OVH is a French based company (located in Roubaix Valley) founded and owned by Octave Klaba /Oles ( his nick). At the time being OVH claims to have 70 k servers ( which makes them the biggest Internet provider).

In addition to their shared hosting, domain name registration, colocation and dedicated servers (with value added specifications) OVH started offering a handful of newfangled products which include RPS, VOIP, cloud hosting .

What do users love about OVH: location in France ( heart of Europe) which would give the French company the possibility to have lower amount of hops to their clients. The fact that all of their servers who provide root access are hooked into a 100mbit pipe ( some are even connected to a 200mbit one). The possibility to have a very strong (and just launched into the market) hardware for a very reasonable price tag.

What users don't like: English people (from OVH's UK forum) dislike being answered in French when most of them speak English ( as most English). Users dislike high installation fees . Users dislike to have changes in company's policies from month to month. One of the thing that upset many customers is the monthly cap ( which they say it is not fair as the French customers don't get any cap/ bandwidth limit per month). International customers (who are not in countries that they sell ) can't get the product and have to pay a reseller ( which is not completely clear if it is valid by OVH). Server delivery time frames in most cases last a large amount of time.
. Low quality support ( forums are clients best best to solve problems by asking colleague clients). Big setup fees (specially in low end products such as RPS's ) in which the product costs 10Euros per Month and the setup fee 49 Euro. Delivery times take quite a lot to be processed and the product ready to be used.



RPS:

For those who don't know what an RPS is: Real Private Server it is a dedicated server but without its own disks. . ''How comes?'' you might ask yourself and scratch your head. Fact is that they have a bunch of disks stacked into what it is called an iSCSI SAN, iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface and is a an IP based Interface Storage solutions. Some of the include : redundancy, better access times and lower cost.

RPS have a bad congestion of internal traffic ( as every owner of their RPS wants to access to his data) and bottlenecks tend to be the performance killer product which could be a revolution if the company invested in a faster ( I/O ). Why is this a bad thing? because they offer a product which is deceiving. You a 100mbit network connection and clients access to data ( and to run applications) do not exceed the 1 MB/sec. See chart below:

Low-end/Standard( as they call it): RPS (I): has VERY low transfer rate ( and of course the usual 100mbit pipe which makes OVH the king it is)


Disk access ISCSI
Minimum ISCSI flows 1 MB/sec
Connection 100 Mbps
Bandwidth 100 Mbps
Traffic limit unlimited

cost: for almost 10 Euro you get an N270 Intel Atom processor, with 533 Mhz FSB . Nice processor as it has a low TDP ( 2.5W) but not a good choice for something that requires any real power. Memory: you get 512 Mb DDR 2 which is good for most common tasks (like hosting a web site, having a VPN or having a shoutcast)

Mid Grade/Premium ( as they call it):RPS (I): Same stuff as the previous one but with a better internal guaranteed transfer rate ( 4MB/sec). Downside is price: the bundle ( RPS I +improved private transfer rates) will cost you twice the cost of the Standard RPS I (almost 20Euros) to get an acceptable access to your slice of storage. Why do we say acceptable? Because your network speed is 100mbit/12.5MB/sec and you internal is 4MB/sec.


High Grade/Business: same as Premium but with a real deal internal network connection to your HDD slice (10MB/sec) which is very handy to work with as it almost has (almost) the same transfer rates (public and access to your hdd share. Downside: 30 euro per month ( 3X times the RPS I standard plan )


General downsides:

-Bottlenecks in the iSCSI SAN:
For large download speed you should transfer directly to RAM. Remember the RPS are very cheap server. You know already the bottlenecks.

-Backlogs on building the RPS's:
There is also a small backlog on the RPS 1, the others are in stock. You should have the server by early next week.
http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=23657&postcount=3



Some more Backlogs gripes :
http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1733


-No precise data on included bandwidth : even when an OVH staff member provides feedback ( which is a rare thing)
that's 16Mbps, which is fine inside the 100Mbps that an RPS could provide, theoretically. Though to use it constantly or as an average for the whole months comes up as 5TB per month! First, consider that the bandwidth regime for RPSs is 100Mbps not guaranteed. So, if the network is fine, you'll be getting that. Just in the case that we're experiencing a high volume of traffic, this bandwidth could be limited. So you'll have to take the possibility into account. Secondly, 5TB of traffic per month is quite high, so you're putting the RPS under quite a big strain. Mind that RPS is a sort of simple cheap server to have fun but not thought as a server to run 24/7 applications. I would strongly suggest to go for a better server for that. I wouldn't plan ahead for a server that's going to meet the specifications so tightly as in your case. But it's up to you.

- Unexpected/expected downtime to some avid readers but downtime for all ( even for your clients or audience):
Following the work of changing discs, we will progressively restart the iSCSI targets on infrastructure. We plan to complete all the work in 2 weeks. During startup, communications between RPS and the SAN will be down and once everything has been restarted, the communication will resume (the kernel patched by OVH supports blocking 24hrs communication on iSCSI).


Pros:

Possibility to have windows in an RPS:
Hello, Microsoft has put significant resources to successfully boot the latest version of Windows 2008 on an RPS. And it is stable! Take a look at: http://demo.ovh.com/fr/640bed8c4f545...0ce8189fa8190/ RPS will move shortly to the solutions of "cloud clustering" i.e. the function that needs the cluster will be expanded and from 2,3 or 4 RPS to ... 10/20/50 RPS in parallel in 1 click. We are moving well in Linux and LAMP (solutions with load balancing MySQL through the mysql-proxy). The same will be proposed for other framework like Java, RubyOnRails and .NET. All these solutions will be "root-less" i.e. administered by OVH with 24/7 teams aka GS (Global Solutions). There is still a lot of R&D to complete the solutions, but we think we will offer you all this in February 2010 . All the best, Octave


Tips and tricks:

Maximize Network speeds caching with your RAM:

http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2050

rps fees
http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3343


telephone:

http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3064

Offering cloud
http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3436