All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
UK Hosting Alternatives to DigitalOcean, Prioritizing Fast Outage Resolution
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for hosting provider that has physical rack on UK that excels in disaster recovery support. My company right now have been sticking with DigitalOcean for years, but as our needs scale up, their costs are starting to outpace more affordable dedicated options like OVHcloud or ukservers.com.
For example, on DigitalOcean, around £80/month gets me a setup with 4 AMD cores, 16GB RAM, and 200GB NVMe storage. In comparison, OVHcloud offers something much beefier for a similar price, 6 Ryzen cores, 32GB RAM, and nearly 2TB of NVMe.
We receive good experience with DigitalOcean with their quick and clear support during disasters, outages or failures that are always inevitable in hosting. As an engineer without physical access to the machines, we rely on that when issues arise. In the rare cases we've had a VPS suddenly become unreachable (happen to me twice in year), their team jumps in fast, DigitalOcean supports gave diagnose to the problem (like a hardware fault on their machine), provide a straightforward summary I can share with clients, and resolve it efficiently. It's given us huge peace of mind. That said, we're planning to move as we scale further, we've realized how expensive their plans get, especially since we need more than 32GB RAM on a single machine.
My previous employer (different company I'm currently for) used ukservers.com, which was solid overall. The hardware specs were a bit dated, but it performed reliably, and their support was quick to step in during emergencies.
OVHcloud appeals to us right now because of their more complete ecosystem. They have built in options for load balancers, managed databases (not that we need this), DDoS protection, and more global presence to go if we just need to scale further without starting again from scratch.
However, when I dig into OVH reviews, there's a lot of negativity that gives me pause. From what I can tell, most complaints come from user misconfigurations leading to downtime, which I get isn't the provider's responsibility to fix (I'm not looking for managed hosting like that). Still, the sheer volume of bad feedback is concerning.
So, my main question, Does OVHcloud truly have poor support, particularly for disaster scenarios? For example, if our dedicated server hit with a power supply failure, RAID problem, or RAM issue, how responsive and effective is their team? I am considering either OVHCloud or ukservers.com right now, but if any of you have experience you can share in other provider feels free to do that.
Thanks in advance!
Comments
I think it's better to simply manage your own disaster recovery. LET isn't a great place to find HA hosts because the race is to the bottom in terms of overhead.
It would be cheaper overall, but perhaps a bit harder, to purchase ultra cheap VPSs from two different providers and run a database cluster across them for HA.
Yeah, my initial thought is that even if OVH has bad support, building our own HA infrastructure with a multi node load balancer, application servers, database, and multi-location backup storage would minimize downtime in case of a disaster.
I think I just want some encouragement from others that choosing OVH wouldn't be a mistake in the future. This app is a kind of critical product for my company, but going with AWS or GKE is beyond our budget right now. With OVH, my plan is that we'll never need to migrate to another bigger provider (like AWS or GKE) and can just keep scaling there, since OVH is already one of the biggest providers.
@ramaditya , OVH is solid and have a good track record regarding their hardware - however, because it's a big company, support by default is delayed (due to lots of tickets) but they have an SLA option which is more dedicated and obviously cost more. Depends really how critical is your need for support. Contact them for pricing. I think the ultimate choice comes to yourselves in the end - however if you specify here what exact specifications you require, there might be providers out here to suit your needs.
OVH will always have poor reviews it's the internet people get disgruntled at the smallest thing.
Id also recommend speaking to @Clouvider
You've already mentioned them but UKServers are great. They own and operate their own high end DC & network with staff onsite 24/7. You can pick up the phone and speak to someone who is within walking distance of your server(s) which is a rarity these days.
They would also be able to offer you greater flexibility in terms of set up when compared to someone like OVH.
https://clouvider.com would be happy to help both with Dedicated Servers, perhaps spread across multiple locations, or Virtual Machines.
I would suggest to make your disaster recovery plan better, so that you can become independent from the provider
Start to defining your RTO and RPO, and then design the architecture accordingly.
For example if you have 1h RTO and 1 minutes RPO, primary and replica database with manual promotion can be done. Once you have outage on your primary, you can promote the replica manually
Different approach will be needed if you define different RTO RPO
+1 ukservers.
They are quit fast on charging hardware parts.
Rackspace. Enterprise solution, but ukservers gives more and if they can sustain sla - they are better then rackspace.
As others have said already, the best strategy is to be as much in control of your availability as possible, with different providers and well tested plans to switch from one to another.
I should also mention that OVH offers paid support options, at work we had that for a while and we had OVH support on the phone 15-30 minutes after creating a ticket.
@speedypage