Euro folk in here
 

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

Oh, and forgot to add for you seo-type people - real geo-seo-ip solutions with geo-localised IPs to countries in Europe ordered in groups of /30 (4 IPs), /29 (8 IPs), /28 (16 IPs), /27 (32 IPs) blocks with one-off payments (42€ for a /27 block, €7 for /30). Max 512 IPs per account.

No longer can the goog think your content is potentially duplicate as it comes physically from a diff country, or does it?

Well one thing what suck at them is how they have datacenter only in France.

urghm...

http://weathermap.ovh.net/

I think you'll find they have DCs in 11 countries in europe... If you're worried about their Global Crossing hop in Paris, rest assured it's redundant with London, which is why Google hosts their main euro infrastructure there:

http://weathermap.ovh.net/backbone

believe it or not, that tiny rack on the left labelled Google, is actually their switch (or most probably many switches) that links the Goog into Europe.... try their traceroute and you will hit one of those switches in that diagram (at least on the main weathermap page).

What other ISP gives you live 10-min updates on their infrastructure??

Well i have one wm who called them and they said how they have only in france dc.And that things which have in other countries are probably connection nodes and not servers.

Well, they are wrong cos when I was looking I called their French # and actually wanted a UK server, but after discussing my needs found out the FR based location was best for me (I needed the FR telephone #s which kind of pinned me down geographically), but I could honestly have chosen servers in their London DC also if I wanted - the operator told me all euro traffic routes mainly through france or if that hits >65% goes via london.

fwiw.

And in any case, connection node or not, why would this matter if you have geo-localised IPs to your country? I don't see the problem in where the server is physically located in country X if it virtually appears to all to be based in country Y.

interesting .

So ip's are like $2 each, 1 time fee?

Yes, but you order them in blocks (as stated above) and those blocks are sequential numbers. You can allocate any block to those IPs though when you divide them up to use and a day or two later, they become assigned to that country. So if you want say 8 IPs on different subnets, you order 4 (same subnet, sequential) assign to say NL, wait a few days, order another 4 and assign to eg ES and they'll be on a different subnet (again sequential). If you order 4 NL then 4ES straight away, you'll end up with 8 IPs probably on the same subnet but they will be geo-localised.

Once divided up and routed to a server, there's no going back... you can't change your mind and route them to another server

do you icq? would like to chat briefly

Ah.. seeexy picture.. i mean the /backbone picture... for nerds like me )

Do they have such sweet deals for non-French as well? I'm not impressed by what I see on ovh.nl

so you got 6 dedicated servers for €160 euros?
if that's correct please contact me on ICQ (in sig)

would like to ask you some questions.

thanks!

I did have, but since a few months now, I can no longer log in, so I gave up using it!
fire me an email...

you can get 6 dedis for 95? if you want - their kimsufi range.
http://www.kimsufi.ie/ks/

It all depends what you want them for - my needs were quite particular where proc speed I didn't care about for the most part, but redundancy so I took a group of celery sticks at cheapo ?15 backed up with the more powerful things for mysql redundancy.

the .ie domain I just noticed - http://ovh.ie is actually open for people from the US and Canada too, so I guess the title is misleading!

what is it you're after? they seem to have the same servers as the .fr site... ignore the splash page when you click on dedicated servers, but look more in the left column, as well as their kimsufi range (isgenoeg)

a 72TB server for ?600/mo with 10Gbs connection and 123mbs bandwidth included is damn sweet!

Here, stroke one out...

http://weathermap.ovh.net/schemes/we...?1296115079760

I can vouch for them as well... did some tests with them starting in 07/2007 and have most of my stuff with them by now, except some backups and special servers that need to be in certain places.

They are good :2 cents: