I've used all the service providers available and these opinions include my historical experience with them (I've used all providers for many years, my account with DO is since 2013). Most of my service uses were focused in those service provider's North America locations, Asia locations, and Oceania locations. Note I did do a short comparison between DigitalOcean and Vultr back in 2014 here: https://vpsboard.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-the-asian...
Most service providers here are fairly decent.
From my experience, OVH's KVM VPSes weren't worth the time, but their VMWare VMs were absolutely top notch.
Linode has had two major security events over the last few years, one of which was in early 2016 which included release of credit card information. However, they also offer paypal payments now and are fairly top notch in terms of performance. (They've taken approaches to fix their problems from 2016 with this blog post here: https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-re... ).
DigitalOcean is fairly reliable. Their Singapore location early on had regular packet loss events, but they've been shaping up pretty nicely over time.
Vultr has been a major problem for me. Vultr for a while (on their storage instances in Japan) had terrible I/O which took a solid two hours just to install Ubuntu 14.04. When contacted support, they stated they "stopped a noisy neighbor and to retry" but no real improvements were seen.
We had a service running on a VC2 that irregularly required a large amount of CPU power (higher than 0.5 load on a 1 CPU instance for a period of 1 hour a night). The same task was completed faster with VMs from DigitalOcean and Linode. But the biggest problem I've experienced is their network.
For the longest time their Japan location was single-homed and routing was funky. We'd regularly see any traffic going outside of Japan being routed back through their Los Angeles location, so adding 300+ ms latency for any of our users in Korea, China, and anywhere in South-East Asia. Today it's much better with 40 ms latency from their Japan location to our Korea client, and a solid 80 ms latency to our Singapore client.
A colleague of ours had very important clients who required 100% uptime (which Vultr agreed to) but over a period of a month had regular packet loss events or network loss (regularly 40 minutes per event and around one event every few days monitored via external monitoring systems such as uptimerobot, statuscake, and a GCP server running Icinga2). Didn't receive much help from Vultr's engineers nor could they find the issue. They ended up moving to Google Cloud Platform. They did end up getting SLA credit from them but no reason to have SLA credit when you're not on their platform anymore.
I regularly return to Vultr every few months to every year or so to see how it's going and they've come a long way with the services they're offering. I'd recommend them for a dev environment and testing over a period of an hour a day or so. However, I would caution with production systems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd suggest reviewing the quality of the product in addition to the price tag per resource.
It's truly helpful to hear experiences first hand across different providers - especially so specifically.
I'm really interested in your experience with OVH - how long ago did you last use it, and what problems did you have?
I've used OVH successfully for various unimportant things for a while now. I'm about to setup a prod environment on OVH for a side project that we anticipate getting some good initial traction. So, not trying to spend a ton, but willing to forego the conveniences of AWS the best cost to performance ratio.
OVH has made a big Openstack push, it seems. "VPS Cloud n" series is KVM (Openstack), with NVMe drives, using Ceph (Openstack) storage, and a moderate 99.99% uptime (same as DO).
It's quite attractive at their prices - so I'm trying to gather as much relevant intel as possible on others' experience with them.
I have multiple dedis (not VPSs) at OVH Canada (Windows on bare metal as well as Proxmox with Linux and Windows VMs). You'll want multiple dedis there too, if you use them.
Occasionally a server will hard lock and when you got into the management web app and ask for a reboot it will say that the system is not responding and they have to send a tech to go physically power cycle it. When that happens (and it will, it's happened to ALL of my dedis there at some point) you're down for 30-90 minutes.
They provide remote reboot and a java-based ILO which can solve most weird issues, but the hard lock stuff continues to confound us.
We currently have multiple dedicated servers out of OVH BHS Canada (bare metal servers) and I have never ran into that problem. Most of the time I believe OVH gives you all the tools necessary. If I recall correctly, I believe their power-cycle feature is sending a SNMP command to the UPS, so their online control panel should technically work, but mileage may vary.
We've started moving on to Colocated hardware though. Unless you specifically need OVH's VAC system or their network (or free 256 IPs with setup fees), I've found OVH's availability of hardware and configurations to be fairly lacking. Glad it works out for you guys though!
My experiences with OVH's cloud platform has been a bit dated. I've been using their cloud platform since 2012, especially when their OpenVZ "Cloud" VMs were nested VMs inside their VMWare containers and had regular network outages (due to noisy neighbors) or restarting the VM every few hours. I switched to their VMWare VMs and they work like a charm. Granted some see it as a bit pricey for a small project but it's still cheaper than some other options.
My experience with OVH's KVM Openstack line was when it was still maturing as a RunAbove product. I remember they had problems out the gate and at one point had regular service restarts and I think at one point had a storage problem becoming read-only. I stopped using them since then and just chalked it up as another problem with using OVH's cheapest cloud platform. They've never worked out for me.
However, for those who stuck around and also bought KVMs from OVH after they "graduated" from RunAbove, I believe it works to an extent. It's not the best, it's obviously focused on minimizing costs and maximizing possible resources and reliability, and (this is my own speculation now) I think their server density is fairly high (VMs per host node). I haven't heard of any major problems lately with their KVM platform but again, I wouldn't put anything intensive on there either.
If cost is a major factor for you, then go with OVH's Openstack KVM line. If you still need fairly solid reliability, I think going with AWS or GCP might be worth another look. If you're fine with a VPS starting out without Ceph, NVMe, etc, then I'd really suggest you hit up Linode. Linode offers some of the best resources per cost ratio while still providing a decent reliability factor. If you really do need reliable storage then I'd look at DigitalOcean's Block-Storage (also known as network storage). Once you've grown your operation a bit more and have more resources and funds, then I think it'd be worth re-visiting the idea of moving to AWS or GCP or any other cloud platforms.
YMMV as I am just one person.
If you want a more detailed response feel free to let me know.
And thank you very much to share your experience with us. I think that the same provider can offer you a very different experience in different regions. Even AWS is not immune to that, they had datacenters with some major outages in some US regions while in another countries almost none big problems.
That's a very true statement. There are things outside our control (and sometimes in it) that can result in downtime. Like a datacenter downtime event in 2013 where a road construction crew were performing maintenance and ended up cutting their fiber (the location fiber actually was didn't line up with where it was supposed to be on paper). Since then they've built another fiber connection out of the building.
In the end, what matters is how they respond to these kinds of events and issues and what actions they take to prevent those issues in the future. While I can't say for certain what issues were avoided through proactive measures, I will state that Linode has been great with setting up fixes that hopefully prevents problems in the future. DigitalOcean recently had a problem twice with their billing and control panel system going down (in addition to their API being down). They've also taken action to prevent this in the future and have been fairly open about it (one was their SFO datacenter being down if I recall correctly).
My only gripe about Vultr is that their support responses are very basic. Limited to "try again now" and "we've turned off a neighbor". Honestly I was hoping a solution that would work long-term and communication on how they're working to ensure that. DO and Linode focus on relaying that information and I feel really works with me. This is why I'm really fine with buying through them even if they're technically "twice" as expensive as Vultr. That peace of mind is really worth it.
Singapore is a big problem. The network there is so fragmented. Last I checked, Singtel owns a large portion of Singapore's networks but won't peer with certain ISPs or anyone peering with certain ISPs. This meant a Singapore user trying to communicate with a Singapore server sometimes needs to be routed through Hong Kong or another exchange before returning back to Singapore.
Don't forget SoftLayer's network in Asia. It's a real hit or miss on residential ISPs. One time a client of ours in Seoul on SK was being routed through Japan to hit SoftLayer Hong Kong. What is usually 40ms latency from Seoul to Hong Kong turned into 90ms of latency with a higher chance of packet loss during peak hours (for those who aren't familiar with Asia network, all countries are connected via submarine cables which really makes it expensive to expand bandwidth between countries. During peak internet usage you really can sometimes experience the packet loss unless you pay more. Expect higher operation costs in Asia especially since many central IX countries are currently experiencing power shortages).
I've used all the service providers available and these opinions include my historical experience with them (I've used all providers for many years, my account with DO is since 2013). Most of my service uses were focused in those service provider's North America locations, Asia locations, and Oceania locations. Note I did do a short comparison between DigitalOcean and Vultr back in 2014 here: https://vpsboard.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-the-asian...
Most service providers here are fairly decent.
From my experience, OVH's KVM VPSes weren't worth the time, but their VMWare VMs were absolutely top notch.
Linode has had two major security events over the last few years, one of which was in early 2016 which included release of credit card information. However, they also offer paypal payments now and are fairly top notch in terms of performance. (They've taken approaches to fix their problems from 2016 with this blog post here: https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-re... ).
DigitalOcean is fairly reliable. Their Singapore location early on had regular packet loss events, but they've been shaping up pretty nicely over time.
Vultr has been a major problem for me. Vultr for a while (on their storage instances in Japan) had terrible I/O which took a solid two hours just to install Ubuntu 14.04. When contacted support, they stated they "stopped a noisy neighbor and to retry" but no real improvements were seen.
We had a service running on a VC2 that irregularly required a large amount of CPU power (higher than 0.5 load on a 1 CPU instance for a period of 1 hour a night). The same task was completed faster with VMs from DigitalOcean and Linode. But the biggest problem I've experienced is their network.
For the longest time their Japan location was single-homed and routing was funky. We'd regularly see any traffic going outside of Japan being routed back through their Los Angeles location, so adding 300+ ms latency for any of our users in Korea, China, and anywhere in South-East Asia. Today it's much better with 40 ms latency from their Japan location to our Korea client, and a solid 80 ms latency to our Singapore client.
A colleague of ours had very important clients who required 100% uptime (which Vultr agreed to) but over a period of a month had regular packet loss events or network loss (regularly 40 minutes per event and around one event every few days monitored via external monitoring systems such as uptimerobot, statuscake, and a GCP server running Icinga2). Didn't receive much help from Vultr's engineers nor could they find the issue. They ended up moving to Google Cloud Platform. They did end up getting SLA credit from them but no reason to have SLA credit when you're not on their platform anymore.
I regularly return to Vultr every few months to every year or so to see how it's going and they've come a long way with the services they're offering. I'd recommend them for a dev environment and testing over a period of an hour a day or so. However, I would caution with production systems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd suggest reviewing the quality of the product in addition to the price tag per resource.