Kimsufi: the affordable dedicated server

https://www.kimsufi.com/en/

by fh973 • 12 years ago

80 59 12 years ago

kimsufi.com

axyjo• 12 years ago

Please don't run anything 'at-scale' on these. You get exactly what you pay for with these desktop-grade processors.

jmgrosen• 12 years ago

I'd hardly call a Xeon a desktop-grade processor; for the rest, be wary, but don't completely disregard them.

vomitcuddle• 12 years ago

The main advantages over something like a VPS are having a dedicated full-sized hard drive and being able to run any OS you want on bare metal (they support remote iso installs via kvm and vnc). If you choose a non-atom processor you can also run your own virtual machines on these.

shuzchen• 12 years ago

Any reliable VPS offering should support custom kernels -linode, prmgr, and ec2 do. While it's not "any OS you want", they support any kernel that runs under Xen, which pretty much opens the door to most distros you'd want to run a server with. Really, the only thing you're technically locked out of is Windows.

dmpk2k• 12 years ago

More importantly, OVH doesn't offer anything with ECC RAM until you're near the $100 range.

Do not run anything beyond a throwaway personal blog on a server without ECC RAM.

ezequiel-garzon• 12 years ago

Last time I checked they seemed to have an unlimited bandwidth usage policy, but this was buried in a forum. Could anybody using the service please answer this? Thanks!

valinor4• 12 years ago

Mine does. I don't know about the new ones.

neverminder• 12 years ago

I've used Kimsufi for over a year now. So far no complaints, granted that I'm not doing much with it. The main point I suppose is that in dedicated server market there are not a lot of players that can match such prices - in fact I couldn't even come up with an alternative except Hetzner, but they don't have the lower range servers like Atom.

STRiDEX2• 12 years ago

I'm on Hetzner and servers are as advertised. Purchased from their server auction and got a very good deal. Some of them are not good deals, you have to know what you're shopping for. Available to americans after proof of ID, paid with paypal that converts your US dollars to euro's for you. Beats the pants off of a digital ocean in price/performance in the above $40 price range.

https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

codexon3• 12 years ago

Hetzner is really bad.

If you get a tiny ddos attack for a few seconds, you'll get null routed for 24 hours. Any longer than that and they'll potentially kick you out.

If you've never been ddosed, your really don't have a lot of users. Multi gigabit attacks are available for the price of a cup of coffee.

http://hackforums.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=232

mnml_• 12 years ago

online.net is better to be honest

rguldener• 12 years ago

Care to elaborate? In what way are they better?

asterfr4• 12 years ago

It's cheaper for a similar quality. However I've experienced great pain with online.net: if you do not fit in their box, their administrative pain can kill you. No matter how hard you try to beat it. They will slam you with garbage.

Twice (in different context) I have tried to use online.net and fallback to OVH/Kimsufi. Why ? First time unability for them to sell servers, second time unability for them to get paid.

itooo• 12 years ago

Kimsufi only uses second hand/refurbished desktop hardware, built "in the garage" and installed in low cost datacenters. Imagine a desktop motherboard just sitting on a metal sheet in a rack : that's it.

Online.net only uses branded hardware and server hardware (except the 'SC' product range) : Xeon, ECC, Hardware RAID, ...

I'd say the price/quality ratio is better at Online.net but you just might not need that higher quality if you are running a personnal blog.

Speaking about the support, OVH has been internationnaly selling for much longer than Online.net, it's still quite 'fresh' at Online.net.

About the network, OVH's one is wider and it has a datacenter in Canada, Online.net only has datacenters in France and their network has gone international last summer with many peerings/transits (they used to rely on a French ISP before). Online.net servers are all gigabit connected. Both network are DDoS protected. OVH has a mandatory SMTP filter which has its pros and cons.

rosser• 12 years ago

You make a terribly compelling argument...

emocakes2• 12 years ago

Just got rid of online.net, going back to kimsufi. I've hopped around between hetzner, ovh, online.net, kimsufi is still the best cheap dedi, imho.

eps• 12 years ago

Haywain, you are shadow-banned.

cedricdejour• 12 years ago

100% agreed with you! I am customer on both service (kimsufi and online.net). Online.net service is much more reliable (Dell servers with hardware raid and many options), their technical support is fast and friendly, and their network is very efficient on US

tiles• 12 years ago

Is it possible to beat 1TB of disk storage space for just € 12.00+VAT ($16.64) a month? There aren't many backup options out there that you can rsync to and reach Glacier-like prices.

blibble• 12 years ago

will it be there in a month though?

X-Istence• 12 years ago

kimsufi is the bottom of the barrel line from OVH, they have been around for a long time.

nolok• 12 years ago

The Kimsufi brand is 8 years old now, and they are part of OVH which is 15 years old and the biggest dedicated hosting company in Europe with over 700 000 clients.

They have more chance to be there tomorrow than most hosts.

dwild2• 12 years ago

OVH has a service called hubiC for backups, it's 10 TB for €10 including VAT. You need to use their software but it work on Linux and they have an API (I don't know what you can do with it)

https://hubic.com/en/

chm2• 12 years ago

Le nom provient-il de "Ce qui me suffit"?

asterfr4• 12 years ago

Yep it does, it's a French company and it's crystal clear for us.

chm2• 12 years ago

It was clear to me as well, but I wondered if it was just a cognate/false friend between French and another language.

electrotype• 12 years ago

Last time when their servers were 2,99$ or something I bought 3 and they were all cancelled without real reason.

Why should I trust them now?

JoshGlazebrook• 12 years ago

That 2.99 euro deal was a disaster for them. Instead of new customers flocking to them, a large amount of their current customers were cancelling their existing servers that were more expensive and ordering the cheaper ones. And if I remember correctly it was in the tens of thousands of order backlog for that deal.

dwild2• 12 years ago

That offer was actually 2,99 euros and it was for European only.

asterfr4• 12 years ago

I'm using them, it's descent until now however:

* No phone number nor contact form for any kind of support. * No way to change to change my password (or I didn't find it). And I don't like to be forced to keep those "randomly" generated password. They seem to have reduce everyextra to 0, their lean customer service is way too lean to my taste. Destroying obvious features to make your customer upgrade is bad.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

The Ryanair of dedicated servers if you will.

asterfr4• 12 years ago

You name it

crypt1d• 12 years ago

I switched from Hetzner to these guys few months ago. They are in the same price range but offer DDOS protection (Hetzner just null-routes you in such situations), which can be handy. Basically you get what you pay for. Not much of a customer support, but quite cheap compared to rest of the market. Useful for playing around or as a development box. The servers are in France (you can choose from a few datacenters), so good latency towards Europe's visitors. If anybody wants to tests them let me know, I can give you temporary access to one of my boxes.

andmarios• 12 years ago

Probably one of the worst services I ever tried to use.

Last week I ordered one of their small servers (PS-1). Although their site is in English, the registration form was in French and despite giving me a drop-down to choose another language, there wasn't one. I complete the process and I am asked to email them a copy of my ID and a utility bill for verification. I did so and never heard back from them. This is unacceptable and I can't think of many worse cases of contact from companies. I sent you a copy of my ID and you do not even reply back? Even a Nigerian prince would be more polite than this.

Also in the past, I gave them a try with the €2.99 offer. They just canceled my order because it couldn't be "validated". I can understand if they have problems, but I expect them to be more straightforward.

rak2• 12 years ago

I got them to validate my account with an email and a copy of a statement but I was later told I could not purchase this because it wasn't available to Americans. Before I realized this was the case, I received an e-mail saying that my paypal payment wasn't accepted because the order couldn't be validated.

I just ended up going with Digital Ocean instead. It would've been nice to have a cheap dedi but it isn't worth this kind of hassle.

codexon3• 12 years ago

Digital Ocean asked for similar verification papers after a couple months of usage. I am also located in the US.

dustcoin• 12 years ago

    I am asked to email them a copy of my ID and a utility
    bill for verification. I did so and never heard back from
    them. This is unacceptable and I can't think of many
    worse cases of contact from companies.

You were goxed. To make matters worse, these documents may be compromised by hackers in the future.

spullara• 12 years ago

goxed.

CSDude• 12 years ago

But why 100 mbps?

jauer• 12 years ago

a) 100M switchports are insanely cheap

b) It limits the damage you can do when your box gets owned.

b.1) It limits the amount of damage you can do if your business/usage model assumes more traffic than their business model assumes you'll use.

mackwic2• 12 years ago

Ok, there's mainly negative of mitigated feedback here. Let's go further in the discussion with positive feedback.

So, I personally own some kimsufi's, and I run a hosting structure for CS students with another since 4 years.

The things you have to know about Kimsufi is:

- they are full dedicated servers, fully capable of handling a decent charge

- they are second hand hardware, already made profitable (that's why the price is so low)

- you should change change them every 4 years so that you won't run into hardware issues

- you can do whatever you want with them, there's really no chance to lose a kimsufi thanks to the remote control console which can make a reboot on a minimal image

- you can do whatever you want with them, really. The bandwidth is really free and unlimited, no bullshit.

- the OVH network is really strong. In 5 years of use, I've never seen any downtime of any of my servs.

For me, that's the best choice for non-critical hosting. They are unbelievably much cheaper than everyone around (except online.net, who has a weaker network), with twice as many features, their greatest community manager is the CEO (checkout @olesovh), things just work everyday. When they don't, just check http://travaux.ovh.com . No bullshit about the problems (cc PlanetHoster, DreamHost and the like).

I'll be happy to answer questions if you have.

tehf0x• 12 years ago

I can only agree, you just have to know what you're getting into, there's no SLA, but that's the deal and why these are so cheap. If you want high-quality hosting then you can go with OVH's main line or the SoYouStart line, but what's nice with these is you get to take advantage of OVH's nice network and reliable infrastructure, for really rock-bottom prices. ...I swear I don't work for them, I just really enjoy this company... they even have a bi-monthly newsletter which I keep in my bathroom to read about how they deploy their new DSL infrastructure, or their international fiber backbones!

Axsuul• 12 years ago

I use Soyoustart, another branch of OVH, and so far no complaints. The 32 GB memory is a godsend when you need to run 200 unicorn workers.

TacticalCoder• 12 years ago

I really don't get all the hate directed towards OVH.

I've got two Kimsufi dedicated servers at OVH since years and years and, to me, it's an amazing service (at a price which apparently nobody can beat).

One of my Kimsufi on which I installed Debian reached an uptime of four years. Four years of uptime. The smallest of the Kimsufi, which is already the cheaper of the dedicated servers OVH provides. Four years.

A pretty stock Debian, with only SSH and Tomcat and not a single (known) root exploit forcing me to install a patch that would have required me to reboot the box. Meanwhile I had two very serious DoS Java bugs requiring me to patch the JVM / JRE (IIRC the Tomcat version I had could do with just the JRE, no need for the JDK). One Java exploit was the infinite floating-point parsing bug and the other the hashmap not being O(1) anymore (the attack consisted in submitting very long URL with carefully query paramaters).

Now the real funny thing: one day I got an email from OVH saying my server was down and that it "would not reboot". What happened is that the motherboard died and they moved my stuff to a new system. But the Debian version on my Kimsufi was so old that it wouldn't recognize the new motherboard...

That's basically how stable Kimsufi are: they can happily crank up for years and years and years and years.

Now I'll have to look into it: because I pay 20 EUR / month for mine (VAT not included) and apparently the new ones at 17 EUR / month are already more powerful than the ones I have, so I may want to switch to a beefier machine for a cheaper price.

Also note that during summer time (month of august IIRC), they launched a Kimsufi at 2.99 or 3.99 EUR / month (don't remember, but several people here point the number of 2.99). But it got so successful that they had issue and were forced to remove the offer. And "Octave" tweeted that OVH would come up with an entirely new offer. I'm glad to see they're now offering Kimsufi at 8 EUR / month.

That's 8 EUR for your own dedicated server. Seems quite a good deal to me.

Shank• 12 years ago

Not going to lie, I've been a really happy customer with OVH and Kimsufi too. I had a motherboard die and they replaced it and helped me get it running in a day. Sure, not the best online time for something like a startup, but for what I was doing that was totally acceptable and fine. Their support was no hold and worked well; they spoke English; overall, an amazing experience.

codexon3• 12 years ago

I have a few issues with OVH. In no particular order:

- In summer 2013, they used their customers as beta testers for their anti-ddos service. This was mandatory for ALL customers, there was no way to opt out.

This caused false detections on some of my servers and ended up blocking ALL dns requests until I uploaded the deb for PDNS (because apt-get wouldn't work anymore) and configure TCP dns lookups.

- Multiple times in August and September all servers that detected a DDoS attack in the past 24 hours became disconnected from the internet or the US for an entire day.

- Also in summer 2013, they upgraded their offerings as usual. Their website said it would come in a week but I waited for over 60 days before I finally told them to cancel the order. This was for their midrange server.

- They removed the ability to pay for less than a month because everyone was extending the rent on their old server until their new ones arrived. This was very scummy coming from OVH.

- Later I found out they were complaining about "turnover" even though when I asked support if I could upgrade my server, they said the only way to do that is to cancel the old server and get a new one.

- They removed e-mail support for Kimsufis even though some of them cost more than their new mid-range line that has it. Now they expect you to use a forum where responses have gone unanswered and everyone can see details on your server. They didn't even reduce the price.

- There have been a few sporadic cases throughout the year where the server just lost connection to the internet for a minute. Support had nothing to say about this, but sometimes I could find some related message on travaux.ovh.net (this page gets more updates than status.ovh.net)

ericd• 12 years ago

OVH's US site (ovh.com) is rage inducing. I've never tried this hard to give a company my money and still been unsuccessful. I'm stuck in some sort of login loop, where it refuses to accept credentials I just set up, and for my older account, rather than completing my order, entering credentials on the last screen of the checkout process boots me to the main landing page.

They've got some perfect matches for server setups I need right now, but if their checkout process is this bad, I shudder to think how much of my time dealing with any actual problems with the servers might consume.

fredsanford• 12 years ago

More Slashvertising? :/

kijin• 12 years ago

Judging from this thread and previous discussions on other sites, the main problem with Kimsufi seems to be that they're picky about the country where you come from, and so far it's not easy to tell which countries are allowed.

Last year, everyone outside of EU who ordered the €2.99 deal were canceled without any mention of the rules. Some non-EU customers were told to order from their Irish site (kimsufi.ie). But this year, it seems that they merged all the ccTLDs into a single multilingual website. Anyone have any idea which countries they allow/deny?

notastartup• 12 years ago

16gb of ram for $37 CAD? what does the ipv6, 128 mean, 128 ip addresses? what is this 4c/4t mean?

emocakes2• 12 years ago

4core 4thread, /128 block of ipv6 addresses. google pl0x...

wusatiuk• 12 years ago

I was on kimsufi server for the last 3.5 years for all european projects from small to medium sized and we never had any problem with one of the servers. the last few weeks we are switching partly into the cloud and partly on an OVH Host-32 server.

price-performance ration at Kimsufi is fine from my point of view. I guess anybody who is ordering a VPS for 8€ / month should know that he will not get the latest technology in his box, but for the one or another usecase, such boxes are awesome.

dlau1• 12 years ago

A lot of bad experiences with Kimsufi here. Does this extend across the board for OVH in general?

Their 'enterprise' dedicated servers look really attractive.

$109,$174 for 64gb,128gb ram with really nice e5-16x0v2s. 2x 240gb intel S3500 ssds for $35 more a month.

http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/

Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?

mackwic2• 12 years ago

A lot of bad experiences with Ovh.

The customer support goes up with the bill. You can't ask the same support for a 3e/month server and a 100e/month.

Seemingly better network and infrastructure than hetzner too?

Yes. Ovh is one of the main Isp actor in Europe at the Wan level. Moreover Ovh is full ipv6 compliant, unlike hertzner, and bandwidth is totally free without quota.

Ah, and Ovh building itself their servers, they are the biggest PC manufacturer in EU. They don't even play on the same field.

adamseabrook• 12 years ago

I have used a few of the Kimsufi boxes and had no issues with them. At meanpath.com we use 40 SoYouStart servers and 5 big OVH servers and have never had any issues. Excellent support was provided when we did run into problems with quick hardware swap outs or whole server replacements.

If you want to test out the speed of the network feel free to download some of our publicly released crawl files on http://archive.meanpath.com which is on a 2gbps burstable pipe.

Kimsufi: the affordable dedicated server

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