OVH Hosting, one of the biggest players in the field, has the absolutely, completely and utterly worst ever localized website – and it’s not even localized website, it’s the website for their Finnish company, ovh-hosting.fi.I simply cannot understand how their developers ship that product of stinking shit. It’s completely unusable wreckage.
Let me show you a screenshot:
This error message above (it says error in Finnish) is what you get when you follow their domain transfer procedure, provide them with the authentication id and click save. Note that there is no indication of what went wrong, what you can do etc.
Their whole website is full of this crap. Anything you do that deals with ordering a product, changing some settings from their management panel, viewing their product listings and so forth every once in a while shows you an error message very close to the above one. Usually there is some text but it’s in French or English even though the rest of the website is in Finnish. The text, if some is displayed, does not tell you what happened. It gives some general error message and it’s usually impossible to know what happened. And these things happen all the time: if you fill out a form in some wrong way, you get an error message after submitting and it doesn’t tell you what was wrong; if you try to make changes in the management panel, it tells you something in French that has nothing to do with what you were doing in the panel. Very frequently some parts of the site, management panel etc. are covered with some {{templating.variables#}} and so forth.
Some of the information on their website is also completely misleading, untrue or incomplete. Some product listings don’t tell you all that comes in the package (for example their MX services) but you have to ask the customer care for details.
One funny case was when I ordered a .fi domain whose registration was rejected. I emailed the customer support for help and… the problem was that Ficora requires birthdate of the owner for .fi domains but the OVH order system didn’t ask for that. It was broken and unusable. It was of course very nice that you could fill it in after the rejection through the management panel 🙂
I have reported over a dozen problems like these to their customer service. I have even told the one poor person who always responds to my emails that I have nothing against him but cannot really understand what really goes in the company’s mind if they cannot fix these problems. Of course, Finland is not their biggest market, but if you have ovh-hosting.fi one would probably assume that you can actually use the site. Also, they have somehow locked my personal account to some “this is a Finn” state and I cannot just switch to the international version of their management panels etc. since they always pop me back to the Finnish one.
This has nothing to do with their product quality. I have used their DNS Anycast services for years, manage multiple webhosting packages for my clients and have some personal stuff on their servers. Everything has worked perfectly hosting infrastructure wise and I’m recommending them to people since they offer a wide range of services that are performant enough for a reasonable price.
But the Finnish website, their ordering system and the management panel are worst pieces of software that I have seen from a company of this size. I really cannot understand it.