This post is part of a series sharing hands-on feedback on French PaaS providers, with one problem in mind: hosting a fleet of 120+ WordPress sites.
In this series:
- Part 1. Background to the French PaaS comparison
- Part 2. PaaS comparison: OVH falls overboard
- Part 3. PaaS comparison: Clever Cloud,
the boat is taking on waterthe captain rights the ship - Part 4. PaaS comparison: Scalingo stays afloat
- Part 5. PaaS comparison: Platform.sh lies at anchor
- Part 6. PaaS comparison: Hidora, the Swiss cloud
- Part 7. PaaS comparison: performance, Clever Cloud VS Scalingo VS Hidora
OVH and its Cloud Web offering
Skip to the summary if you’re in a hurry
OVH is the latest arrival in the PaaS world with its Cloud Web offering. It’s not their area of expertise, and you can tell quickly. Very quickly.
First bad surprise: you can’t order a Cloud Web plan for less than 12 months.
If you don’t want to order a domain name with the Cloud Web plan (because you already have one), there’s no way to skip that step when ordering through the OVH web interface. You can, however, get around it by ordering the plan through the OVH API.
Apparently the teams are working on lifting these restrictions, but according to an internal source, it won’t happen for many months (no guarantees). But let’s be clear: some competitors offer per-minute billing, so shelling out ~€490 including VAT just to run a few tests on Cloud Web 3 is hard to justify. And if we project that onto our fleet of 120+ WordPress projects, it would mean an entry ticket of ~€60,000, with no guarantee that our clients stay with us for a year.
I got in touch with someone at OVH to report these issues. They offered me Cloud Web 3 free for 1 year in exchange for feedback on the product. Thanks for the offer.
As soon as I had access to the product, I wanted to switch to PHP 7.3 and create my environment variables so I could configure WordPress and run my performance tests. But I ran into problems, one of which stopped me from using the product at all:
- PHP 7.3 isn’t available, even though it came out on December 6, 2018, more than a month before this post was written
- No permission management (other than for the admin/technical contact), for example to let a group of people on a team manage environment variables
- I created some environment variables: some were created within seconds or minutes, while others still said “Being created” after 15 minutes. I dug through the UI before finding out that the creation task for some of them had failed (with no further details)
- No “bulk insert” for environment variables. Because of that, I had to repeat the variable creation process 20 times
OVH support
With no way to edit or delete the “faulty” variables, I’m stuck in the middle of my setup, so I turn to support.
- January 8, 2019: I open a support ticket to report that I can’t use the product because of my environment variable problem
- January 21, 2019, 13 DAYS later: I get the first reply from support, which boils down to: “We apologize for the delay in handling your ticket; our administrators are looking into your request.”
- January 23, 2019: I’m told that the failed operations have been canceled and invited to try again, with no explanation of what happened.
OVH Cloud Web summary (TL;DR)
👎 Cons
- Annual commitment
- No monthly payment
- Can’t order without an associated domain through the web interface
- Very thin, incomplete documentation
- No Git deployment
- No automatic deployment via a GitHub/GitLab app
- No horizontal or vertical scaling
- No auto-scaling
- OVH support: steer clear
- No permission management, for example to give a team access to environment variables
- Poor UX/DX for managing variables, on top of being buggy
👍 Pros
- Automated backups
- Let’s Encrypt integration
- OVH network
- That’s about it… 🤷♂️😱
⛔️ VERDICT: ELIMINATED ⛔️
It’s hard to pass final judgment on OVH’s PaaS offerings when you can feel they still need to mature before they meet the market’s needs. Honestly, I was frustrated and disappointed that I couldn’t benchmark the performance of their Cloud Web 3 plan.
Unfortunately, my preconceptions about their support were confirmed, so I can’t recommend this offering to anyone for professional use: at the slightest problem, you wait weeks for support to reply (unless you hound them on Twitter), even when it’s critical for your service.
As for personal use, who can drop ~€490 in one go to host their personal “side project” on a PaaS? 🙊