I've never had luck with the unlimited / unmetered folks.
Let's say you spin up 10 instances with OVH at the cheapest level (ie, $200/month). That is supposed to give you dedicated 3Gbps in addition to compute / storage etc or around 1PB data per month + compute and storage.
This compares favorably to google standard egress at $60,000/month. But as soon as you build a business model around this - poof - rate limiting -> some TOS violation claim pops up.
"Oh, we meant unlimited or unmetered, but only if..."
Seriously, with unlimited / unmetered at $20 these would make the great bases of things like CDN networks, image / static asset hosts for big properties etc. But it generally turns out to be total BS.
In contrast - paying for bandwidth with AWS / Google etc -> no one has ever complained to me (though my current usage is minuscule in the distance past had high usage experience)
> But as soon as you build a business model around this - poof - rate limiting -> some TOS violation claim pops up.
If bandwidth was at the core of my business model, I would certainly want to pay for it separately to avoid possible interruptions. In case of OVH, I assume, that's what "Bandwidth upgrade"[1] with a "limit of 20 Gbps per customer, and per datacentre" is designed for. It's not unreasonable to consider "spinning up to 10 cheapest cloud instances to avoid bandwidth limits" as a service abuse.
Is this actually unmetered? Or is it unmetered until you hit a secret limit that they don't tell you, and then demand you pay them, like Cloudflare? (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's reasonable for CF to want their highest-usage customers to pay, I'm just curious)
But there’s always a “secret limit”—the point where your bandwidth usage looks like a DDoS attack, and the tier-1 exchange feeding the cloud provider’s DC decides to blackhole your traffic for the sake of the network.
Their bandwidth limits are based on Mbps / Gbps, so the bandwidth is unmetered, but not unlimited. And unlike CDNs, public cloud companies make money from the computational power (CPU / RAM) they provide.
They're going to limit you if you spin up a bunch of cheap instances to use up their bandwidth, but if you pay $300/mo for their 3 Gbps connection you can saturate that and they don't care.
You can’t compare it like that as the calculation is different. If someone eats a small part of their meal or the whole portion doesn’t change the outcome for the restaurant. They can’t sell the rest to someone else, if someone doesn’t use bandwidth someone else is going to use it.
Except that you do still have to worry, because it is metered, they're just being coy about the precise figures, and they're really just outright lying to you by using the word 'unmetered'.
Am I missing something? I'm not seeing another side to this. Secret fair-use rules are exactly as dishonest as when the telcos lie about 'unlimited' data plans, no?
Even amazon's own Lightsail offers terabytes of traffic for cheap(5$=2Tb). Obviously aws knows lightsail can be used to cut down the bill and number of lightsail instances is limited and using lightsail for traffic 'engineering' is against the ToS
I think it's more that hetzner and ovh are great until you want to go outside of europe. Hetzner is only in europe. Ovh has one datacenter in America, one in canada, one in australia, and one in singapore. It may work great for europe, but most of the world's population is elsewhere. If trying to build a global service, the cost of making your service scale properly across different providers is often too high.
> It may work great for europe, but most of the world's population is elsewhere.
That's true, European providers work best for Europe.
But how many global locations does a service really need, if it's sitting behind a CDN? Three locations (East Coast, Western Europe, and Singapore) alone are enough to be within 100-150 ms of the most of the world's population.
OVH probably wouldn't be the best choice for projects focused exclusively on South America or China, but it already covers the rest of the world pretty well, including three locations in North America (East Coast, West Coast, and Canada).
Ovh has two data centers in America. One is down the street from me where I keep my server and the other is on the east coast. Actually haven’t had much problems
With their peering now that the DC is stable.
> Hetzner Cloud offers 20 TB (1 Gbps) for each cloud instance, but has locations only in Europe
I've looked at them to use for my email/small web server and like their prices and features, but am not sure of the GDPR implications.
Currently I use a US cloud provider, and I'm in the US, and so am a controller or processor not established in the Union, and all my data processing takes place outside the Union. All my GDPR obligations, if any, are those that arise under the extraterritorial jurisdiction provision of Article 3(2).
If my server was hosted in the EU by an EU company, would that still be the case? Or would GDPR now apply via the in Union jurisdiction provision of Article 3(1)?
This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
b)the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
So it basically says that the GDPR applies, I don't think that hosting in europe would change anything at all.
As I understand, the point of GDPR is to protect data and privacy of EU citizens. Therefore, you would have the same obligations to EU citizens even if your server was hosted outside the EU. On the other hand, if you don't serve EU citizens, GDPR might not apply to you even if your server is hosted in the EU.
It's broader than that. According to Recital 14, "The protection afforded by this Regulation should apply to natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence, in relation to the processing of their personal data".
It can't actually accomplish that goal, because the EU doesn't have the jurisdiction for that.
For controllers and processors that are in the Union, GDPR applies to their processing of personal data of people regardless of where those people are or what entities they are citizens of.
So, for example, as a US citizen residing in the US who has never set foot within about 7000 km of Europe, but has bought things from vendors in the EU, those vendors need to obey GDPR when dealing with my data.
For controller and processors that are not in the Union, the EU lacks the authority to enforce such a broad requirement on them. Instead, the requirement is that if the person whose data you are processing is "in the Union" and you are offering goods and services to them or monitoring their behavior as far as their behavior takes place within the Union, GDPR applies.
(Whether or not they can actually enforce that is still an open question).
Putting this all together, if I'm in the US, with users in the US, but having my server in the EU makes me count as being in the EU for GDPR purposes, then I have to obey GDPR when dealing with US users. If having my server in the EU doesn't do this, so that for GDPR purposes I'm in the US, then GDPR does not apply to my dealings with people in the US.
OVH Public Cloud[1] offers unmetered bandwidth (250-500 Mbps) in all regions, apart from Asia-Pacific.
Hetzner Cloud[2] offers 20 TB (1 Gbps) for each cloud instance, but has locations only in Europe.
Both of them offer dedicated servers with up to 1-3 Gbps unmetered bandwidth that could be used as exit nodes.
[1] https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/instances/prices/
[2] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud