still have a plan, now gone, @ 29.99€/mo)

I linked the .co.uk but there are also .fr .it, etc.

24 comments

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MikeW|15 years ago

I can't speak for their Cloud offering, but I have been using their Kimsufi Large (2.6GHZ) dedicated servers for around a year.

It's renewal time next week and my plan is to stick with them and drop my Slicehost.

Pros: - Pricing is great. Hardware performs well. The value for money is far better than anything I can get in my own country. - Most countries now have local sales/support teams so you can deal with a friendly local representative and they will deal with France and Octave. - They're very fast with getting new Linux distros prepped for their manager system.

Downsides: - Routes from your ISP to OVH may not be optimal. I've seen reports from people here complaining of routes going right around Europe the long way, from various ISPs. - Pulling a large file from Novell to my Slice in the US I was getting around 2MB/sec but to OVH it was just a few hundred K/sec. Decide the value of bandwidth and where your customers are. - I've had an unexplained reboot that I haven't been able to track down. It didn't bother me enough to track it down with support. - The Manager user interface seemed to be a machine translation from French into English. Quite often the statements made no sense at all. This has improved quite a lot within the last 12 months though.

I've had more positives with them than negatives. Their Kimsufi dedicated offering suits me well and I'm incredibly impressed at how Octave has grown the company

pierrefar|15 years ago

So what is Ovh's reputation as a host? Anyone use them? Any problems?

The prices are amazingly cheap, so might be worth trying them just because it won't cost much.

ned|15 years ago

I've had dedicated servers, shared hosts and individual domains with them for a few years. I had a hardware failure on a server once, the HD died, they replaced it in a few hours, it was handled pretty efficiently. The price is really low. The connectivity in Europe is good (although my customers are mostly based in France, so I don't have real benchmarks from elsewhere).

Two caveats:

- They have no taste and are really bad a interface design. Their administration tools are notoriously confusing, even after years of using them I'm still blown away at how they manage to make something simple so complicated. The boss (Octave) will post product announcements in the forums, and not in the official newsletter, encouraging a cult following of enthusiats/amateurs (that can be seen as both good or bad I guess…). Don't expect good documentation either.

- support is sub-par. I only contacted them a couple of times, and my carefully worded questions were met by a standardized reply, as if they had only read half of my email.

tl;dr : if you're a good sysadmin and don't need any hand-holding, they are good.

madflo|15 years ago

I've been using the MiniCloud service for a few weeks during the beta (the service was then offered) and for a few days as a paying customer.

Well... everything is working pretty smoothly. I'm using their manager to upgrade/downgrade my host's RAM on a daily basis, as I'm using the cloud as a pre-production server for a webapp. The manager UI is quite ugly, to say the least, but sufficient to start/stop and upgrade/downgrade the virtual host.

I did not had to ask for help from the support team so I cannot offer any advice on them.

_Lemon_|15 years ago

I feel I could write an essay on the pros and cons of OVH but it basically comes down to bandwidth quality.

You're only really paying for the cost of the hardware, the rest is a heavy reliance on peering with no or little transit links (you'll see they only sell to some EU countries).

gregorym|15 years ago

They're french. They are very popular here.

kierank|15 years ago

OVH are famous for cheap bittorrent seedboxes.

cl3m|15 years ago

1 month = 730.484398 hour

730.484398 * 0.01 UK£ = 10.6570369 U.S. dollars

paraschopra|15 years ago

>you can not send emails (you can receive them).

Seems like a deal-killer to me.

mahmud|15 years ago

Not at all. If you're using email as notification, move your MTA to another port, or use something else.