7 ms·

OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center

187 points by ers35 10y ago

l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
I think the reason for the location is due to the proximity to our 3 letter agencies. Thus the ability/requirement to tap into their infrastructure.
IgorPartola 10y ago
So does this make my data with them fall under the category of American companies and is not subject to warrant less searches? Or only their VA data center?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Based on a Microsoft ruling, I believe only their US data center. As always, take measures to keep your data out of the US if it's important to you. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/microsoft-case-shows-the-limits-of-a-data-privacy-law.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...
  - IgorPartola 10y ago
    Out or in? Because if it's out, it's subject to the warrantless searches, right? But if it's in, the company can be compelled to give the NSA access?
    - seszett 10y ago
      If it's out of the US, the US don't have jurisdiction and I don't see them breaking into OVH's datacenters in France anytime soon to get to your data. If they really want to access it and are doing covert operations I don't think being in the US will stop them. I might be naive, but as far as I know there's no question that data is always safer if it stays in datacenters in Europe rather than in the US (which is why OVH is going to great lengths to separate their US entity as much as possible from the French one, and also why their first step in North America was Canada and not the US).
      - IgorPartola 10y ago
        I suppose my communication with the server would be encrypted, but wouldn't the NSA try to store all the back and forth transfers between my US-based laptop and my OVH server in France?
        toomuchtodo 10y ago
        They could, which is why all of your communications between you and your OVH server should use high grade encryption (SSH, SSL, etc).
- math0ne 10y ago
  I'm definitely questioning this decision because I believe a lot of their business comes from people doing some pretty questionable things with copyright. Might open up some of the larger video hosts that work with them to the scrutiny of US authorities. I wouldn't worry about a personal seed box, but some pretty big video hosts work with them closely.
- derefr 10y ago
  Speaking of: are the non-US AWS regions subject to warrantless searches? Or are they technically their own "companies"?
- r1ch 10y ago
  They made a good post addressing this. https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-the-usa-while-preserving-its-european-identity https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-...
tiffanyh 10y ago
>> "Virginia successfully competed against North Carolina for the project, which will create 54 new jobs" How many people typically work at a data center for one of the largest hosting companies in the world? Because 54 jobs seems kind of low, no?
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  That's pretty typical. You need maybe a couple of technicians to run the water and air handling systems, a handful of people on skateboards swapping out dead machines, and some security guards. Here's a recent article that says Google employees 400 people in their Oklahoma facility, which is enormous. http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facility-opening-in-pryor-brings-its-oklahoma-investment/article_13726985-22ca-56b6-8f29-dae948baf0e5.html http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facil...
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  The place where I colocate our servers (the company is probably in the top five in the industry in terms of size, with data centers in about a dozen cities) runs with a tech staff of ~six during the day and two overnight. They've obviously got other staff for all of the other business-related roles, but data centers just don't require a lot of staff in the general case.
- derefr 10y ago
  In the same way that some companies have negative externalities like pollution, you could think of a data-centre more as having a positive externality of job creation. Data-centers don't do many things themselves, using manual labor; instead, they're just large machines that consume purified resources (power, live fiber, provisioned equipment) and turn it into APIs. But purifying those resources for the DC's consumption does require people—and DCs need a lot of each of the resources they consume. For every N data-centres that get built in a state, that state probably employs a good few more power-plant workers and linemen, for just one effect.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Not really. That infrastructure scales up. You pick up a few construction jobs and maybe get some reusable utility infrastructure. That's it. A lot of the other roles are field service type things that don't use local workers. That's not a bad thing, just not the end-all, be-all. if the building of data centers or similar facilities are a trend, you will build up good local capability to build these facilities and may start winning other business.
burger_moon 10y ago
> Governor McAuliffe approved a $1.25 million grant from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund to assist Fauquier County with the project. The company will also be eligible to receive sales and use tax exemptions on equipment. Was this worth 54 (unspecified types) jobs? I guess It's not that bad since it doesn't mention property tax exemption which usually goes along with new developments.
- cosmie 10y ago
  I'm not sure what the average salaries look like for data center employees, but assuming a reasonable, round figure of $50k/year, that's about $2.7mm/year in additional area income. Which has a multiplicative effect as it gets spent in the local economy and supports other area jobs. It also costs a lot of money to build out a data center and get all the infrastructure in place to support it, and that money gets spent (idealistically) on local contractors. Plus, once the area infrastructure, local zoning/regulations, and talent pool gets built out to support this type of project, it becomes a lot more attractive for other companies to bring similar projects. Tax exemptions to attract business can get real shady and dubious, but it's not just the permanent, direct jobs you have to factor in. The potential positive externalities in this case seem like a solid case for tax exemptions. And the grant helps absorb some of the cost of getting local infrastructure in place that'll be needed to support it; infrastructure that'll benefit more than just OVH.
bhouston 10y ago
OVH has great prices, especially on the SoYouStart line. https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/
- webtechgal 10y ago
  And these dedi boxes (also from OVH) are priced almost unbelievably low: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml
  - blfr 10y ago
    And there were offers that were even lower. I have a dedicated server from them for about 42EUR a year (yes, a year, 3.5EUR/mo). It's just an Atom box with a single 500GB HDD but still amazing.
  - garaetjjte 10y ago
    "IPv6: /128" What!?
    - niij 10y ago
      That seems to be par for the course for the online.net conglomerate. Scaleway only has /128s that are dynamically assigned on reboot.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      The Kimsufi line is a bunch of low-end boxes not meant for serious work, they technically allocate every server a /64 but you can't add RDNS records for anything but the "/128" you've been allocated. If you want a proper /64 block and support for it you need to get a server from their SoYouStart or OVH branded offerings.
doh 10y ago
Great. If they figure out the ordering system, it could be interesting. Last time (3 months ago) to install 200 servers (that they claim to have up in 120sec) would take 9 weeks, even if with our long term commitment.
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part? Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? You don't know what you don't know.
    - tmikaeld 10y ago
      OVH treats VIP customers very differently than its one-cheap-box-hire customers. EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        > So I really don't see any problem with 200 boxes from OVH. Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points: * When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment * When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on) * When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter (or in the other direction, depending on business requirements) It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.
stonogo 10y ago
This is the third time OVH has been just about to build a US datacenter in the past five years.
- ryporter 10y ago
  Yeah, I guess this means that their plans to build a data center in New York in 2016 fell through. [1] I love OVH, but I've been waiting for a while for a second data center in North America. I hope they build this one. [1] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting-speed-up-north-american-growth https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting...
WhitneyLand 10y ago
How much has the data center growth curve been dampened by Amz/Msft/Goog offerings?
- vidarh 10y ago
  Good question. I don't think it has that much of an effect, as none of the above compete with businesses like OVH on price at all. Companies like OVH that sell low priced are basically real estate investors (and, in fact, a number of real estate investment firms are large data centre owners) with various degrees of value-adds, but where the way to grow your profit margins is to identify lower priced property and cheap power relative to your competition and wait for your capital investment to appreciate. AWS/Azure/GCE on the other hand are tech play where they are getting their huge margins on value adds or perceived value adds and are much less directly affected
walrus01 10y ago
One of the reasons why the massive OVH datacenter is in its particular location in Quebec is the extremely cheap power from Quebec Hydro. At one time I checked and the large customer rate was 5.6 cents (Canadian!) per kWh. I am curious how much they are going to pay in VA and why they didn't choose to build a datacenter somewhere in OR or WA near the Columbia River hydroelectric systems instead.
- astrodust 10y ago
  It's also on a major trunk which helps considerably with connectivity, and ping times from there to the east coast of the US are comparable to Chicago. That cheap power is another reason why Québec is a big manufacturer of aluminum which is an extremely energy intensive process.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  Probably because they're aiming to provide a private government cloud and they want to be geographically closer to key clients - Fauquier county is a 20 min drive from DC and big co's in West Virginia. Also because the incentives Virginia is providing ($1.25m in cash, cuts on sales and use tax, cash for employee training) make up for a higher energy cost - especially the tax cuts.
- berns 10y ago
  An Oregon datacenter was also announced this year: http://mj.ovh.com/nl2/4tpt/xsvw.html http://mj.ovh.com/nl2/4tpt/xsvw.html
- sebtoast 10y ago
  Rate seems about right. Their datacenter is located near the Beauharnois power station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_Hydroelectric_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_Hydroelectric_Gene... I also stumbled upon an article that said it was (at the time, in 2012) the largest data center in the world. That doesn't sound right.
- hga 10y ago
  Because I used to live there and know the electric company was, prior to being acquired by a bigger one, well run by engineers (a good idea if you have nukes...), I expected their power rates at (eventual) massive data-center scales to be good. While I'm not sure I believe the "We're Great!" first thing I found with Google indicating the possibility of a rate even lower by a few tenths of a cent, it looks good ... except of course per Google the exchange rate is running 1-0.75. Still, their power should be pretty affordable, I'd more worry about tradeoffs in more expensive real estate vs. easier hiring of talent and the other advantages of being in a major telecom metro area. And their are other advantages as noted by others in this sub-thread, and doesn't AWS have its biggest region in NoVA?
jpalomaki 10y ago
I believe reasonably priced dedicated servers (from companies like OVH, Hetzner) will be big thing in future. Cloud based virtual machines are useful for many tasks, but it is also pretty nice to get 256GB/6 core/4TB machine for 140€ per month.
- ju-st 10y ago
  It should be a big thing, but their marketing/hype machine is seriously lacking. As a first step, building a data center presence in SV/west coast would help.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Their ability to do automated recurring billing, amazingly, is also lacking. I really wish they would fix that already. It's kindof a deal breaker for most people.
    - slau 10y ago
      How so? I've had servers with OVH and Online.net for about 10 years, and only had to look at the billing forms when I moved countries.
    - niij 10y ago
      I had an even more annoying issue with their billing system. I had 5 VPSs and whenever it was time for renewal, one of the VPSs would turn off ~5 days prematurely (before the renewal date). I contacted support multiple times about the error in their billing system until I got too frustrated and migrated last month.
- catdog 10y ago
  I agree, using dedicated hardware is certainly nice and has some advantages over VMs. It's not only a big thing in the future but also at present, companies like OVH or Hetzner seem to do well despite the rising of the "Cloud". You exactly know what you get performance wise, e.g. no bad influence from some random neighboring VM. Security is also a concern with virtualization, isolation between VMs turned out to be not that perfect as desired. You can also roll your own virtualization exactly tailored to your needs. "Cloud" VMs also tend to be rather expensive if you need them continuously, you pay for the flexibility they provide.
jarnix 10y ago
It may become difficult for OVH (based in France) to survive with Amazon and Azure deploying servers in France, don't you think ?
- dx034 10y ago
  I don't think so, they have a different type of clients. AWS is great if you want to quickly deploy servers or get rid of most administration work. If you can estimate the power you need and/or use a lot of bandwidth, OVH can be much, much cheaper.
- mamadrood 10y ago
  As a french guy, Azure is pretty much unknown here (except for MS shops, i guess) and Amazon is already used by startups. The difference between Amazon datacenters in France instead of Ireland / Germany will not change a thing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mooneater 10y ago
I would love OVH if they would finally implement automatic recurring credit card billing. Ive been asking them for years. What a horrible single point of failure that is.
- gnyman 10y ago
  I believe this is due to them being a French entity and the French laws or banking systems requiring this. But I could be wrong, I'm basing it on the fact that Gandi had the same thing unit they created a US Entity which could do the billing. I'm guessing this is not far away for OVH either now.
  - hyperknot 10y ago
    Their biggest competitor - Online.net - is also French, yet offers recurring payments and even PayPal subscriptions.
- michaelmachine 10y ago
  They do have automatic recurring billing for the Public Cloud servers now, but on the dedicated servers it is still the old payment system for some reason.
koksik202 10y ago
Bit too late for this game as AWS is expanding constantly in both Americas

187 points by ers35 10y ago

I think the reason for the location is due to the proximity to our 3 letter agencies. Thus the ability/requirement to tap into their infrastructure.

IgorPartola 10y ago

So does this make my data with them fall under the category of American companies and is not subject to warrant less searches? Or only their VA data center?

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Based on a Microsoft ruling, I believe only their US data center. As always, take measures to keep your data out of the US if it's important to you. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/microsoft-case-shows-the-limits-of-a-data-privacy-law.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  Out or in? Because if it's out, it's subject to the warrantless searches, right? But if it's in, the company can be compelled to give the NSA access?
  - seszett 10y ago
    If it's out of the US, the US don't have jurisdiction and I don't see them breaking into OVH's datacenters in France anytime soon to get to your data. If they really want to access it and are doing covert operations I don't think being in the US will stop them. I might be naive, but as far as I know there's no question that data is always safer if it stays in datacenters in Europe rather than in the US (which is why OVH is going to great lengths to separate their US entity as much as possible from the French one, and also why their first step in North America was Canada and not the US).
    - IgorPartola 10y ago
      I suppose my communication with the server would be encrypted, but wouldn't the NSA try to store all the back and forth transfers between my US-based laptop and my OVH server in France?
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        They could, which is why all of your communications between you and your OVH server should use high grade encryption (SSH, SSL, etc).
math0ne 10y ago
I'm definitely questioning this decision because I believe a lot of their business comes from people doing some pretty questionable things with copyright. Might open up some of the larger video hosts that work with them to the scrutiny of US authorities. I wouldn't worry about a personal seed box, but some pretty big video hosts work with them closely.
derefr 10y ago
Speaking of: are the non-US AWS regions subject to warrantless searches? Or are they technically their own "companies"?
r1ch 10y ago
They made a good post addressing this. https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-the-usa-while-preserving-its-european-identity https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-...

tiffanyh 10y ago

>> "Virginia successfully competed against North Carolina for the project, which will create 54 new jobs" How many people typically work at a data center for one of the largest hosting companies in the world? Because 54 jobs seems kind of low, no?

honkhonkpants 10y ago
That's pretty typical. You need maybe a couple of technicians to run the water and air handling systems, a handful of people on skateboards swapping out dead machines, and some security guards. Here's a recent article that says Google employees 400 people in their Oklahoma facility, which is enormous. http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facility-opening-in-pryor-brings-its-oklahoma-investment/article_13726985-22ca-56b6-8f29-dae948baf0e5.html http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facil...
SwellJoe 10y ago
The place where I colocate our servers (the company is probably in the top five in the industry in terms of size, with data centers in about a dozen cities) runs with a tech staff of ~six during the day and two overnight. They've obviously got other staff for all of the other business-related roles, but data centers just don't require a lot of staff in the general case.
derefr 10y ago
In the same way that some companies have negative externalities like pollution, you could think of a data-centre more as having a positive externality of job creation. Data-centers don't do many things themselves, using manual labor; instead, they're just large machines that consume purified resources (power, live fiber, provisioned equipment) and turn it into APIs. But purifying those resources for the DC's consumption does require people—and DCs need a lot of each of the resources they consume. For every N data-centres that get built in a state, that state probably employs a good few more power-plant workers and linemen, for just one effect.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Not really. That infrastructure scales up. You pick up a few construction jobs and maybe get some reusable utility infrastructure. That's it. A lot of the other roles are field service type things that don't use local workers. That's not a bad thing, just not the end-all, be-all. if the building of data centers or similar facilities are a trend, you will build up good local capability to build these facilities and may start winning other business.

burger_moon 10y ago

> Governor McAuliffe approved a $1.25 million grant from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund to assist Fauquier County with the project. The company will also be eligible to receive sales and use tax exemptions on equipment. Was this worth 54 (unspecified types) jobs? I guess It's not that bad since it doesn't mention property tax exemption which usually goes along with new developments.

cosmie 10y ago
I'm not sure what the average salaries look like for data center employees, but assuming a reasonable, round figure of $50k/year, that's about $2.7mm/year in additional area income. Which has a multiplicative effect as it gets spent in the local economy and supports other area jobs. It also costs a lot of money to build out a data center and get all the infrastructure in place to support it, and that money gets spent (idealistically) on local contractors. Plus, once the area infrastructure, local zoning/regulations, and talent pool gets built out to support this type of project, it becomes a lot more attractive for other companies to bring similar projects. Tax exemptions to attract business can get real shady and dubious, but it's not just the permanent, direct jobs you have to factor in. The potential positive externalities in this case seem like a solid case for tax exemptions. And the grant helps absorb some of the cost of getting local infrastructure in place that'll be needed to support it; infrastructure that'll benefit more than just OVH.

bhouston 10y ago

OVH has great prices, especially on the SoYouStart line. https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/

webtechgal 10y ago
And these dedi boxes (also from OVH) are priced almost unbelievably low: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml
- blfr 10y ago
  And there were offers that were even lower. I have a dedicated server from them for about 42EUR a year (yes, a year, 3.5EUR/mo). It's just an Atom box with a single 500GB HDD but still amazing.
- garaetjjte 10y ago
  "IPv6: /128" What!?
  - niij 10y ago
    That seems to be par for the course for the online.net conglomerate. Scaleway only has /128s that are dynamically assigned on reboot.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    The Kimsufi line is a bunch of low-end boxes not meant for serious work, they technically allocate every server a /64 but you can't add RDNS records for anything but the "/128" you've been allocated. If you want a proper /64 block and support for it you need to get a server from their SoYouStart or OVH branded offerings.

doh 10y ago

Great. If they figure out the ordering system, it could be interesting. Last time (3 months ago) to install 200 servers (that they claim to have up in 120sec) would take 9 weeks, even if with our long term commitment.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part? Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? You don't know what you don't know.
  - tmikaeld 10y ago
    OVH treats VIP customers very differently than its one-cheap-box-hire customers. EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      > So I really don't see any problem with 200 boxes from OVH. Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points: * When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment * When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on) * When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter (or in the other direction, depending on business requirements) It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.

stonogo 10y ago

This is the third time OVH has been just about to build a US datacenter in the past five years.

ryporter 10y ago
Yeah, I guess this means that their plans to build a data center in New York in 2016 fell through. [1] I love OVH, but I've been waiting for a while for a second data center in North America. I hope they build this one. [1] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting-speed-up-north-american-growth https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting...

WhitneyLand 10y ago

How much has the data center growth curve been dampened by Amz/Msft/Goog offerings?

vidarh 10y ago
Good question. I don't think it has that much of an effect, as none of the above compete with businesses like OVH on price at all. Companies like OVH that sell low priced are basically real estate investors (and, in fact, a number of real estate investment firms are large data centre owners) with various degrees of value-adds, but where the way to grow your profit margins is to identify lower priced property and cheap power relative to your competition and wait for your capital investment to appreciate. AWS/Azure/GCE on the other hand are tech play where they are getting their huge margins on value adds or perceived value adds and are much less directly affected

walrus01 10y ago

One of the reasons why the massive OVH datacenter is in its particular location in Quebec is the extremely cheap power from Quebec Hydro. At one time I checked and the large customer rate was 5.6 cents (Canadian!) per kWh. I am curious how much they are going to pay in VA and why they didn't choose to build a datacenter somewhere in OR or WA near the Columbia River hydroelectric systems instead.

astrodust 10y ago
It's also on a major trunk which helps considerably with connectivity, and ping times from there to the east coast of the US are comparable to Chicago. That cheap power is another reason why Québec is a big manufacturer of aluminum which is an extremely energy intensive process.
roymurdock 10y ago
Probably because they're aiming to provide a private government cloud and they want to be geographically closer to key clients - Fauquier county is a 20 min drive from DC and big co's in West Virginia. Also because the incentives Virginia is providing ($1.25m in cash, cuts on sales and use tax, cash for employee training) make up for a higher energy cost - especially the tax cuts.
berns 10y ago
An Oregon datacenter was also announced this year: http://mj.ovh.com/nl2/4tpt/xsvw.html http://mj.ovh.com/nl2/4tpt/xsvw.html
sebtoast 10y ago
Rate seems about right. Their datacenter is located near the Beauharnois power station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_Hydroelectric_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_Hydroelectric_Gene... I also stumbled upon an article that said it was (at the time, in 2012) the largest data center in the world. That doesn't sound right.
hga 10y ago
Because I used to live there and know the electric company was, prior to being acquired by a bigger one, well run by engineers (a good idea if you have nukes...), I expected their power rates at (eventual) massive data-center scales to be good. While I'm not sure I believe the "We're Great!" first thing I found with Google indicating the possibility of a rate even lower by a few tenths of a cent, it looks good ... except of course per Google the exchange rate is running 1-0.75. Still, their power should be pretty affordable, I'd more worry about tradeoffs in more expensive real estate vs. easier hiring of talent and the other advantages of being in a major telecom metro area. And their are other advantages as noted by others in this sub-thread, and doesn't AWS have its biggest region in NoVA?

jpalomaki 10y ago

I believe reasonably priced dedicated servers (from companies like OVH, Hetzner) will be big thing in future. Cloud based virtual machines are useful for many tasks, but it is also pretty nice to get 256GB/6 core/4TB machine for 140€ per month.

ju-st 10y ago
It should be a big thing, but their marketing/hype machine is seriously lacking. As a first step, building a data center presence in SV/west coast would help.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Their ability to do automated recurring billing, amazingly, is also lacking. I really wish they would fix that already. It's kindof a deal breaker for most people.
  - slau 10y ago
    How so? I've had servers with OVH and Online.net for about 10 years, and only had to look at the billing forms when I moved countries.
  - niij 10y ago
    I had an even more annoying issue with their billing system. I had 5 VPSs and whenever it was time for renewal, one of the VPSs would turn off ~5 days prematurely (before the renewal date). I contacted support multiple times about the error in their billing system until I got too frustrated and migrated last month.
catdog 10y ago
I agree, using dedicated hardware is certainly nice and has some advantages over VMs. It's not only a big thing in the future but also at present, companies like OVH or Hetzner seem to do well despite the rising of the "Cloud". You exactly know what you get performance wise, e.g. no bad influence from some random neighboring VM. Security is also a concern with virtualization, isolation between VMs turned out to be not that perfect as desired. You can also roll your own virtualization exactly tailored to your needs. "Cloud" VMs also tend to be rather expensive if you need them continuously, you pay for the flexibility they provide.

jarnix 10y ago

It may become difficult for OVH (based in France) to survive with Amazon and Azure deploying servers in France, don't you think ?

dx034 10y ago
I don't think so, they have a different type of clients. AWS is great if you want to quickly deploy servers or get rid of most administration work. If you can estimate the power you need and/or use a lot of bandwidth, OVH can be much, much cheaper.
mamadrood 10y ago
As a french guy, Azure is pretty much unknown here (except for MS shops, i guess) and Amazon is already used by startups. The difference between Amazon datacenters in France instead of Ireland / Germany will not change a thing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mooneater 10y ago

I would love OVH if they would finally implement automatic recurring credit card billing. Ive been asking them for years. What a horrible single point of failure that is.

gnyman 10y ago
I believe this is due to them being a French entity and the French laws or banking systems requiring this. But I could be wrong, I'm basing it on the fact that Gandi had the same thing unit they created a US Entity which could do the billing. I'm guessing this is not far away for OVH either now.
- hyperknot 10y ago
  Their biggest competitor - Online.net - is also French, yet offers recurring payments and even PayPal subscriptions.
michaelmachine 10y ago
They do have automatic recurring billing for the Public Cloud servers now, but on the dedicated servers it is still the old payment system for some reason.

koksik202 10y ago

Bit too late for this game as AWS is expanding constantly in both Americas