Cloud setup pricing update

💡 OVHcloud is my current employer. This is my opinion, as a customer, on a service they provide.

⏮️ Initial cost

When moving my home server to a VPS, I made some calculations on the cost. Here is what I wrote at the time:

With the VPS, here's the cost breakdown (including 20% VAT in France):

• VPS: 13.56€/mo

• Automated backup option: 3.96€/mo

• MySQL: 7.908€/mo

• PostgreSQL: 7.908€/mo

• Total: 33.336€/mo or 400.032€/year

I could save some money - about 30€/year - by committing to the VPS for one or two years but I'm giving myself some time before doing that.

[…]

The MySQL DB is used only for three instances of Ghost (open source blog software). I'm looking at alternative solutions for the blogs. Removing MySQL would save me ~96€/year so the recurring cost would go even below the homemade setup.

⏩ New offer

Fast forward to now, I’ve made a few changes:

• Thanks to a new VPS offer at OVHcloud, I now pay 5.39€/mo for more resources (4 CPU and 8 GB RAM)

• Automated backups are now included

• I moved my blogs over to Pika, which costs 4.33€/mo ($60/yr), and I was able to shut down the MySQL instance

• I still use a Web Cloud Database PostgreSQL instance: 7.91€/mo

• Total: 17.63€/mo or 211.56€/yr

This is less than the ~334€/yr I estimated for the home setup, and nearly half of the initial cloud cost. I have enough resources for my current needs, and I can even scale vertically: the next plan gives me 50% more CPU and RAM for +3€/mo, still well within reason.

Committing for 12 months now looks far less interesting: I would only save 10€ over the year.

🧐 Opinion

So far, I’m glad! I initially started renting my VPS at OVHcloud because it’s a French company 🇫🇷🐔 and because I wanted control on my data, but the price was steep compared to competition. I’m now also staying for the price. Their offer is quite competitive now!

The migration was not perfectly smooth. I had to order a new service and reinstall everything from scratch. There was an option for me to upgrade to the new offer at the same cost but I wouldn’t get as much as the new offer advertised for that price, and I wasn’t presented with an option to stay on a similar resource level and reduce the monthly fee. See the images below for context.

Thankfully, I already had most of the setup process automated, including application deployment and DNS record management, so migrating wasn’t too difficult. All applications using a database were already using the managed instance outside the VPS. I had to transfer a few files but nothing that scp and rsync couldn’t handle. I regret the marketing move though, it doesn’t seem very fair.

I may investigate in using S3 as a backend for file-based applications, to make the VPS deployments truly stateless. I’m not sure yet. Stay tuned! 😉