OVHcloud
A French cloud provider that builds its own servers and data centers and sells bare-metal servers, an OpenStack-based public cloud and hosted private clouds.
- What it is
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Type
- Commercial product
- Made by
- OVHcloud
- License
- Proprietary
- Facts checked
- 24 October 2026
What it is
OVHcloud started as a server host and still sells a lot of bare metal: dedicated servers in ranges from cheap Kimsufi machines through Advance and Scale to High Grade, rented by the month. Unmetered traffic is the default outside Asia-Pacific, anti-DDoS protection is included, and every server has a second network card for the vRack, a physical private network between a customer’s servers. On top sit a Public Cloud built on OpenStack, with VM instances, GPU instances, block storage, S3-compatible object storage and a Managed Kubernetes Service, billed by the hour, by the month or on longer commitments; and a Hosted Private Cloud, which includes managed VMware vSphere.
The company is vertically integrated: it designs, builds and runs its own data centers, servers and network. It reports 46 data centers on four continents, more than 3,000 employees and 1.7 million customers in 140 countries. Most of its European regions have one availability zone (Gravelines, Roubaix and Strasbourg in France, Limburg in Germany, Warsaw, and Erith near London); Paris (2023) and Milan (2025) are three-zone regions, and smaller Local Zones sit in 16 more European cities.
OVHcloud sells itself on European sovereignty. Several offers, including its SNC Cloud Platform, managed VMware vSphere and a Bare Metal Pod, hold SecNumCloud, the qualification that ANSSI, France’s national cybersecurity agency, grants after auditing technical, legal and organisational safeguards.
Why teams pick it
- Dedicated servers with unmetered bandwidth and anti-DDoS protection included, and a physical private network (vRack) between them
- It owns the whole chain, from server design to data center and network, which it says gives it control of cost, security and sustainability
- A French company with SecNumCloud-qualified offers, for buyers who need that French security qualification
- The Public Cloud speaks the standard OpenStack API, so infrastructure is automated with OpenStack clients rather than a proprietary interface
Watch out for
- The 2021 Strasbourg fire destroyed the SBG2 building; the fire service found no automatic extinguishing system and no general power cut-off, and some customers lost both servers and the backups they had paid for because both sat in the same building
- Most regions are a single availability zone: only Paris and Milan spread across three, so surviving a site loss means running in two regions
- Unmetered bandwidth is shared: under its fair-use rule OVHcloud may cap a server’s outgoing public bandwidth by up to 50% if it hurts other users, and Asia-Pacific servers are metered
Alternatives
What all infrastructure as a service (iaas) have in common →Compare side by side →
ScalewayCommercialThe cloud arm of France’s iliad group: VMs, GPUs, bare-metal servers, Kubernetes and managed databases in four three-zone regions in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan.
HetznerCommercialA German host that rents cloud VMs by the hour and whole dedicated servers by the month from its own data center parks in Germany and Finland, plus cloud-only sites in the US and Singapore.
Cherry ServersCommercialA Lithuanian host that rents dedicated bare-metal servers through an API, billed by the hour, as spot capacity or by the month, from seven locations in Europe, the US and Asia.How it fits with other technologies
See it in a real stack
No architecture uses OVHcloud yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →Where it came from1999–2025
Octave Klaba founded OVH in 1999, while he was a student at ICAM in Lille, to meet the demand for internet hosting. In its first years the company developed a water-cooling system for its servers that cut the energy its data centers used. Between 2004 and 2009 it bought a rundown industrial site in Roubaix for its head office and first data centers and built its own fibre network; between 2010 and 2015 it added a Hosted Private Cloud and a Public Cloud and opened a North American office and data center in 2012. In 2016 KKR and TowerBrook bought a minority stake for €250 million, with the Klaba family keeping control, and in 2019 OVH renamed itself OVHcloud.
Just after midnight on 10 March 2021, a fire destroyed SBG2, one of four buildings on OVHcloud’s Strasbourg site, and damaged servers in SBG1. Klaba told customers to activate their disaster recovery plans. The fire service report described a fire in an electrical inverter, a building with no automatic extinguishing system or power cut-off, and courtyards that acted as chimneys. More than 140 customers joined a class action, and in early 2023 the commercial court of Lille ordered OVHcloud to pay two customers whose paid backups had been stored in the same building, or wiped during recovery; OVHcloud appealed.
On 15 October 2021 OVHcloud listed on Euronext Paris under the ticker OVH, raising €400 million; it then ran over 400,000 servers in 33 data centers. Since then it has opened three-zone regions in Paris (2023) and Milan (2025) and won SecNumCloud qualification for some of its offers.
Why it’s built this way
- Build its own servers
- OVHcloud says making its own servers gives it more room to innovate and better control of cost, security and sustainability than buying from server vendors.
- Water cooling from the early years
- Cooling servers with water rather than only air cut the energy its data centers used.
- A public cloud on OpenStack
- OVHcloud builds on open-source standards such as OpenStack, Kubernetes and PostgreSQL, so customers automate it through the OpenStack API rather than one of its own.
Timeline
- 1999
Octave Klaba founds OVH
- 2012
First North American office and data center
- 2016
KKR and TowerBrook take a €250 million minority stake
- 2019
OVH becomes OVHcloud
- 2021
Fire destroys SBG2 in Strasbourg (March); listing on Euronext Paris (October)
- 2023
Court in Lille orders damages to two customers who lost backups; three-zone region opens in Paris
- 2025
Three-zone region opens in Milan
- OVHcloud corporate: Our history
- The Register: OVHcloud fire report, datacenter had no extinguisher or power cut-off (Mar 2022)
- Blocks and Files: OVHcloud must pay damages for lost backup data (Mar 2023)
- Euronext: OVHcloud lists on Euronext Paris (Oct 15, 2021)
- OVHcloud: Regions and data centers (3-AZ regions and opening years)
Sources8 · facts checked 24 October 2026
- OVHcloud corporate: home page (46 data centers, customers, employees, revenue)
- OVHcloud corporate: Why OVHcloud (own servers, vertical integration)
- OVHcloud: Public Cloud (OpenStack, instances, block and object storage, Managed Kubernetes, billing)
- OVHcloud: Bare Metal (ranges, unmetered traffic, fair use, anti-DDoS, vRack)
- OVHcloud: Regions and data centers (1-AZ, 3-AZ and Local Zones)
- OVHcloud: SecNumCloud (qualified offers, ANSSI)
- The Register: OVHcloud fire report (Mar 2022)
- Blocks and Files: OVHcloud must pay damages for lost backup data (Mar 2023)