Back to OVH
To use a term I first heard from (and probably coined by) Bryce Wray, I am a bit of a ‘migratory nerd’. That is I move between different technological options from time to time due to frustration with my current option and hopes that another option has gotten better (if I had tried it before) or is better (if it’s new to me).
If you’ve been here often you’ve noticed that for quite a while I had a lot of switching back and forth between Linux and Windows. Now that I am happy with my Linux setup, and have been for some time, that seems unlikely to be repeated any time soon (I don’t even have a Windows virtual machine at the moment, and haven’t missed it).
That is not why I am writing today, however. Today I am writing because a couple of months ago I switched back to OVH Canada. This was for two basic reasons. My needs were too advanced/particular for TekSavvy Business hosting. While TekSavvy Business folks were great (and still are for most users), I needed my own hosting. The other issue I had was with Vultr and is not a complaint about the service itself, but my wish to avoid US hosting. Vultr is a US based company while OVH is a French company with Canadian subsidiary and their own Canadian data centre.
Because of my previous difficulties with the OVH public cloud offering (which may be resolved now, but I didn’t feel inclined to test), I used a different one of their hosting options. I now use their ‘Bare Metal’ hosting and manage my virtual hosts my own way. In addition I really like their domain and DNS services and have been shifting my domains to OVH.
Another thing I really like is their no-charge Denial-of-Service mitigation infrastructure. While I’ve only been targeted a couple of times for an actual attack it has also helped me reduce the ’log spam’ which can occurs when a firewall blocks unwanted traffic. One of the IP addresses I now have, seems to have been used for some service (before being transferred to me) gets a lot of traffic that I don’t want, and the OVH firewall means my host doesn’t have to deal with most of that traffic.
Since the transition I’ve been quite happy with the results and still have lots of CPU and memory to spare. It’s not as inexpensive as the TekSavvy Business option, but at least so far, it is a great fit for me and my needs.