Kimsufi C-05G from OVH (Ireland)

Title: Kimsufi C-05G
Provider: OVH (Ireland)

Transfer: First 3Tb/month @ NIC speed, thereafter @ 10Mbps. +€14.90/month per extra Tb.

Currency: €

Setup: 0.00 (ex VAT) Monthly Cost: 14.99 (ex VAT) [In Euros: €Formatting error In US Dollars: $Formatting error]

Detailed Notes:

[Updated June 2010]

OVH have a fairly rotten reputation - despite being, or perhaps because of being one of the largest dedicated hosting providers in the world, there do seem to be an awful lot of people out there who hate them and have nothing good to say. Personally I have had no problems myself whatsoever and furthermore there are a legion of apparently happy customers in their customer forums, and of course no company would become so big if they were really all that bad,  however I do think it depends on what you're buying from them. If you rent an OVH RPS, then well you should expect an interesting time and you certainly don't want to have high expectations. If however you rent one of their unmanaged Kimsufi dedicated servers then barring hardware failure, your likely main complaint will be bandwidth restrictions or weirdly limited connectivity.

Kimsufi used to be sold under an "unlimited" bandwidth plan which of course torrent seedbox users absolutely loved and equally, foamed at the mouth when they learned that "unlimited" came with restrictions such as differing speeds depending on what network peering agreements OVH has with other networks. Put another way, the network could behave very differently at the start of a month versus the end of the month which led some to feel they were being cheated.

As of July 2009 OVH have completely revamped their Kimsufi offerings not least imposing a new bandwidth limit of 3Tb/month after which NIC speed drops to 10Mbit which should clarify things for a lot of people. They have also bumped up the RAM, CPU and hard drive specs for the same price so supposedly all is good. However I personally think that they have left a massive gap between the lowest end package (this one) and the next one up which is a full quad core Q6700. They should have added a €25/month dual core offering or even a €35/month triple core platform. That said, their €40/month quad core is breathtaking value, but it's just too expensive for this website (and indeed my own pocket). I think that this gap in their portfolio is short sighted especially when one of their biggest rivals 1&1 Hosting has a dual core server smack bang in the middle of this price segment. Still, onto the review.

World Connectivity:

Pros:

2Gb is lots of RAM - which is really good for enterprise deployments. The hard drive is also massive and one of the latest models so it's quick too. We also very much like the free 100Gb backup storage which is unique for this segment.

OVH are well known for being very well connected around Europe, somewhat well connected to the US (100ms+ packet lag) and not so well connected to everywhere else (e.g. Australia and South East Asia where you can expect 300ms+ packet lag). Every provider does this to some extent, however OVH work hard to save money here so you get their "best effort" connectivity which is constantly tuned to reduce costs. Unlike almost all other providers though, they have a special page telling you what's happening right now at http://smokeping.ovh.net/ovh-server-statistics/show.cgi which we consider a very good thing indeed.

Cons:

The 1.2Ghz Celeron D 220 is a low end workhorse based on Core 1 technology, but it's a fairly ancient microarchitecture nowadays. I personally wonder from where they source them as to my knowledge they have been out of production for over a year now, but despite this the Celeron D 220 is still much better than the legacy Netburst crap offered by other providers. Either way it's a single core processor when really it should be a dual core.

The other MAJOR con is that OVH will only deal with customers from its locale, so Irish people MUST use kimsufi.ie, Czech people MUST use kimsufi.cz and so on. And here's the kicker: if you don't live (as in, have a mailing address) in one of these European countries then they won't do business with you. That means that these offers are out of bounds for most of the world's population  and you'll have to go through one of their (many) resellers who add on a few quid per month for their overheads.

Why do OVH limit their customer base like this? Simple: they substantially reduce their network costs this way as they keep most of their traffic within Europe. It actually would cost them more to do differently.

Verdict:

One of the very best for enterprise web application deployment, especially as internal OVH traffic is not counted towards your transfer limits so you can deploy all sorts of interesting applications across multiple servers. Their recent price drop to €15/month is extremely welcome, but it makes the gulf between this product and their next highest which is a quad core for €40/month even more apparent.