OVH, legally OVH Groupe SA, is a French cloud computing company which offers VPS, dedicated servers, and other web services. As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area.[3] As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe,[4][5] and the third largest in the world based on physical servers.[6] According to W3Techs, OVH has 3.4% of website data center market share in 2024.[7] The company was founded in 1999[1] by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France.[8] In 2019 OVH adopted OVHcloud as its public brand name.[9]
History and growth
OVH was founded in November 1999[1] by Octave Klaba, with the help of three family members (Henry, Haline, and Miroslaw).
In August 2023, it was announced OVHcloud was in exclusive negotiations for the acquisition of the Cologne-headquartered edge computing software company, gridscale GmbH.[10]
Funding
In October 2016, OVH raised $250 million in order to raise further international expansion.[11] This funding round valued OVH at over US$1 billion. In the fiscal year of 2016, OVH reportedly had around $343 million in revenue. In 2018 OVH announced its five-year plans to triple investment starting in 2021. Which represent between 4.6 and $8.1 billion U.S. dollars (4 to 7 billion euros).[12]
In October 2021, OVHcloud filed its IPO and is listed on the Euronext Paris, the Paris Stock Exchange[13] as OVH. In December 2021, OVHcloud became part of the Paris SBF120 index.[14]
Operations
As of 2021, OVH had 30 data centers in 19 countries hosting 300,000 servers.[15][16] The company offers localized services such as customer service offices in many European countries, as well as in North America, Africa, and Singapore.[17] As of 2019[update], OVH is considered one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world, with over a million customers and one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world,[18] and a network capacity totaling over 20 Tbit/s
OVH uses in-house design and manufacturing, including custom-made servers (based on standard components) and a modular shipping container architecture. In 2019, the Canadian data center (Beauharnois, Quebec) was considered a leading example of the OVH model.[21]
In March 2021, OVH suffered a large fire at its datacenter in Strasbourg, France.[25] SBG2 had been built in 2016 with a capacity of 30 thousand physical servers.[26] SBG2 was declared a total loss, with early reports indicating damage to SBG1, and services across all four Strasbourg locations experiencing disruptions.[27] The company's chairman, Octave Klaba, took to Twitter to confirm that all its staff were safe.[28] All customer data and backups stored in SBG2 were lost.[29] SBG1 was damaged partially while SBG4 remained intact, and SBG3 was intact but without power, though the servers at the latter sites were taken offline temporarily.[30][28] In September 2021, the company filed a report[31] with the Autorité des marchés financiers documenting the estimated damage at about €105 million.[32] In 2023, OVH was ordered to pay €250,000 to two customers that had lost data, and more than 130 other customers are engaged in a class-action lawsuit against the company.[29]
In October 2021, the company had a worldwide outage across all their networks due to a human error.[33]
Controversies
WikiLeaks
In December 2010, French Gizmodo edition revealed that WikiLeaks selected OVH as its new hosting provider, following Amazon's refusal to host it.[34][35][36] On December 3, the growing controversy prompted Eric Besson, France's Industry Minister, to inquire about legal ways to prohibit this hosting in France. The attempt failed. On December 6, 2010, a judge ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks.[37] The case was rejected on the grounds that such a case required an adversarial hearing.[38]
Environmental impact
OVH started to integrate innovative water cooling in 2003 for its servers.[39]
OVH relies in large part on nuclear power, in particular their Gravelines data centre is known for being located next to the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station.[40][41]
^"DOCUMENT D'ENREGISTREMENT" [Document of Registration] (PDF) (in French). OVHCloud Group. 17 September 2021. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2021-10-16. Retrieved 12 October 2021.
