Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Moving from RamNode to OVH

Yesterday, I wrote about moving the techmansworld.com domain over to Google Domains. That day, I also made a few other transitions, which were moving my two RamNode VPS' over to OVH's VPS hosting.



Why I moved

I know that a lot of folks asked me about this (especially on IRC), but the answer is really more clear cut: the inclusion of DDoS-protection out of the box. RamNode themselves are not a bad company, and I didn't leave them on bad terms. I just simply left them because they no longer fit my needs.

RamNode does offer DDoS-filtered IP addresses, but the amount of bandwidth that those addresses can handle is quite low (10 gbits/second), you have to pay extra to have these filtered IPs, and they also offer no higher tier of protection.

OVH is a much more massive hosting company. They build and run their own datacenters, in a few spots all over the world. OVH offers mitigation of any kind of attack, with only a few gripes.

I was using the OpenVZ plans over at RamNode, and despite knowing the limitations of OpenVZ, it didn't bother me too much considering what I host (which is IRC servers for the chat network). OVH's VPS plans are a bit cheaper than RamNode. The smallest OVH tier is $2.99 USD, and features 1GB of RAM. I was previously paying $5/mo just for one RamNode server, and only had 512 MB of RAM. Basically, I was getting more for less at OVH, with only slight (not important) compromises.

Good terms with RamNode

As I have said before, I did not leave RamNode on bad terms. They simply no longer met my demands. Their goal in hosting is not exactly to offer DDoS mitigation, while OVH is more apt to deal with more "serious" hosting tasks.

Would I buy from RamNode again? Sure, I don't mind buying from them. However, I will say that once again, OVH's prices cannot be beaten. There is literally no other competitor that offers so much more, for less than they do.