borked

Only euro-based people can benefit from this, so the rest of you - the back button awaits.

Bear with me here, cos this my sound like a marketing spin, but in all absolute honesty I've zero to gain by this.

You've probably heard of OVH - a french company that has kinda spread all over Europe in the last 10 years. They have DCs everywhere, but their main hub is in Roubaix, France.

They have always had damn good offers on servers, that I've always shied away from (too good to be true), but recently I was looking for a solution to a problem (multiple servers geolocalised as well as a cloud setup as central base) that I thought would have cost a fortune. I stumbled on them, and being in France I guess (accessing their .fr site) I get access to more of their beta stuff than their .co.uk, .es, .nl etc parties.

Anyway, I managed to get set up with them for a 5 dedicated servers setup in cluster and a private cloud for back end computation for only ?160/mo. That was the start - in the beginning I was sceptical but went ahead (I had 1st month free being a frog-registered co) configured everything as a "virtual bay" using their CP, added dynamic load balancing to direct the major traffic to equally 3 servers of the 5 cluster, with the 2 free servers taking CPU strain when possible and when not directing load to the private cloud setup.

It took about 3 weeks from the order on the email to a stable situation to get this lot in palce, but by god, it's fantastic - I can add servers and/or clusters to this at will with the click of a button now.

Of, and to boot, they offer a frikken excellent VoIP service - for 1?/mo/number have whatever number you want (region, country, freephone, premium, audiotel) all easily configured. Have your phone # in spain redirect to your main UK number, or your cell phone, or offer "to talk to sales, press 1" PBAX services blah blah.

They are 100% acceptable to porn (I asked them over their CS line) so long as it's legal.

The only problem is, you need to know how to administer a server.... from their CP, you can reboot your server, or if it dies, their techs will reboot it under 30 mins, but that's it. They give you ever other amenity available to do shit with your servers, except the day to day housekeeping of them.

If you want me to help you out there, just hit me up ;)

This was not at all a sales pitch, just a FYI on this company that exists throughout Europe that is damn impressive. Well, Google, BT, Orange et al all host their switches and servers with them :P

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For coding work - hit me up on andy // borkedcoder // com
(consider figuring out the email as test #1)