OVH, now widely branded as OVHcloud, is a French cloud computing and hosting company. It provides services such as web hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, public cloud, private cloud, domain services, storage, and network infrastructure.
OVH was founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba. The company grew from a hosting provider into a large European infrastructure provider with its own data centre estate, network, server-production model, and cloud services. The OVHcloud name is now used for the group-facing brand, while "OVH" remains a common short form.
History
OVH began as a hosting business during the late 1990s expansion of the public internet. OVHcloud's own history material describes the creation of OVH in 1999, with Octave Klaba founding the company to offer reliable and secure hosting.
The company expanded from shared hosting into dedicated servers and wider infrastructure services. A major part of its identity has been vertical control of infrastructure: building, deploying, and operating large numbers of servers in its own facilities rather than acting only as a reseller.
As the hosting market shifted towards cloud services, OVH developed public cloud and hosted private cloud products. The OVHcloud brand reflects that broader role, although many users still refer to the company simply as OVH.
Services
OVHcloud's services cover several related areas:
- Web hosting for websites, email, and ordinary online projects.
- Virtual private servers for small applications, development, and isolated workloads.
- Dedicated servers for customers who need full physical machines.
- Public cloud services for scalable compute, storage, networking, and managed platform tools.
- Hosted private cloud for customers who want dedicated virtualisation platforms.
- Domain registration and DNS-related services.
- Storage and backup products.
- Security and network services, including anti-DDoS protection.
This mix places OVHcloud between traditional web hosts and hyperscale cloud providers. It is often chosen by users who want direct server control, European hosting options, or a balance between cloud features and predictable bare-metal capacity.
Infrastructure
OVHcloud operates its services through data centres, network links, and regional infrastructure. Its public pages describe regions, availability zones, data centre locations, local zones, and a backbone network used to host customer products.
The company is known for a large physical-server footprint and for designing parts of its own infrastructure stack. Dedicated servers and bare-metal products are a major part of its public identity, even though the company also sells cloud services.
Data centre location matters because it affects latency, data protection requirements, resilience, and disaster recovery design. Customers running important systems on OVHcloud still need to plan backups, replication, and recovery according to their own risk, rather than assuming one provider location is enough.
Strasbourg Fire
On 10 March 2021, a fire broke out at OVHcloud's Strasbourg site. OVHcloud's public incident information stated that the fire began at 00:47, detection systems activated, and the site had to be isolated while emergency services responded.
The incident affected services connected with the Strasbourg campus and became a well-known example of why off-site backups and multi-location recovery matter. The event did not mean that cloud hosting is unsafe by default, but it showed that a single data centre or single provider region can still be a failure point if customers do not design for resilience.
Privacy and Jurisdiction
OVHcloud often markets itself around European infrastructure, data protection, and cloud sovereignty. For European customers, jurisdiction can matter because hosting choices may affect contractual duties, privacy compliance, support expectations, and public-sector requirements.
Those points do not remove the customer's own duties. A customer still needs secure configuration, access control, encryption where appropriate, logging, retention policies, and a realistic recovery plan.
Role in Hosting
OVHcloud is important in the hosting market because it offers a large range of infrastructure products at different levels of control. A small customer may only need shared hosting or a VPS. A larger customer may use dedicated servers, private cloud, storage, and network services.
The company is also part of the wider European debate about cloud independence, data location, and competition with larger American and Chinese cloud platforms. Its strengths and weaknesses are therefore judged not only on price, but also on service reliability, support, geographic reach, compliance, and resilience.
See Also
References
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