Why all OVH dedicated servers are "sold out"

https://www.ovh.co.uk/a1186.SoldOut

by mike_esspe • 13 years ago

57 48 13 years ago

ovh.co.uk

I'm an OVH customer, and I find this unbelievably bad practice. This rant is a piece of polemic that only serves to legitimise their screw up. Not selling cheap dedi's makes them entirely redundant.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

What rant? Unless you're seeing something different to me, it's a Q&A form text that calmly explains the problem they have encountered with their current business model, and how they are going about trying to figure out a model that will work for the long term.

You are right, if the situation remains, it does make them redundant. On the other hand, if the turnover is too high to allow them to recover the cost of the new servers, they'll go bankrupt, so it is a problem they need to deal with one way or the other. The approach they've chosen is unusual, that is all.

aroch6• 13 years ago

The text is almost verbatim from a post Oles made a month or so ago. It read someone what like rant, but mostly because Oles apparently can't write in French or English with proper grammar

clienthunter5• 13 years ago

What annoys me I suppose is that the issue was entirely predictable. I now know there are customers who got in before the shutdown who now have a server with double my spec at half the price. Of course current customers were going to move if they could! Why this surprised anyone is beyond me. The shutdown locks loyal customers in to a worse deal, and this rant/article/whatever doesn't even come close to apologising for/mitigating that - it is exclusively concerned with the ramifications for OVH. I'm the customer, OVH is the variable that bends to my will, not the other way around.

I'm eyeing up online.net now anyway, as I didn't know of them before. Now I do, and I have an insight into how the OVH mind works, I'm unlikely to ever use them again.

maaarghk2• 13 years ago

Also an OVH customer and whilst I think the "shutdown" is annoying because I do want to buy another server from them (concurrently, not as a replacement), I don't agree that this is a rant at all nevermind a polemic, seems quite reasonable.

clienthunter5• 13 years ago

Perhaps 'rhetoric' is a better word. I'm a predictably pissed off customer, the last thing I need from OVH is a lesson in business strategy. All I want from them is a fair plan for what they plan to do for me now they've gone and got my back up. I don't think that's unreasonable given that I'm one of many who has chosen to keep them in business, and the hand that giveth is the hand that taketh away.

yannickmahe• 13 years ago

CEO announced on twitter they would have new offers in 10-14 days.

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/390557634790973440

alexandros• 13 years ago

Surely if users are flocking to the 'latest and greatest' you deal with that by gradually reducing the prices of the old servers such that you get natural price discrimination?

vidarh2• 13 years ago

That's one possible solution, but then that needs to be accounted for in their price model to ensure they can pay off the cost of each server over its life, and that seems to be a substantial part of the problem they've run into:

The turnover on each new generation is higher than their models accounted for, and so reduces their lifetime expected revenue per server too much.

Doing what you suggest is certainly possible, but would likely mean they'd need to charge more early on.

networked• 13 years ago

The main competitor of OVH is actually OVH itself. The customer stays with OVH but orders a new server instead of keeping the old one.

Interesting problem, and surely not the worst one to have. What would have been a more graceful way to deal with it, though, if any?

clienthunter5• 13 years ago

I wouldn't call it interesting, the situation was massively predictable - I would call it profound incompetence.

davidjgraph• 13 years ago

How about simply reduce the rental cost of the older servers to below that of the newer servers? I don't see this mentioned anywhere, isn't it pretty obvious?

justincormack• 13 years ago

Yes that was my thought, have a price function that falls over time you have held the server, perhaps starting a little higher than the current one. Its a kind of amortised up front fee in some ways.

Alternatively, start a PAAS business to use the servers people dont want to buy, although I guess the VPS business does this to some extent.

tinco2• 13 years ago

This is not what they want because they are trying to price their new hardware competitively by milking their older customers. If they would reduce the profit of their cash cows they can not invest in reducing the prices of the hardware that attracts new customers.

tinco2• 13 years ago

No it's not pretty obvious. Reducing the rental cost of sold servers means directly reducing revenue, that sounds like madness to me.

The saner alternative would be to _increase_ the cost of the newer servers, but as they point out that could result in them being less competitive.

The real solution would be to devise some way where happy customers just retain their current servers, and new customers can get the latest hardware for the lowest price.

For some reason the old customers do enjoy upgrading their machines though, so this lands them in a tough spot. They can't have the best of both worlds, both the lowest prices and the freedom contracts. So they're going to take their time finding out what their strategy on this is going to be.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

Yes, it's obvious enough that the author specifically calls it out:

So yes if it's a turnover issue, we could offer the old server at the same price as the new one as an incentive.

It might or might not be correct, but it's an extremely obvious idea.

kijin• 13 years ago

Ideally, the old servers would have (1) paid for themselves, and (2) generated a reasonable amount of profit, before they became so obsolete that the market demands drastically reduced prices. A high revenue stream from that server after that point should never have been part of OVH's business model in the first place.

A host that expects customers to keep paying the same monthly amount for a 2-year-old server is no different from a rotisserie that expects customers to pay the same price for last week's leftover chicken. If the rotisserie's business model depends on selling stale poultry at a higher price than what the market would bear, it is clearly unsustainable and deserves to have its revenue reduced.

rsynnott2• 13 years ago

For some reason the old customers do enjoy upgrading their machines though

This is largely their own fault; they make doing this relatively cheap and easy, and are thus punished for it.

reidrac• 13 years ago

I guess the price is already quite low and at some point the cost of the power, space, etc would be higher than the rental price. Do you want a new new server or a server that is 2+ years old and it's reaching its end of life?

I met people using OVH 4 years ago and they told me support wasn't great (I can't confirm this at all!) and that it was usually faster to order a new server and migrate than to wait until a faulty disk was replaced.

If people get good doing that kind of thing, it makes sense it's a problem for OVH (+150k servers): instead of waiting until a server is over 3 years old to be retired, just order a new one every year and benefit of the newest hardware. It's the same price, isn't it?

aroch6• 13 years ago

I met people using OVH 4 years ago and they told me support wasn't great (I can't confirm this at all!) and that it was usually faster to order a new server and migrate than to wait until a faulty disk was replaced.

This is still pretty much true, especially under their best effort support. I have their higher SLA (<2hour) on several large servers and it still takes them a day or more to get back to me and then a day or more to get the hardware replaced. And now they've introduced a new iteration of servers (which, IMO, was designed to fuck the customers over...they've figured out how to oversell the rack at scale) that was ~20% the cost of the 2012 models of the same servers.

spindritf• 13 years ago

Another would be to tie the customers to their current servers through other means which is what they're trying.

For example, one of the things they're trying now is to link the number of IP addresses you can have attached to the cheaper servers with how long you have been running it. Which is pretty clever if you think about it. Who are the savvy customers switching to the new offer the day it comes out? Hosters who need mutliple IPs for their users.

mdasen• 13 years ago

The issue is that they need a certain amount of revenue per box.

So, they buy a new Core i3 box with 8GB of RAM and they want to get $40 over the next two years to cover the investment. If they have to reduce its price to $30 after 6 months and further as time goes on, they don't cover the investment.

Now, they could price the box at $60 and lower it over time, but then you lose signups since it's a higher price (even if the average price over two years would be the same). You can say: well, have the older servers whose price has already been reduced available for sale as well. That complicates the lineup and is hard to manage. Unlike the new servers, the old servers only become available when someone gives one up which makes the supply unpredictable. With a new server, they can always buy one. Making matters worse, if the old ones have a reduced price, people are more likely to stay with them.

A decent part of this is that a lot of people are probably "needlessly" upgrading. By that, I mean that a lot of people probably aren't upgrading because the new server will make their usage better, but because they have a sense that they should be getting the top that their dollar will get. They were running perfectly fine on the old box, but why not try the new?

Ultimately, this is why VPSs are a lot easier. You can lower prices as time goes on in a reasonable manner. Someone wants the 1.7GB/1GHz 2007 box? That's a fraction of a new piece of hardware we can deploy. On the contrary, if someone wants a two year old model at OVH, they can't deploy a new two year old model: it's only available if someone gives it up. So, it becomes hard to capture the cheap-end of the market unless those signups keep paying for that box.

peteretep• 13 years ago

Now, they could price the box at $60 and lower it over time, but then you lose signups since it's a higher price

That feels like the crux.

A friend claims Warren Buffett said something along the lines of "it doesn't matter how many insurance policies you sell, if you sell them at the wrong price".

If your customers are losing you money by paying at your published prices, then acquiring more customers isn't a sensible thing to do. Lock the customers in, or price higher at the start. Why chase customers who aren't making you money?

gettheyayo• 13 years ago

It all depends on the margins, maybe if they lower the old ones they can't afford these total lower costs

rsynnott2• 13 years ago

Their profit margins are likely not huge as it is, and it costs them just as much (probably more, given changes in power usage in servers over the last few years) to run a Core 2-arch server as an Ivy Bridge one.

dcc1• 13 years ago

I cancelled all my OVH servers, on the high end they are a ripoff and their internal network went to crap recently, it was faster to move files to another country than between 2 HG XXXL servers, go figure

I am currently testing the waters on offering 24 and 36 drive storage monsters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576796

any feedback is appreciated

cmer• 13 years ago

I agree with you. Their internal network is crap. And recently, their external network has been horrible as well.

We have 40 servers with them and we're getting out of there. Been getting downtime almost weekly for the last couple of months.

Their prices are impossible to beat in America however. Even heavily discounted, SoftLayer is more than twice the price.

tluyben2• 13 years ago

I used to not like them years ago when I had a lot of servers, moved away, went back and we are very happy now. We are not experiencing the downtime / slowness you are referencing. And the competition quite expensive compared. I mean; I don't have to get the cheapest stuff possible, but Softlayer etc is really not economical for our business even if OVH would have some downtime.

nly2• 13 years ago

Despite other criticisms, you can pry my $60/year dedi out of my cold dead hands (2 GiB/500GB/dual core Atom)

aroch6• 13 years ago

Using OVH's horrible volume network, backed by their crap support with their servers built from a lot of QC-rejected procs on 5400RPM drives.

anoncowherd3• 13 years ago

It seems you've got some bad experiences with OVH. Could you go into more detail on this stuff?

Do you think Hetzner is better than OVH, by the way?

nly2• 13 years ago

You get what you pay for. Nothing wrong with a 5400 RPM drive with those specs for hosting a personal website, backup, VPN etc.

I've had 100% uptime over the last 3 months (externally monitored), used terabytes of bandwidth, and get 20ms ping over the Channel. You can't beat that on price.

Napapijri• 13 years ago

OVH is the worst out there.

bio4m• 13 years ago

The biggest problem was they were introducing new servers with similar or better specs than servers existing customers had. And instead of dropping existing customers prices, they kept them static. So a lot of people found themselves looking at a bill 600% higher for the same server just because they were an existing customer. Who in their right mind would pay 6x times more for the same service ?

They could stop the customer churn by simply changing the price to match the new offerings.

At the time I switched to a new server type I even asked their customer team if the new pricing would be offered to existing customers and the answer was a flat no.

lowry• 13 years ago

it would be much better for their sales if they did not force clients to manually renew every 3 months.

Karunamon• 13 years ago

It was every individual month for me. This combined with a dodgy spam filter led to me losing my server there. And now I can't reorder because of this silliness.

Oh well. I recently found out that I can get business-class internet at my home, so I'll be moving all that stuff inside my own network soon enough.

maaarghk2• 13 years ago

Monthly for me, but managed to keep on top of it. Happy to know that they are re-thinking payments, because it was getting really annoying.

_delirium• 13 years ago

That's one of the things mentioned in the post, which seems like a reasonable place to start. If their goal is that older customers should ideally stay on the old servers, that's more likely if it's basically autopilot. If someone has to manually decide to renew, they're much more likely to notice that they can upgrade to a newer offering, instead.

benmorris• 13 years ago

It appears to me they have underpriced their servers to the point they can't offset the ratio of existing customers upgrading servers. Seems like they should implement longer term contracts if they want to keep offering these rock bottom prices people keep snatching up. I'll admit looking at their pricing I can see why they sell so many.

sriramiyer• 13 years ago

I too, like many of you find their policies a little strange. Where the entire business world practices reducing prices of older products and replacing them with superior products at old or even slightly higher price points one must wonder the reasoning behind their, "newer must be cheaper than older" strategy where they do not pass on the benefit of the older hardware to the customers.

If an existing customer reads that page, and this thread there's just one thing that they will immediately deduce. Existing customers are being used as a subsidizing agent to capture new audience. Which, again is quite strange. In a game theoretic way, this drives the point to existing customers that it is beneficial to not be loyal to the service (i.e. cancel/re-order).

If they reduced cost on older hardware while introducing newer one, they could also list those up for sale. Surely people on a budget or people who don't need a Xeon will simply settle for an older Atom at a cheaper price. This also allows OVH to retain and milk the box till its ROI is hopefully achieved.

jjoe• 13 years ago

"bringing in new customers and new projects which will allow us to increase our business figures"

Guys, you need to realize this isn't about getting the balance sheet in the black. There is no legitimate or interesting problem to solve here. They've been deep in the red. Their ultimate goal is to increase revenue figures at all cost and perhaps look "good" for an OK exit. Maybe there isn't more users or market share to grab in their niche. Hence the "thrashing." Their target server count is a million. They've been building DCs left and right with this figure in mind without there being solid sustained demand. I think they've spread themselves too thin.

OVH is working hard to acquire as many users as it can for the sole purpose of pleasing investors. And when that becomes any business' only focus...

Why all OVH dedicated servers are "sold out"

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