Anybody familiar with OVHcloud?

[KGIII]

I'm putting on my big boy pants and renting a bare-metal server. I 'know enough' about the server operation, it's what I'll be adding on top of it that's going to make it more of a challenge. I'll also need to get up to speed.

It's a long story... I'll make it short.

I have a lot of hosting that's spread across many companies. I 'sell' web hosting, but I don't actually make any money doing so. In fact, I lose money doing so. That's okay. I like it as a hobby.

One of the companies I use has ceased all communication. The clients haven't heard anything for more than a month and a half. I have no idea how much longer they'll keep the lights on.

So, I'm going to do the insane thing. I'm going to spend even more money to rent a dedicated server.

I'm pretty much shooting from the hip with this one. I've managed servers, but not for offering web hosting to the public.

So far, I'm liking the offerings (and prices) at OVHcloud. They're fair and reasonable. (They also have some good VPS prices, which I might consider at a later date.)

Does anybody here have any experience with OVH, or with one of their subsidiaries? If so, what were your experiences? How well do they support, and how quickly do they respond to support requests? (Responding quickly is not the same as responding well.)

LOL It might just be me asking the questions in the future!

I've pretty much settled on CWP on OpenLiteSpeed, and I'll splurge to get my clients access to Softaculous.

 

[Trml]

I don't have experiences with their support or heard any strong opinions about it. It reminds me of my first hosting provider, which was based in Paris. This was back in the good 'ole millennium, when you shared virtual hosts on one server with a hundred others and no-one had much of an issue with other customers scrolling through your path/config files, because it was a way to learn for your own script concoctions.

The OVHcloud name reminded me of a major data centre fire, which they suffered about five years ago. One of their sites (Strassbourg I think) was basically destroyed and they lost a court case for storing the latest backups they produced for a big customer's cloud at the same site as the systems.

I mention it since I believe such incidents will sharpen tech providers processes. To stick to the point, I'd be surprised, if they still handle backups like that. Very recently they were one of the winners for a major EU cloud competitive tender, so they are one of the very big players.

Regarding pricing, I'd only advise you to check how recently they raised respective prices. All hosting firms do have to adjust pricing considerably to account for their hardware costs. I've seen reports that some (have to) do it to the scale of 50%+. You don't want to be lured by price and find them just in the process of having to adjust theirs.

 

[KGIII]

To stick to the point, I'd be surprised, if they still handle backups like that.

I think it's safe to assume that they've learned from the lesson. Losing in court is usually a good way to learn lessons.

Regarding pricing, I'd only advise you to check how recently they raised respective prices.

They've had consistent pricing for a while. I'd been looking at it for a while.

Last night, I said to heck with it and plonked my money down. I've got my plan together. I have a backup plan if that plan doesn't work. I do not have a plan if the backup plan doesn't work. If that doesn't work, I'll just have to do it all manually.

I've settled on Apache and MariaDB. (Plus PHP, of course. Users should be able to select their PHP version.)

I've worked on many servers, but not in this capacity. I've hosted many sites, but not on my own hardware. We will have to see how it works out. I'm not doing it to make any real money. It's just a hobby -- which I make abundantly clear.

 

[Trml]

If you have a few sites to host on there contributing to the cost and don't account for your time keeping it the cogs flight, it can't be far off breaking even. That's great, with everyone on it benefiting from a dedicated machine. Happy hacking.

Out of curiosity, which location of them did you choose? Canada and a server ping of less than 15ms with your fiber is my guess.

 

[KGIII]

Canada and a server ping of less than 15ms with your fiber is my guess.

I did indeed go with Canada, as other areas were sold out of the package I wanted.

It's nothing too impressive, just 8 cores, 32 GB of RAM, and a butttload of storage. I did make one controversial decision. I went with HDDs instead of SSDs. There are all sorts of ways to cache things, and much of what's hosted will be fairly static content.

I'm sort of rushed, but I'm not going to let myself get rushed. I have no idea when the existing content is going down for good.

Also, the hosting company has a community forum. I've let folks know of my plans. I might be able to help them out. They may become new clients.

If I scrapped all of my other hosting accounts and moved everything to this server, it'd save quite a bit of money. I always buy a lot more web hosting than I'll need. I also like to keep things compartmentalized. This means I end up buying reseller accounts always with cPanel and WHM.

I'm skipping both cPanel and WHM (and WHMCS). There are less expensive options out there, and some of them are free. I'm also not going to pay for LiteSpeed. I can't really use OpenLiteSpeed because it can't process the .htaccess files well. In fac, you have to reboot the whole thing just to get the changed .htaccess recognized. So, we won't be doing that.

I'm hopeful that at least one of the other hosters will step up to give me a hand.

Plus, I'll have to get the missus up to speed, well enough to at least follow directions. If I'm incapacitated, I want it to go smoothly.

 

[deb_user]

I think it's safe to assume that they've learned from the lesson. Losing in court is usually a good way to learn lessons.

I don't think I would call it a good way to learn, but certainly effective.