New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Same reason Walmart is cheap. It's huge.
Apparently OVH makes their own servers now so they just get the base hardware.
They have been making their own servers for almost a decade.
Their custom cooling solution, as well as their need to have KS servers occupy the least amount of space resulted in OVH producing their own servers - Chasis, motherboard etc. They have only scaled it up and started to advertise that fact.
Didn't know they have been doing it for so long. I knew the water cooled stuff was custom, but I didn't know they actually still did that.
Little-known fact: Oles flatulence is lengthy and cooling; he visits each FR DC daily to assist with temp control.
OVH isn't producing their own motherboards, but anyway ^_^ they use X10SRi-F in pretty much all servers they have but GAME range.
They produce the plate (not chassis) they put the server on, their own water cooling loop (and cooling block), their own power connector and their own racks (which I believe is 90 servers per rack).
Le serveurs
My bad. I had read about it long ago, and remembered that they had an extremely customized setup in place, which in turn required a lot of customization to be made to the servers and racks. That is where their in-house production team came into play.
Also -
/me is watching Oles pinching cables
Didn't he invent liquid cooling when he wasn't well?
The parts are stolen from the Nigerian Mafia, they are assembled by a highly a highly trained staff of Meerkats. The support is run by Mice with a back up of Fleas. That is how they do it all.
It appears that many people want to believe this, but where's the evidence? Under EU law, a government can't just decide to provide state aid to a private company in order to give the company a competitive advantage. It doesn't work this way. Exceptions can be made in exceptional circumstances but the exceptions have to be approved by the European Commission. I don't know of evidence that OVH has received state aid.
A much more plausible explanation for the attractive pricing is that OVH is big and (I imagine) efficient, so they can afford to compete on price. (Hetzner is also in this category although Hetzner is smaller than OVH.)
For what it's worth, it's not that uncommon to provide tax breaks to particular 'growth industries', I believe. That might be where these claims originate from.
(Of course, that's still very different from being handed bags of money, and it would apply to all such companies and not just a single one. It also would likely only be handed out at the start of the company.)
Naturally, I can't say whether OVH has ever received tax breaks, but tax breaks are given in exchange for something else, for example, a commitment to employing a certain number of people, or as you say, if it is deemed desirable for certain industries to be initially promoted.
In any case, it's often insinuated that the French government simply gives state aid to OVH, but not only would this be illegal, there's also no evidence for it.
Indeed.
If one is looking for a case where an EU government gave illegal state aid to a tech company, the case of Apple in Ireland would be a promising example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_against_Apple_in_Ireland
One thing no one has mentioned yet - OVH has many components automated, thus reducing capital needed for staff.
There is probably still a place on the web somehwere that hosts a somewhat old PDF where the founder of OVH explained that the way they do it is with large investments and an agreement between the owners to only pay themselves a salary (I'd bet a good one) but nothing more. He claimed they reinvest almost everything and (but I am not sure if I am not mistaking them with someone else on that) have been taking capital from outside for some time to bring in fresh money. Automation, scale and lowering costs by building the servers in-house are the practical measures to deliver the product at the lowest possible cost, but it's the business model that really keeps it all together. And wouldn't you wat to invest in something that is constantly growing at such a pace?
This business model is not new, tho. Take Amazon with their "no profit" model and almost 100% computer-controlled warehouses, Ryanair's whole fleet of one single make and model of jets (and their one-type of anything else way of doing things) + the fact that their tickets' prices don't even cover the cost of the jet fuel most of the time. But their luggage fees, late check in fees, reserved seats and funding from governments that want to invest in being their next hot destination, as well as airports that would otherwise be dead (hi Ciampino & Charleroi) make up for everything and the company is Boeing's biggest customer, as well as one of the most successfull airlines. Yet, long time ago the family behind the company was once at 20m pounds loss that they somehow managed. Started in 1985, their first year of operation with profit was 1991.
Actually those 2 pages explain a bit OVH's size, technology and how they potentially support this pricing:
https://www.ovh.co.uk/aboutus/
https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/cp2489.ovh_raises_400_million_to_support_its_strategic_development
Their recent promotions in Asia and AUS have been brilliant, especially for hosts wanting to provide their clients with new locations
They make everything they can and they make it the industrialisation way. They have their own metal laser cutters, they build the case, the racks, the rooms, the cooling, everything is made to be easily repaired/changed. Also Automation like mentioned is previous post. Everything is automated software side and they have been doing it since day one.
They can offer low price because of the scale. kimsufi servers are the old hardware that have been sold as brand new with full support on the ovh brand, that goes to the soyoustart brand after and ends it life in kimsufi.
I have work there and seen it with my own eyes. ( nothing said here is private information )
Economies of scale.
Does bandwidth cost anything? I was under the impression that bandwidth was cheaper in France? I remember going to an Internet Cafe in 1990s in Paris, FR. They had enormous # of workstations, time to use was considered inexpensive, and speeds were good.
Something that nobody has mentioned so far is the very strategic siting of their core/major datacenters and how that has affected their power costs. Their Roubaix (RBX) and Gravelines (GRA) datacenters are located very near to the Gravelines nuclear power plant (with the Gravelines DC being located quite literally right next to the Gravelines NPP (it's located about a third of a mile from the plant's boundary and about three quarters of a mile from the nearest reactor), although the DC itself is fed from a separate 225 kV line running from the Warande substation located ~10 miles away from the NPP/DC, which is where the three 400 kV lines from Gravelines initially terminate) — which is the largest nuclear plant in France and the second-largest in Europe. Their Strasbourg (SBG) datacenter is likewise located close to the Fessenheim nuclear power plant. France in general already has some of the cheapest electricity in Europe thanks to their nuclear plants, and OVH's costs are further minimized by siting their datacenters very close to major generators. As for their Canadian location, Beauharnois (BHS) is also located quite literally right next to (approximately half a mile away from) the 1,853 MW Beauharnois Hydroelectric Power Station, on the site of a former aluminum smelter, with connections to multiple 120 kV lines. Electricity costs in Quebec are already absurdly cheap thanks to the abundance of hydropower, and locating the DC on a site so close to a major generator with pre-existing HV transmission connections, a private substation (although it did require some refurbishment), and other infrastructure that can be reused helps cut costs even further.
It's also worth noting that most of OVH's datacenters do not use air conditioning at all — 70% of heat rejection occurs via water cooling, and the remaining 30% is accomplished via simple air cooling — this brings more power savings, and thus more cost savings. Liquid cooling is also near-mandatory for the ultra-high-density server racks OVH uses to be cooled effectively, and it's a large part of what makes it practical in the first place for them to densely pack bare motherboards into racks without cases.
Transit pricing, France is average (basically within the entire central/western EU pricing is the same), the best place for cheap bulk transit is still Amsterdam.