Wow, that is a sweet deal. Thanks for posting jacques. I can't imagine a startup idea I may have that requires that much disk space, but it may set the mind turning to know the option is somewhat affordable.
Personally I was swayed by the bandwidth, the fact that it is unmetered 1G for 1.45 / Mbit is really very low compared to other places. And this is a very serious hosting facility, unlike some of the other 'price breakers' out there.
They currently host 10's of thousands of servers, including some pretty major sites.
Where are they located? Are there benefits to the location, such as fair treatment of IP disputes? It would be nice to have a server hosted in a place where the ISP only unplugs you after a court decision, not before.
They're in Europe, specifically on an industrial area close to the city of Haarlem.
Leaseweb has historically hosted a whole bunch of 'controversial' sites, they've stood by their customers as far as they can but of course they do have to abide by the law.
I've just purchased my first server from Leaseweb as well (spoke with Robin too) and the deal is pretty nice considering the quality of bandwidth is supposed to quite good with Leaseweb.
The majority of my servers are with OVH though, they're not known for quality support but their prices are pretty low and do have a good control panel. However I guess it's best to find a server that suits your needs.
I've looked at OVH, but I read so many horror stories about them on hosting review sites that I never dared to sign up with them, good to see they have satisfied customers as well.
They're huge from what I've seen about them, but as you say, support is a bit of an issue there, as well as strong opinions about oversold bandwidth.
I just read what I wrote, I sound like an advert! I actually have quite a love/hate relationship with them.
They generally work through things blundering on one thing to the next and I'm not sure how they made it this far. At times they cause more trouble than they're worth but when it's all good, it's brilliant.
They're bandwidth can also be pretty hit or miss outside of Europe (and random spots within Europe and even France too). They disregard it with little interest but that's a bit insane considering the Internet is an international phenomenon. Oh, and not to mention peers can get 5kb/s to one server but then their full connection (700kb/s+) speed to another server in the same datacentre (again, met with little interest).
That said, I have been told (explicitly in an incident ticket by staff) that the monitoring on the 10Gbps servers do not yet work with their routers. As a result they have no way to track the bandwidth usage and impose their 40TB usage on them.
They can deliver (for now). They do prioritise servers on the network so these servers are getting better bandwidth than most others that I have seen.
The only problem is that they will wise up eventually and fix the issue (especially when you've just walked away with 500TB!) so it is quite a gamble.
If you do ever get a HG-10G Large from them and get bored of it, I will gladly take it off your hands. (Possibly throwing in something to help with the set up fee depending on how much I need it).
You are right, I should have paid better attention (the provider is, apparently, not themselves advertising this "feature").
Regardless I still don't see the point of highlighting a loophole that is obviously going away in the short term.
Au contraire the existence of this flaw should a be strong indicator against using said ISP. Do you really want to trust your stuff to them if they can't even get their own billing straight?
While searching for a new hosting provider a few months ago, I had a few (on-site) conversations with Leaseweb in The Netherlands too. I can confirm they seem to be nice people (although we decided to go with another company).
