OVH (english website [1]) is the best French hosting company and one of the best French domain name registar (with Gandi [2]), and are starting to make themselves a name outside of France. Hubic is the "cloud" offer from OVH.
They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive, and have very fair prices (they are like the hosting counterparts of Free [3], a French ISP that drove subscription fees down to what they now are and forced other ISPs to make their prices fairer).
OVH is the largest not the best French host. They're a budget host that vastly oversells. OVH has no such reputation for responsiveness, their "fair" prices are based on many fold overselling their network and holding onto and charging the same for hardware that's ten years old. They recycle disks even when they're about to die. They overload racks and cause power issues (Your whole rack rebooted? Sorry, one of the servers on it drew enough power under load to flip a breaker) . They randomly reboot servers as part of their DDoS protection. They think sending UDP packets is nefarious and will wipe your server for it.
"They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive"
Have you ever dealt with their support? - I for myself am quite happy with my service (Dedicated server) so far (because I rarely had to deal with the support) but I've heard a few horror stories where some of their biggest UK customers basically got kicked out even though they stayed within the TOS and the terms they signed the contract for, or the thing about their DDoS protection kicking in, rebooting your server even though they are legit requests.
Their support by email / Internet is just nonexistent: I've never had any reply to the many messages I've sent this way. The support by phone requires you to wait about ~20 minutes until someone takes your call, but then, it's very efficient (in my case, at least).
I'm very happy I almost never have any problem with OVH (I've two DSL connections with included Hubic accounts and a few web hosting with included domain names), because the support is not great at all.
OVH is probably the biggest, but it's unfair to say they are the best: they are a low-cost hosting company and provide a minimal support, unless you pay the price.
Moreover, OVH sometimes take quite stupid commercial decisions without notice. For instance, two months ago, they decided to put on hold any dedicated server command without notice... during more than 5 weeks.
Why did they do that? Because OVH's CEO became angry at customers ordering upgraded servers instead of renewing the leasing of their older ones.
As of Free, they bully and racket network peers which need to send traffic over their network as much as they can. (See how slow is youtube over the Free network, for instance...)
I also use OVH as an ISP and quite happy so far. I had connectivity problems once and a technical person answered my email within a couple of hours. By the end of the day it was back to normal.
Seems to be based on OpenStack [1] Storage [2].
That means any client that supports OpenStack (and Rackspace Cloud Files [3], for that matter) like Cyberduck [4] and a lot more should already be compatible with hubiC.
Do you know a good client for Linux? Their official client [1] requires mono and I don't want to install that on my server (or even my desktop, for that matter).
They seem to use custom OAuth-based facade, so bare OpenStack clients won't work out of the box (or I'm missing something, I'm just starting to read about what Swift is).
First I tried to use API console to get storage API URI and auth token, but I misunderstood something and it didn't work for me.
> I confirm having read and fully understood the hubiC General COnditions
> PDF en français
Luckily, Google Translate provides mostly readable results, but if they present site in English they really should consider translating ToS too.
Although I was unable to share direct link (Google rejects to translate PDF from URL, only by direct upload), and the result not peeep.us-able, I was able to save it as a paste here to save others time downloading and uploading the PDF: http://dabblet.com/gist/8861421 (Dabblet seems broken, too, "view full page result" fails, so click "result" tab to get rid of unnecessary panes)
Some points I got(but may have misunderstood) from there:
- There're 10Mbps up/down bandwidth limits.
- You remain the sole owner of your data.
- Not allowed to store and/or share ("stocker et/ou partager") porn (huh‽) and some other kind of content considered indecent, disturbing or unlawful.
- They're not responsible for failed transfers, you explicitly agree have to check that the files succesfully uploaded by yourself.
- Commercial use of service is prohibited (uh... only personal accounts?)
- I didn't really get this part: "Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." but Google says it translates to something like "The Customer agrees to pay directly to the author of the claim any amount that it would require OVH." From the context, I may guess the meaning is, that if you somehow caused some damage, you're going to protect OVH in court and if you/they're held responsible, you're going to pay those damages. Hmmm...
Not sure if that will help, but here's my understanding:
"Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." If an author ask compensation to OVH, you (OVH Client) pay the author directly the wanted amount.
Android client wants access to my calendar and contacts for some reason. I'm gonna install it anyway because I can prevent it from accessing those things after the fact because I'm running an OpenPDroid modified Cyanogenmod.
I can't understand how people trust (or even care about) server-provided encryption. There's no guarantee they or their friends can't open it on their servers. Unless you use your own solution, their encryption only provides protection in transit, against unaffiliated third parties.
Link encryption is good, and it's helpful to ensure the only attack vector is the service provider itself, not sub-contractors or someone being stupid and throwing away drives.
That said, Dropbox has done a pretty good job of lying about how much security they offered users in the past. But someone providing a service like this with a reasonable security policy which is openly communicated to the users is still better than no security policy.
When it comes to zero-knowledge encryption, it is hard to know how their implementation holds up without external audits. This is the same for other encryption applications (google Truecrypt audit).
If you have enough devices yourself does it matter much? I'd take uptime over redundancy. I always have 2 work pc copies + 2 laptops going. As long as they don't sync empty folders back down I don't mind a services that's only got light redundancy.
Jesus that's cheap. Anyone know how good their differential syncing is, or what they are using (librsync?) Are they using inotify or is it a regular tree walk?
1. From a quick glance I can't find anything related to patching in backend or change handling classes. Either I'm missing something or it doesn't handle arbitrary changes well. There's some suspect-driving long ByteDelta property on Change class, but I fail to see where it's used in a meaningful manner.
2. It uses a lightweight abstraction over System.IO.FileSystemWatcher. This means inotify, when ran on Mono on GNU/Linux.
I like OVH and everything, even if I don't host with them anymore.
However I tried this service a few months ago, and it was very unreliable and slow to sync files. Sharing files between different people in particular was quite a hassle, which is why i quit using it. Also, I had a lot of trouble with the Linux client.
It may get better with time though as the project was only started in 2013 i believe.
It's good to have cheap alternatives but if you can pay for Dropbox there's just no comparison in the products.
Readit News
They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive, and have very fair prices (they are like the hosting counterparts of Free [3], a French ISP that drove subscription fees down to what they now are and forced other ISPs to make their prices fairer).
[1] http://www.ovh.co.uk/
[2] http://en.gandi.net/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_%28ISP%29
Have you ever dealt with their support? - I for myself am quite happy with my service (Dedicated server) so far (because I rarely had to deal with the support) but I've heard a few horror stories where some of their biggest UK customers basically got kicked out even though they stayed within the TOS and the terms they signed the contract for, or the thing about their DDoS protection kicking in, rebooting your server even though they are legit requests.
You can't beat their prices though.
I'm very happy I almost never have any problem with OVH (I've two DSL connections with included Hubic accounts and a few web hosting with included domain names), because the support is not great at all.
Moreover, OVH sometimes take quite stupid commercial decisions without notice. For instance, two months ago, they decided to put on hold any dedicated server command without notice... during more than 5 weeks.
Why did they do that? Because OVH's CEO became angry at customers ordering upgraded servers instead of renewing the leasing of their older ones.
As of Free, they bully and racket network peers which need to send traffic over their network as much as they can. (See how slow is youtube over the Free network, for instance...)
[1] http://www.openstack.org/
[2] https://api.hubic.com/
[3] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack
[4] http://cyberduck.ch
[1] http://mir7.ovh.net/ovh-applications/hubic/hubiC-Linux/1.1.1...
[1] http://redbo.github.io/cloudfuse/
First I tried to use API console to get storage API URI and auth token, but I misunderstood something and it didn't work for me.
This, on the other hand, helped, although it uses some other API endpoints (still, those are OVH APIs): https://github.com/gierschv/node-hubic-swiftauth
> PDF en français
Luckily, Google Translate provides mostly readable results, but if they present site in English they really should consider translating ToS too.
Although I was unable to share direct link (Google rejects to translate PDF from URL, only by direct upload), and the result not peeep.us-able, I was able to save it as a paste here to save others time downloading and uploading the PDF: http://dabblet.com/gist/8861421 (Dabblet seems broken, too, "view full page result" fails, so click "result" tab to get rid of unnecessary panes)
Some points I got(but may have misunderstood) from there:
- There're 10Mbps up/down bandwidth limits.
- You remain the sole owner of your data.
- Not allowed to store and/or share ("stocker et/ou partager") porn (huh‽) and some other kind of content considered indecent, disturbing or unlawful.
- They're not responsible for failed transfers, you explicitly agree have to check that the files succesfully uploaded by yourself.
- Commercial use of service is prohibited (uh... only personal accounts?)
- I didn't really get this part: "Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." but Google says it translates to something like "The Customer agrees to pay directly to the author of the claim any amount that it would require OVH." From the context, I may guess the meaning is, that if you somehow caused some damage, you're going to protect OVH in court and if you/they're held responsible, you're going to pay those damages. Hmmm...
"Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." If an author ask compensation to OVH, you (OVH Client) pay the author directly the wanted amount.
Seems to be owned and run by OVH France.
But without encryption and private keys, i'd rather rent a server and use Duplicati.
That said, Dropbox has done a pretty good job of lying about how much security they offered users in the past. But someone providing a service like this with a reasonable security policy which is openly communicated to the users is still better than no security policy.
EVault, Wuala, Tarsnap, SpiderOak, Norton Zone, KeepVault, Jungle Disk, ElephantDrive, CrashPlan, Carbonite, F-Secure, Handy Backup, IASO Backup, MediaFire, MEGA, OwnDrive, TeamDrive etc..
..all provide Zero-Knowledge encryption for their cloud backups, i think OVH should be able to at least the same.
> Data is copied in 3 seperate datacentres in France.
1. From a quick glance I can't find anything related to patching in backend or change handling classes. Either I'm missing something or it doesn't handle arbitrary changes well. There's some suspect-driving long ByteDelta property on Change class, but I fail to see where it's used in a meaningful manner.
2. It uses a lightweight abstraction over System.IO.FileSystemWatcher. This means inotify, when ran on Mono on GNU/Linux.
Basically it says good bye with:
~/Downloads/hubic> hubic main-loop [INFO | 2/9/2014 9:05:08 PM | Ovh.Hubic.Sync.Linux.CLI.Server.MainLoop] Application starts (Version: 1.1.13.22-64; Platform: Unix 3.12.9.301) [ERROR | 2/9/2014 9:05:08 PM | Ovh.Hubic.Backend.HubicAccountHandler.GetGreetings] Got error while getting greetings: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Runtime.Serialization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.
Not going well so far, credit card form was in french... Said it failed, it refreshed itself, says it's worked, but it isn't showing up on my account.
Something tells me that 10 euros is going to cost a hell of a lot more than that of my time getting to the bottom of this.
However I tried this service a few months ago, and it was very unreliable and slow to sync files. Sharing files between different people in particular was quite a hassle, which is why i quit using it. Also, I had a lot of trouble with the Linux client. It may get better with time though as the project was only started in 2013 i believe.
It's good to have cheap alternatives but if you can pay for Dropbox there's just no comparison in the products.
On a Sdsl line my upload rate (pc <-> hubic) is 45kb/s, download is 120kb/s. Not mind blowing but it's enough for me, running in the background.
For casual sync and backup, I totaly recommend.