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How to Fix OVH's Broken Renewal System (Since They Don’t Give a Shit)
Hello ladies and gentlemen!
Have you ever gotten this from OVH?
Dear Customer,
Your iexxxxx-ovh account manages the invoicing of services that are configured to 'manual renewal'
that are going to expire in less than 60 days.
Once these services expire, they will be suspended unless you take action.
It continues:
This is the list of relevant services:
Services expiring in less than 15 days:
nsxxxxxxx.ip-xxx-xx-xx.eu:
dedicated dedicated-option / 2023-12-27
What?
I put all services to renew automatically.
I googled "dedicated-option ovh", "dedicated-option" and "dedicated-option lowendtalk".
I didn't find anything.
Until I found my own post on LET from back in may - I had to solve this once and for all. I can't submit a ticket for every server that I buy and ask for help setting up automatic renewal.
After hours of browsing the client area, I can simply add this issue to my 8-bullet points long bug report on OVH, in which I tagged and DM'd @ninzo59 (didn't respond) and @OVH_APAC (answered once in DM's, as I told him my "Customer code", he told me to contact OVH in the region my account is, as the APAC department can't forward GLOBAL bugs to the relevant team..) - as I've reported simiar issues previously (like this renewal issue), I know for a fact that while they solve your specific issue ONCE, they never fix the underlying issue.
So, time to dig.
I famiarized myself with their API. I first requested:
/services with a GET req
I got a long list of services in return:
xxxxxxxxx - "24gamele01"
xxxxxxxxx - "ram-128g-ecc-2666"
xxxxxxxxx - "softraid-2x960nvme"
xxxxxxxxx - "bandwidth-250-upto-500"
My take-away is that the first one is the server itself, the other ones are simply the options of it. I think we're getting closer to the dedicated-option mentioned in the email.
So, I went to check them one by one:
24gamele01 - renew: { current: { mode: "automatic" } }
ram-128g-ecc-2666 - renew: null & parentServiceId: [the ID of "24gamele01"]
softraid-2x960nvme - renew: null & parentServiceId: [the ID of "24gamele01"]
bandwidth-250-upto-500 - renew: { current: { mode: "manual" } } & parentServiceId: [the ID of "24gamele01"]
Notice the bandwidth renewal.. "manual".
From my ticket back in May, OVH told me that my bandwidth was set to manual renewal as well:
Additional option of the server nsxxxxxxx.ip-xxx-xx-xx.eu- 250Mbps unmetered (burst 1Gbps) was still in manual renewal. We have made the necessary adjustments.
A final piece of interesting background: I have also found that the Service ID for the bandwidth is lesser compared to the other articles, yet, they seem incremental. It's likely created before the server is, and dosen't follow the renewal settings of the server, in a bug likely caused by that very fact:
xxxxxx858 - bandwidth
xxxxxx922 - server
xxxxxx923 - ram
xxxxxx925 - softraid
Solving It
First, disclaimer: Do this at your own risk. I haven't waited to see if this works as intended.
So, solving it. Quite simple, request the following for the bandwidth service stuck in manual renewal:
/services/{serviceId} with a PUT req
displayName: null
renew: Define property, "automatic" ModeEnum & blank period
terminationPolicy: null
Before
mode: "manual"
state: "toRenew"
After
mode: "automatic"
state: "active"
API
You can use the web-interface for their API if you don't want to setup authentification yourself: https://api.ovh.com/console/.
Comments
You are right, their system is really strange, I couldn't even add my credit card to the account, but I deposit some money to my account with the same card, every month it receives payments from there, there is no problem with that.
Yeah, honestly seems like the whole organization is a bit messed up.
I knew about this 4 years ago. As soon as an automatic system for writing off money for services appeared. I also wrote about this on the forum and blogged myself.
Did they elaborate on this statement? Is this policy at OVH? Or do they simply not have the contact information for the right people?
If it's policy, OVH is retarded. Forcing the client to play phone/email tag instead of just logging the issue with the respective team is negligent at best, malicious at worst.
If they don't have the contacts, OVH is also retarded. If your own employees can't reach the right people, how are customers supposed to?
Given how bad it is, I agree
They did not elaborate, in fact, they didn't even reply once I clarified that it's a bug with their billing platform. That's when their interest seized. Probably because they couldn't solve it in a few seconds. It would require actual attention
From my experience, I'm smelling a rotten culture. Something makes them completely uninterested in spending time on a functioning platform. It wouldn't surprise me if management is pushing heavily towards new cloud features since their IPO
Whatever it is, it's resulting in devs not being able to create reliable software, automatic and manual testing not finding the issues, and nobody left to follow-up and prioritize fixing things that just don't work
Here's another thread where I basically spent just a few minutes on their site and took notes of weird stuff: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/189412/thread-to-help-ovh-fix-their-weird-payment-issues
ONE developer with freedom to just test stuff and implement fixes could have fixed a lot of these issues over the years...
Dont use them , easy.
Not so easy though. This is all very annoying to have to deal with, for me personally. BUT, I haven't experienced any issue with OVH that have had any impact on the servers that I host or my clients. Never once
At some point, I'll definitely move. At the latest when I get my own rack, maybe sooner to another provider (Worldstream seem very nice), but for now, I'm okay to deal with these issues as I've settled down with them and have been for a while. Their value is insane, and I trust their DDoS protection way more than I'd trust Hetzner's, for now