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

Many have long been interested in this company, until 2011 they generally worked only with EU residents, after that they had to register in different departments at different times, there were many unclear (for me) questions. I decided to clarify them.

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

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

Immediately after registration, but BEFORE payment, when you already know 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 in the attachment - immediately passport scan. In 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 opened in any branches.

Now you can pay for the order. It will be checked manually - it is useless to do it on weekends. If you paid with a card, you will be asked to send a scan of the card itself, a passport scan again, and a proof of residence confirmation (I sent the Russian registration, everything is in Russian - but it’s over). When paid by PayPal - all this is not required.

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

What is there delicious

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

But then - I could not pass by Kimsufi: their small dedicated servers on Atom. The smallest Kimsufi - 10 euros per month. Inside, there is 2GB of memory, 500GB of hard drive and the processor is lucky (at least 1 Atom core). _Guaranteed_ channel 100 Mbit / s, the port is cut to 10 Mbit / s after 5TB traffic. Of course, by exceeding, you can buy additional traffic, more expensive servers have no traffic restrictions.

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


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

Departing from the topic - it is worth mentioning the “transparent” OVH CDN - it is now in beta test (= free), upon completion of the beta test promise CDN traffic prices 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 tuning is the French locale (at least on Ubuntu). Fix it easy:

update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 

And relogin.

A few years ago, I had a dedicated Atom 330 in a coloration - it would be interesting to compare the 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 

Almost two-fold increase both on the processor, and on a disk. However, even the performance of the old atom was enough for me.

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

I stay here :-)

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