OVHcloud: European Sovereignty and Bare Metal at Scale

OVHcloud owns its data centres, builds its own servers and cools them with water. That vertical integration is why the prices look the way they do.

2 March 2026 3 min read

OVHcloud is Europe’s largest hosting provider. It manufactures its own servers, runs its own data centres and cools them with a water-cooling system it designed. That vertical integration is the reason its prices sit where they do, and it is a genuinely different model from renting capacity in someone else’s building.

The product lines

Dedicated Servers — the historic core. Physical machines across several ranges, from entry-level to high-end enterprise hardware, on monthly terms.
Public Cloud — OpenStack-based instances billed hourly or monthly, with object storage, managed Kubernetes, managed databases and private networking.
Hosted Private Cloud — managed VMware and Nutanix environments for organisations lifting an existing private estate.
Web Hosting and domains — shared hosting and a domain registrar, which is where many customers first arrive.

Most people evaluating OVHcloud against other providers are looking at either dedicated servers or Public Cloud instances.

Data sovereignty as a feature

For European organisations, where data physically sits and which legal regime governs the operator is not an abstract question. OVHcloud is a French company with European data centres, and it markets that directly at customers who need to demonstrate that their data stays under European jurisdiction.

Whether this matters depends entirely on your regulatory position. When it matters, it tends to matter absolutely, and it narrows the shortlist quickly.

Public Cloud specifics

OVHcloud Public Cloud is OpenStack underneath, which has two practical consequences. First, the OpenStack API and tooling work, so Terraform providers and command-line tools are standard. Second, the abstractions are OpenStack’s — Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Swift — and translate closely to what you might know from other OpenStack platforms.

Instance families cover general purpose, CPU-heavy, memory-heavy, storage-optimised, GPU and discovery tiers for testing. Bandwidth is generous and often unmetered on dedicated servers, which is a substantial difference from per-gigabyte egress billing.

Comparing OVHcloud and Hetzner

	OVHcloud	Hetzner
Footprint	Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific	Germany, Finland, United States
Bare metal range	Very broad, entry to enterprise	Broad, strong auction market
Managed services	Kubernetes, databases, private cloud	Minimal
Bandwidth	Often unmetered on dedicated	Large included allowance
Console	Feature-rich, steeper learning curve	Simple and fast
Sovereignty positioning	Explicit and marketed	European, less emphasised

The short version: Hetzner is simpler and often cheaper for straightforward servers; OVHcloud has more managed services, a wider hardware range and broader geography.

Port 25 and vCPU on account configurations

As with the other providers here, outbound port 25 on new accounts is restricted and opened on request. Account capacity is also described in vCPU because that is the constraint that determines what you can actually run. Both attributes appear on the OVHcloud account configurations.

First steps

Change the password and enable two-factor authentication in the OVHcloud control panel.
Review users and API applications; OVHcloud API credentials are long-lived, so revoke any you did not create.
Create a Public Cloud project — it is the billing and resource boundary.
Upload an SSH key to the project before creating instances.
Create a private network if instances need to talk to each other without public addresses.
Apply a security group; do not rely on the operating system firewall alone.
Set up automated backups or snapshots for anything holding state.

Common questions

Is OVHcloud Public Cloud the same as a dedicated server?

No. Public Cloud instances are virtual machines on shared hardware, billed hourly. Dedicated servers are physical machines rented monthly. Dedicated gives better price-per-resource at steady load; Public Cloud gives elasticity.

What does unmetered bandwidth mean in practice?

On many dedicated server ranges, traffic is not billed per gigabyte — you are limited by the port speed rather than a monthly quota. For high-egress workloads this changes the total cost dramatically.

Does OVHcloud offer managed Kubernetes?

Yes, as part of Public Cloud, with a free managed control plane and charges for the worker nodes — the same model as most providers.

Is the OpenStack base a problem?

It is usually an advantage. Standard OpenStack tooling and Terraform providers work, and the concepts port to any other OpenStack platform.

Where to go next

For the direct head-to-head, see Hetzner versus OVHcloud. Account configurations, including vCPU capacity and port 25 status, are on the OVHcloud account page.

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