OVHcloud is a large dedicated server, web hosting and (private) cloud provider operating world-wide and based in Roubaix, France.
OVHcloud is one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world, with data centres all across the world and around half a million servers in operation.
Next to server hosting, hosted private cloud and cloud platform services, OVHcloud are offering a variety of adjacent services, such as telephony and domain registration.
Data Centres
OVHcloud is operating 43 data centres in 9 countries with more than 450.000 servers. Outside of Europe, OVHcloud have data centres in Australia, India, Singapore, United States and Canada. In Europe, OVHcloud are operating 4 data centres in France, one in Germany, one in Poland and one in the United Kingdom.
For the geographical location of all European data centres check the Data Centre Map.
Features & Services
OVHcloud offers a wide range of services beyond the classic IaaS public cloud services. This includes various options for web hosting, including a CDN (based on the worldwide server presence), managed Exchange Server, a private cloud offering for managed SAP HANA, VMware solutions and many more.
In the public cloud portfolio, OVHcloud has one of the widest product ranges, including for example several services to build a data platform, built on Open Source best-in-class tools, such as Apache Iceberg, Spark, Trino, and Prometheus. A service also worth to highlight is the Managed Rancher Service.
OVHcloud offers 31 different managed AI models, readily consumable behind API endpoints. These range from the classic LLM models of the Llama series, DeepSeek and the Mistral models, over image generation, to voice generation models, named entity recognition, image segmentation, and many more. The complete list is in the AI Endpoints Catalog of Models.
A great addition in our eyes would be serverless options for compute and databases with true scale-to-zero capability.
Developer Experience
There are several options to work with OVHcloud:
REST API
The OVHcloud API lets developers provision and configure every service at OVHcloud. The first steps to get started with the REST API are described in First Steps with OVHcloud APIs.
CLI
OVHcloud do not provide their own, official CLI. There are some community projects, but they do not seem to be actively maintained. A previously official CLI was deprecated in 2019. However, there is a guide on how to manage OVH from shell using a variety of tools, including the OpenStack CLI.
For managing AI services, there is a dedicated CLI, officially maintained by OVH.
Terraform
A well-supported way for managing OVH infrastructure is through the OVHcloud Terraform provider. There is a range of examples for getting started with the public cloud services in the OVHcloud GitHub repository.
Console
The OVHcloud console is very easy to get around. You almost instantly know where to look and where to go – unlike the convoluted monstrosities of AWS, Azure and GCP. On the other hand, the complexity of AWS, Azure and GCP consoles is a consequence of a higher depth of configurability compared to OVHcloud.
Environmental Policy
OVHcloud has a very distinct and holistic environmental policy, based on several pillars:
- Energy: OVHcloud’s policy regarding energy consumption is twofold: the data centers are designed use as minimal electricity as possible. OVHcloud claim to have an average Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) of 1,26 (compared to ~1,5 industry average). Furthermore, the company strives to use renewable or low-carbon energy. 92% of energy comes from renewable sources in 2025.
- Water consumption: the data centers are designed to minimize water consumption for cooling.
- Circular economy: OVHcloud claims to disassemle all servers after use, thus reusing 27% of components.
- Measurement & Transparency: the company is measuring its own environmental footprint and is being transparent about it. Furthermore, cloud users can check their carbon footprint in the OVHcloud console. OVHcloud are calculating the carbon footprint by considering the CO2 equivalent of server production, energy consumption and operation.
Read more about OVHcloud environmental policy.
Conclusion
OVHcloud is a very large European cloud provider with the largest number of data centres by far. Also, the product portfolio is one of the widest, with special solutions for the enterprise, e.g. for disaster recovery, managed SAP HANA, a completly packaged data platform, managed Kafka, and many more services. With the maturity of the OVHcloud platform after over 25 in business, OVHcloud is a very solid choice for almost any type of workload and project.
