Why these servers are so cheap ?

Dont know them, but old hardware perhaps?

Because the bandwidth is oversold, the servers are unmanaged so you need to install, configure and maintain them yourself, and support can't be compared to most ISP's here (ticket response times, 24/7 support etc)

http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/availability.xml

The bw is not at all oversold on Premium Bandwidth. I have 4 servers with them since 2 yrs. ow and they are the best host I have been in. Fwiw, i manage everything myself, which you have to, but with free KVM and such, its easy.

I know you can manage your servers but most here can't or don't prefer to do so

Nice to hear.

I always get a good chuckle over those hosts who scream 'oversold' right out of the gate when they can't compete on price or offer. In regards to 'oversold'... it's not always the case, and while I concede it happens to some degree, it is not an absolute always or never.

OVH is bigger than any adult host (maybe aside from choopa).

OVH is good if you can manage your own servers.

depends on how you compare things of course, servers, bandwidth, staff, customers...
OVH is much bigger than choopa in terms of bandwidth

iirc ovh has 50k+ servers now? I think they are by far one of the biggests hosts/providers period.

The hardware is notch, but when limited to 15 TB / month then it's not that cheap.

So far, I've noticed that the "unlimited bandwidth" is limited to 10 Mbps or 10 TB and the "free kvm" is £150 setup and £19 per month. Professional use is an additional £15 / month. If you want more than one IP, that will cost more.

So figure actual cost roughly £78 or $120 for the cheapest one. It turns me away when companies say it's unlimited, then at the bottom of the page say what the real limit is, and say it's free, but it's really $30 / month. That's lying and I tend not to do business with people who lie to me.

10tb isnt very much, but still good prices.

http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/
Got a I7 with 24 gig of ram with them for $81 a month, can't beat that! It's a brand of OVH.

I go with the EG servers - http://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/eg_best_of.xml
and I see there is a difference here as these are 200Mbs premium, whereas the .ie extension servers are limited to 20TB/mo (60mbs). With the EG servers, the kvm IS free...
and the geo-localised IPs are one-off fees, which makes them *damn* cheap.
100GB backup space to boot too.

I love their cloud offerings though - very cheap and very reliable for non-processor intensive operations. nginx works beautifully on them.

You can't beat a quad dual core w/ 24GB ram and 2xTB drives for ~150/mo.

I think though, the best offerings are on their french pages, so it helps to be in France....

I'm waiting for this to be released for mac and linux... that is going to be a sweet backup service @€70/yr for unlimited space (I already called to ask if that was permitted)

http://www.ovh.com/jobs/

translation of the key figures (right column)
#1 french host
#1 european host
#4 world host
6 DCs
16 subsiduary companies
420 collaborations (I imagine in transport)
created in 1999
120k dedicated servers
2.3million registered domains
8million clients
18million hosted sites

OVH are massive plus they've got their own linux repositories which makes installing software very fast.

They are unmanaged though.

doesnt ovh do CDN for some big places?

(myspace,facebook,etc) ?

i5 cant be that old.

They are the biggest host in Europe, and are expanding in America with the opening of a huge " green " datacenter in Montreal .

Take a look at theuir existing facilities, it is just amazing .

What a great many site owners do not realize, is that the majority of the cost of your hosting plan is the level of technical support you receive.

The amount of money actually ear-marked towards recouping the costs of the hardware is rather small ... with many hosts almost giving the hardware away for free - if you are using any real amount of bandwidth.

One thing to remember when choosing a host/server, is that all hardware fails at some point. What you invest into a host who will be there for you - who has your ass covered around the clock, to minimize downtime - could be the difference between a small burp, or a much longer downtime that could be disastrous financially.

In my experience ... a great many site owners focus on getting the most hardware they can - with the most impressive specs - and in doing so, not only are paying for hardware overkill, but not putting enough emphasis on their technical support.

Unless you are an experienced system administrator, you need to invest in an adequate level of tech support. Sure anybody can learn to use a web-based control panel and a few terminal/SSH commands, but what happens when you get hacked, or DDoS'ed, or need to harden your server security, or need to install critical software patches? Not knowing what you are doing is going to - mark my words - be a very expensive lesson to learn. Most system admins for hire charge $200-300 an hour - billable in 15 minute increments - when you need to find an SA that will fix your server "NOW".

Let me paraphrase this -to put it into perspective. I used to be a police constable in Toronto, and worked a few seedy areas of the city with high crime rates. People constantly came and told me about their cars being broken into and/or stolen, and then asked my opinion what brand of car alarm I considered to be the best one/most effective?

My answer was always the same. "A car alarm is only a deterrent -at best - and some car thieves are not even phased by them. If you take the money you were willing to invest in a car alarm, and increase your insurance coverage, when your car is stolen or broken into, it will be far less painful for you to get a replacement. The better coverage you have, the less time you will spend arguing on the phone with adjusters and over-writers who will do whatever they can in their power to NOT have to pay out. It's a game!!

So think of the biggest, baddest spec'ed out server as a car with a fancy expensive car alarm ... a fancy, expensive car alarm does not guarantee your car will not get stolen/broken into. Just because you got the biggest, most bad-assed server your money can buy you, does not mean that at some point you will not have downtime. You are much better off making sure that the level of tech support you are receiving is more than adequate, so that if/when disaster does strike, and you are face with downtime, that you are back up and running as quickly as possible, to limit financial losses, as well as losses of your sanity.

A colleague of mine recently showed me an ad for a hosting company with fairly decent prices, but most of their hardware was approximately 2 year old processors. He was cutting them up badly, laughing at why he would go with a host with "such old hardware" when he could go with another company that has brand new current year processors - at almost the same price? I looked at their TOS and fine print, and the company with the "brand new" hardware only offered support as a premium add-on for $99.00 per month - so add another $100 to their price, and it's suddenly not so fantastic.

In reality, most server companies that have been around for a while, and know what they are doing, know that a 2 year old processor with a good amount of RAM will be more than enough power for 90% of their clients. Of course special needs clients can still order a brand new processor if they desire, but the 1-2 year old processor with a decent amount of RAM (RAM is at it's lowest prices ever ..) is a going to give them much more bang for their buck.

If you are choosing your next server/host based solely on hardware specs, you may be overlooking what is really important ... your Tech Support.

Wow, that's not bad as long as they have good uptime.. about $100 a month

Wow did they also move Montreal to America from Canada? HUGE

You fucking idiot!

America is a fucking continent, not a country. The country is called United States of America.
Note the fucking OF???

That's because the country is inside a fucking continent called America, wich is also subdivided in three parts: North America, Central America and South America.

And you still try to sound cool by being sarcastic. Fucking ignorant....

Agreed whole heatedly.

What many, if not most we see, realistically need (unless they are running a high bandwidth, high traffic, media driven site for example) is a decent Dual Core server with some decent, not excessive, bandwidth speed.

Quad Cores, Dual Quad Cores with 100TB pipes and 16GB of RAM etc. is over kill for what many actually need. They should cut back on the hardware, and invest so me of that money in back ups and redundancy. You do not need super computers for blogs, link networks, and what not. Some decent bandwidth on a solid machine would do just fine. However, most clients come demanding what they want versus truly need based on their own traffic and history numbers.

for the geography course ... so many ignorants on this site ...

No listing for Australia.

Reckon they'd believe I'm from Austria?

lol