HN Explorer

Ask HN: Which VPS provider will survive the coming winter?

22 points by jmnicolas ↗ HN
Hi,

I live in France and the government is preparing a law to be able to cut electricity this winter, so I guess my OVH VPS in Gravelines isn't assured to run 24/7.

On it I run a small website with about 1000 visits per day. It's not vital that it remains up at all times (it doesn't bring money) but if I can do it for cheap I'm looking to relocate this VPS in a country where electricity won't be a problem.

Anything in Europe seems as bleak as France. Not sure about the US. Even Finland that has its own nuclear power plants is preparing to ration electricity.

The only country that has cheap energy seems to be Russia, but I can't get a VPS there for obvious reasons.

Any suggestions?

47 comments

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Dobbs
I imagine most datacenters will be jumping through many hoops to make sure they have power through any cuts. Things like paying premiums for electricity, backup diesel generators, etc. This is their bread and butter. There is of course a chance that the worst case will occur, but honestly I wouldn't spend too much energy focusing on it.
Majestic121
From where do you get this info about a law to cut electricity ?

I don't see anything like that on French newspapers (Le Monde/Mediapart/BFM) nor on Google

jeroenhd
I can't speak French but this may be related to recent news about some policy regarding the nationalisation of the energy grid that France is working on. I can't find anything about cutting power, though.
wasmitnetzen
Iceland should be fine, they have plenty of renewable energy.
dx034
Hetzner in Finland is probably cheaper and with lower latency for Europeans.
davesmylie
free tier aws ec2 t2.micro should be able to handle that load
derN3rd
I can't imagine that these big hosting providers will shutdown parts of their infrastructure because of this.

They will probably buy additional fuel before winter to prepare to run their generators in the times where electricity could be cut off.

dedene
Indeed. The internet these days is such a fundamental part of our society, I can't imagine server providers will be forced to shut down. We will find a solution in Europe, however costly it may be.
hotpotamus
Yep, I worked for a hosting provider based out of Texas during the winter blackout in 2021. We had plenty of issues, but power to the DC wasn't one. Moved to a different company this years that uses a colo/cloud provider in Austin, and they didn't have any problems from the blackouts either.

At the last place, they worked with power companies to run on generators for load shedding already, and in the event of failures, they had 48 hours or more of fuel on hand and contracts to get more fuel delivered as needed only in priority behind emergency services and hospitals. That's the point of using one of these providers; they try and plan for this sort of thing.

rat9988
OVH is one of if not the most trustworthy you can get in Europe. Stick with it.
whizzter
(* Trustworthy except when it comes to fire extinguishers) :D
klohto
Wat? Where are you getting this from? Europe is completely fine from electricity standpoint. Most are doing deals with countries that have nuclear plants. Finland isn’t rationing anything either.
zeroth32
Nuclear? Not really, there were very little investments in past, new nuclear plants are not being build

In France (largest nuclear power producer) 50% of reactors are shut down for repairs right now, some are broken beyond repair. France is now net electricity importer.

DoingIsLearning
I think his worry is the percentage of power production in Europe that shifted from Coal to Natural Gas (read Russian Natural Gas).

But I just don't see it, I think governments in Europe would likely buy surplus US/Canada LNG ($$$) or scrable for extra gas from Norway/Qatar/Algeria instead of creating actual outages, specially considering how much coupling you have in EU power networks across countries. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

Elhana
Problem is that you can't just go to Qatar and ask for some LNG delivery tommorow - they are supplying on long term contracts and they need to invest $$$ to increase production. Qatar already told EU (Germany?) that they can only supply extra if they sign a 20 year contract, not 1-2 years.
DoingIsLearning
Every single supplier will squeeze EU countries for Gas money because they know the EU is caught with their pants down.

EU countries will have to budget accordingly to match the new cost of a failed Energy Policy based on hydrocarbon dependency. Hopefully this will accelerate the extinction of the Oil&Gas lobby, both for the environment of our future generations as well as our geo-political resilience.

nonrandomstring
> On it I run a small website with about 1000 visits per day. It's not vital that it remains up at all times (it doesn't bring money) but if I can do it for cheap I'm looking to relocate this VPS in a country where electricity won't be a problem.

Your house.

A site like that would run on a Raspberry Pi from a small solar panel and/or small (tiny) marine wind generator depending on your climate.

Self-hosting is a learning curve, but don't listen to the pessimists who tell you it's "impossible". There are many examples, but my favourite it this one [1].

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

lakomen
Not everyone has a static ip. Most ISPs prohibit dedicated hosting on a private contract. Email from dynamic address is usually blocked and rightly so. Mixing business with private service is not a good idea. Throughput at home is usually way less and so is reliability.
corymacd
Cloudflare Tunnels are free.
christophilus
Hetzner has a US VPS location. Linode and Vultr are good, too.

Anyway, I’d be surprised if things like OVH went down over this. I imagine they run some critical stuff and that France wouldn’t want their tech darlings to look so unstable.

dx034
While I agree that they won't shut down OVH France, I'd rather go with Hetzner Finland than Hetzner US. Mostly powered by renewables, much of that water, they'll be fine regardless of the availability of gas.
bluehatbrit
I don't really know much about datacentre power feeds, but wouldn't those renewables be connected to the main grid rather than specifically dedicated to the Hetzner DC? In which case if there was strain or rationing it could be grid wide rather than Hetzner being isolated on their own power generation. I might be wrong though, and I'm sure even if they did introduce some kind of rationing then companies like Hetzner would be fine.
o_m
If what you are saying is true, then won't the ISPs turn off their equipment too, so you won't be able to reach your server no matter where it is.
jeroenhd
There will always be electricity available, but it'll come at a cost. I expect businesses running duplicate capacity for redundancy (ie AWS) to spike in price first.

The French grid is mostly powered by nuclear and has been for years. I don't expect much of a problem there even with rising gas prices. The total energy consumption graphs online that show a significant amount of fossil fuels seem to also include other types of energy consumption such as heating.

I wouldn't worry about this for now. Make sure your offsite backups are working and prepare a plan for migration to any other host if you're worried, but with OVH I'd be more worried about the data center catching on fire than electricity being cut for more than a maintenance window.

zeroth32
Dont worry, rationing will affect large electric consumers (industry, EV cars, heating...). VPS are too small.
baremetal
youll be cold and hungry but the internet will work?
viraptor
For some non-extreme cases, sure. It depends on the heating method, but for example European countries with hot water pumped central heating to blocks of flats are more likely to drop the temperature by a couple degrees than kill a data centre or phones (which often go over data links these days).

Is not as simple or fully centrally managed of course, but the idea is valid - communication is more important than some small level of extra comfort. But of course in the middle of the winter a data centre would be shut down before heating went off completely.

dx034
If electricity becomes really scarce, they'll take some large industrial processes offline. Data centers won't be shut down. You'll be fine with OVH.
jeanlucas
This. If electricity becomes that scarce I think keeping your website up would be least of your concerns. Things aren't that bad right now, not even close to that doomsday scenario.
Etheryte
For some context, the question is probably motivated by discussions such as [0]:

> "Let's prepare for a total cut-off of Russian gas. This is now the most likely option," [said French Minister of Economy, Bruno le Maire].

> Some companies could therefore be asked to "slow down their energy consumption, or even stop their energy consumption for a certain period of time" while it would be "totally impossible" for others to do so without triggering wider industrial repercussions," he explained.

[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/07/11/electricity-su...

nottorp
Is gas used to produce electricity? Mostly I think not.

The really large consumers are industrial and use it directly. Some can be shut down relatively easily and will be in case of trouble. Others, not so much and will stay on. Not sure if there are any gas powered smelters, but if you emergency shut down one of those you have to take it down and rebuild it after.

Etheryte
I think the main effect is indirect. Not sure about France, but in many other countries in Europe gas is used extensively for both local and remote heating. If the price of gas soars, the industries that can will switch to electricity, making that price rise considerably as well. Europe already saw record highs in electricity prices in many regions last winter.
zoobab
The price of electricity is directly mapped onto the most expensive source, aka gas.

What a good idea to put that into law for the whole Europe.

nottorp
However, that will make electricity increase in price, it won't lead to cutoffs.
sofixa
OVH host government websites and services, if anything their DCs will have priority for electricity.
iammjm
The country I live in, Germany, is arguably even worse off than France. But: there is a price to be paid for human life, freedoms, democracy and decency. We've been preaching for over 50 years about never letting a genocide happen again on the European soil. Now it's time to walk the talk and pay the price. Still, for us, it's a very modest price, when compared to what the Ukrainians are paying. We pay with discomfort, Ukrainians pay with their lives, limbs and all the horrors the human destruction can bring. Fuck Russia. Sorry for the offtopic and being melodramatic - I hope you will manage to keep your VPS running.
sofixa
> We've been preaching for over 50 years about never letting a genocide happen again on the European soil

Maybe you mean 70 years(WWII), but genocides happened during the Yugoslav wars, or you meant the latter, which were only 30 years ago.

iammjm
I guess "over 50" falls into your first assumption. But you are right about the Yugoslav wars.
WelcomeShorty
If you are seriously worried about the electrical power situation in Europe this winter, I would assume your priorities would focus on the well being of your family first?