OVH Dedicated/VPS Custom Installation

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: The document is currently being modified!

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Introduction

I have personally been using OVH for my hosting for some time now. While they are not necessarily known for their stellar support, if you know what you are doing you can accomplish a lot with OVH. One of the cheaper options at OVH, if you cannot afford or do not need an entire dedicated server all to yourself, is the OVH VPS SSD. With the lowest tier offering starting at around $4USD a month, they are very affordable to grab one to play around with for a bit. So for the sake of science, I purchased one of the first tier (VPS SSD 1) and gave it a go. This is what followed, a complete re-installation of the OS.

DISCLAIMER: Despite being a decent host, they have some very very bad practices for default OS installs (for example putting their own SSH keys into the root accounts authorized_keys). And well, call me paranoid, but I don't trust an OS that I did not install.

You can find a detailed comparison of a few VPS providers including OVH here

OVH VPS Terms & Conditions

After looking through their terms and conditions for the VPS only two things jump out at me in particular.

"OVH reserves the right to limit, filter, suspend or restrict features and protocols (such as IRC or peer to peer file sharing) of the Virtual Private Server to ensure the security of their infrastructure."

This doesn't seem too bad. From the sound of it, if you cripple their network running IRC or p2p based things they reserve the right to firewall you. I can understand that, not like you want to attract script kiddies and DDoS.

"OVH will guarantee a bandwidth of up to 100 Mbps (one hundred megabits per second) as long as the traffic of the bandwidth does not exceed the pre-defined set monthly volume of 10TB (ten terabytes). This monthly volume includes both internal OVH traffic and traffic outside of the OVH network. When the monthly traffic volume exceeds the set monthly volume, the bandwidth of the Virtual Private Server will be limited to 1 Mbps until the next monthly renewal date."

If the monthly transfer limit was not so high I would say this would be a serious deal-breaker. However, given most months I have a hard time hitting even 1TB on my dedicated server I have from them, I do not think this is as serious as it looks unless your planning to run some seriously bandwidth intense tasks.

Setup Time

Setup time for the VPS was not bad but not amazing either. I would say about average for OVH (don't let their 120s activate images on the website fool you).

• Ordered: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 5:37 PM
• Received: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 5:48 PM

Rescue Mode

First in order to install Arch Linux from scratch we need to get the VPS netbooted into the OVH Rescue Mode.