As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability.
Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
I'm using OVH for downloads from PortableApps.com as their un-metered VPS was one of the better and affordable options. Haven't noticed any issues (knock wood). Is there something else I should look at?
Man I used PortableApps.com so much back when I was in high school to get around the "you can't install anything on this computer" rule... Thank you for your service.
How many data centers have had a server room burn to the ground?
We had a halon system in an on-prem data center twice the size of my bedroom. We had to knock out a wall because the volume was too small for the smallest cooling system we could get installed in the building. That was 20 years ago, and we had to do it for insurance reasons. In the United States, which I know you Europeans like to make fun of for being sooo amusingly Neanderthal.
I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread.
OVH is about cheap, not quality.
Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.
I rent a dedicated server from OVH for various self hosted services and for the price I really can't complain. If there's been any outages they happened at times when I wasn't interacting with it so I didn't notice. I'm not entirely sure I'd trust a server that mattered to them but for what I'm doing they're fine.
I'm pro OVH granted I've not used Hetzner before and only used DO briefly. I too remember the burn but they gave credit. I like the emails saying "your service is under DDOS attack".
OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].
Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.
HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.
In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).
I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, entrepreneurs, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.
>Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France
While started by two French founders, Datadog was always an American company. It was only post IPO they started hiring in France (for more than local sales roles).
> (I personally don't mind subsidizing my library + local school district... good schools and libraries are good for the community)
Just sharing random coffee break thoughts... it always blows my mind is how many people _don't_ think like this. When base conditions improve for society, the conditions improve for _everyone_ regardless if they directly benefit you.
I'm also in the boat where I don't have kids, but I'd also like to live in a place that has educated people - so schools make perfect sense to me. Heck, even if I didn't benefit from it, providing children education is just the gosh-darn right thing to do.
It's just lack of trust. It's not that people want a worse community, it's that they have a hard time believing that taking extra money from their paycheck will create a better community.
Part of it is real; seeing massive amounts of state/local government waste and corruption makes it feel safer to keep your extra dollars instead of giving them away.
Part of it is difficulty evaluating timelines; more tax dollars for a better elementary school to be built in 3 years and to yield higher educated people 18 years from now it a lot to bet on.
IMO it's because there's both benefit and waste/corruption in these kinds of social benefit structures. some people choose to only see one or the other:
"these benefit everyone including those who don't use them directly! how could you be against it?"
"this money that I'm having to pay is either overpaid to corrupt vendors, or just straight wasted, why would we ever want to increase how much we're paying into this system?"
in reality you can't have one without the other. it's up to each person to decide whether they can take the bad with the good
Yes, universal health will start saving money even during the first transition year. We spend almost 1/3 or more of those total health dollars on billing administration. That amount surpasses the uninsured number. And the reality is if we can get medical care during the daytime, eventually emergency rooms might get less hectic. My hope is that more days than not ER personell have to pass the time like at a Firehouse.
Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying.
Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation. Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was arbitrary, or useless.
Yep! And, I send that exact message/email all the time in good faith. But, even with that - if someone just wants to talk, trying to nail them down on a topic can be _seen_ as obstructive, even though it's productive. Unfortunately, lots of people who schedule meetings just want to talk with not much outcome.
I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It really really depends on the company, the leadership, the people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing it.
In my experience, sometimes the job is just to talk and socialize — eg, with sister teams or stakeholders.
For my own sanity, I at least try to accurately label those… which is how my calendar usually fills with “1:1”, “coffee”, “sync”, etc. Maybe it’s pedantic, but the accurate labels help my sanity by letting me know which meetings I can show up without prep, a coffee and cookie, and push if things get busy.
'Member when a major crypto exchange, which had original been a market place for Magic the Gathering cards (so it was not a mountain named Gox), was hacked and everyone's crypto stolen because the owner had implemented his own SSH server in PHP?
And, furthermore - being a "noisy Nancy" is often a bad move for your career, socially. As I age, I realize it's more important to get along in most corporate/professional settings than it is to be the person fixing things.
All work represents a social entity (person/persons) and when you're the one calling out issues, pushing for proactive measures, and pushing against bad practices/complexity you're typically taking issue with _someone's_ work along the way. This is often seen as a "squeaky wheel" or "noisy Nancy" - or hell, outright antisocial. Most of the time it is not in your best interest to be this person.
The people who keep their nose down + mouth shut, those who prioritize marketing their work, and the sycophants are the ones who have longevity and upward trajectory - this is corporate America work culture.
> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
Anecdotal of course, but even when I accidentally ran over a squirrel I _immediately_ noticed. Running a _person_ over and _dragging them_... well I think I would realize.
Obviously this is some serious arm-chair speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.