OVH is currently the largest hosting provider in the world, 120 thousand servers in Europe and another 360 thousand in Canada. The fiercest competition in the French market keeps prices low (especially for traffic).

This company was of interest to many for a long time, until 2011, they generally worked only with EU residents, after - they had to register in different branches at different times, there were many unclear (for me) questions. I decided to clarify them.

Under the cut, there’s a short story about what currency you will have to pay, how to get rid of VAT, what documents require and a brief test of a dedicated server on Atom for 10 euros per month.

Register

Clients from Russia are sent to the French branch of OVH - payments in euros, respectively (in the British branch - prices are slightly higher in terms of the exchange rate). Of the minuses - the site is only in French, like all registration forms.

Immediately after registration, but BEFORE payment, when you already find out your account number, we write a letter to the support “Hi, I am citizen of Russia, and live in Russia. Please remove VAT on account ########## ”and attachment - immediately scan the passport. After a few hours, your account will be marked as “non-resident” and all your subsequent orders will be without VAT (-20%). There is support in Russian - pagalba@ovh.lt , they support accounts open in any branches.

Now you can pay for the order. It will be checked manually - doing nothing on the weekend. If you paid with a card, you will be asked to send a scan of the card itself, a scan of the passport again, and a scan of confirmation of residence (I sent the Russian registration, everything is in Russian - but it passed). When I paid by PayPal - all this was not required.

After a manual check (on a weekday during business hours - a few hours), your order will finally begin to be executed. Payments for the extension of the service - should already go automatically.

What is delicious there

Initially, I wanted to try their Cloud - it is made in the style of Amazon: different types of instances with hourly pay + separate disks for them are mounted, but with unlimited traffic at 100 Mb / s (when OVH says that traffic is unlimited - they really mean it )

But then - could not get past Kimsufi: their small dedicated servers on Atom. The smallest Kimsufi - 10 euros per month. Inside - 2GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive and a processor as lucky (minimum - 1 Atom core). The Guaranteed channel is 100 Mbit / s, the port is cut up to 10 Mbit / s after 5 TB of traffic. Of course, when you exceed it, you can buy traffic, more expensive servers do not have traffic restrictions.

Personally, I came across a server with Atom N2800 (2 cores 4 threads, 1.83Ghz), a new broom TOSHIBA DT01ACA050 (3.5 ', 7200rpm). The luckiest are the servers on the lower Core2Duo for the same money, but this is rare. Old brooms can also get caught - everything is as usual with server rental.


After confirming the payment, the server is really set in an hour, they send an iron testing report (temperature, disks, etc.) to the mail.

Moving away from the topic - it is worth mentioning the "transparent" OVH CDN - it is now in beta test (= free), upon completion of the beta test they promise prices for CDN traffic 1TB = 9.99 €, 10TB = 79.99 €, 100TB = 599.99 € (again , this is “slightly” below the market).

We configure and test the server

The only additional thing that needs to be set up is the French locale (at least on Ubuntu). Fixing this is easy:

update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.utf8

And log in.

A few years ago I had a dedicated Atom 330 in colocation - it would be interesting to compare unixbench of the same version (4.1 WHT):

TEST INDEX atom n2800 INDEX atom 330         
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 187.4 126.6               
Double-Precision Whetstone 47.5 41.3              
Execl Throughput 162.7 112.3               
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 481.6 221.4               
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 360.1 147.1               
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 735.3 427.3               
Pipe-based Context Switching 154.4 88.7              
Pipe Throughput 101.5 45.1              
Process Creation 156.1 125.7               
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 165.1 99.8              
System Call Overhead 263.9 151.3               
                                     ======== ==========                  
     FINAL SCORE 199.3 118.1               

An almost two-fold increase in both the processor and the disk. However, even the performance of the old atom was enough for me.

Pings - from Moscow at the moment 65ms, to some Russian hosters for comparison - 115ms due to the habits of some providers, traffic from Russia to Russia through Europe is allowed. Those. hosting a server in Europe does not necessarily result in increased latency for Russian users. Ping from OVH to the USA is 105ms, against 120ms to the same site from Russia.

I stay here :-)

Update 02.02.2014: The flight is normal, uptime has exceeded in a year.