OVHcloud is Europe’s answer to the American cloud giants. Founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba in Roubaix, France, the company has grown into the continent’s largest cloud infrastructure provider, operating 43 data centers across 12 locations in Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific. OVHcloud went public on Euronext Paris in October 2021.
What sets OVHcloud apart is its vertical integration. The company designs its own servers, builds its own water-cooling systems, and manufactures components in-house at a factory in Croix, France. This control over the full stack lets OVHcloud offer competitive pricing while maintaining hardware quality.
Their product range covers the full spectrum: bare-metal dedicated servers, public cloud (based on OpenStack), private cloud (based on VMware), web hosting, domain registration, and managed Kubernetes. The bare-metal offerings are particularly popular among the developer community for their price-to-performance ratio.
OVHcloud has positioned itself heavily around European data sovereignty and GDPR compliance. As concerns about US cloud providers and data privacy regulations have grown, OVHcloud has benefited from European companies looking to keep their data on European soil, managed by a European company.
The company experienced a significant setback in March 2021 when a fire destroyed its SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, taking down millions of websites and some data permanently. OVHcloud has since invested heavily in fire prevention, physical security, and disaster recovery improvements.
With annual revenue exceeding €800 million and over 1.6 million customers worldwide, OVHcloud is proving that there’s room in the cloud market for alternatives to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — especially for customers who prioritize data sovereignty and transparent pricing.
