OVHcloud.com review

You can find more information about other types of services, as well as reviews of OVHCloud.com, in the following articles.

OVHCloud VPS

OVH Dedicated Server

First impression

OVHCloud is a French-based hosting superpower that was established in November 1999 by Octave Klaba, a student at the time, with the help of three of his family members. The company grew rapidly and in 2004 expanded its operations to Poland and Spain, right about the time they moved their headquarters to Roubaix in the north of France. Things just escalated from there and it wasn’t long before they opened offices in Germany, Italy, Portugal, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Ireland, and in 2019 they became the largest hosting provider in Europe and the third largest in the world based on physical servers.

They currently provide Domain Registrations, Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Servers, and operate 30 data centers that span 19 countries, from where they serve their ever-growing customer base of over 1 million.

Trial Period

In today's hosting landscape, only a handful of providers extend free trial periods to assess their services. However, most providers typically offer a money-back guarantee.

Much to my disappointment, OVHCloud does not provide either option. Should you feel the need to cancel their services, there is unfortunately no refund on offer.

Billing Cycle

OVHCloud provides its customers with the flexibility of monthly payments for Shared Hosting, despite it being an annual commitment. However, for VPS plans, customers are required to commit to either 12 or 24 months. They currently accept Cheques, all major Credit and Debit Cards, PayPal, Postal Order (Money order), and Bank transfers as valid payment methods.

Control Panel

OVHCloud offers their own custom built and feature rich control panel, simply named the OVHCloud Control Panel, on their Shared Hosting plans. Personally, I find this to be  extremely user friendly and a much better UI than cPanel. Users can manage all aspects of their website, like DNS, Databases, Emails, CMS installations, SSL Certificates and more, from one convenient location.

Their VPS and Dedicated Server plans offer cPanel for Linux based servers and Plesk for Windows.

Limits

Their Linux-based Shared Hosting offers four distinct plans: Starter Hosting, Personal Hosting, Professional Hosting, and Performance Hosting. The Starter plan includes 1GB SSD storage space, 2x 1GB email accounts, and 1x 250GB MySQL database. Personal Hosting provides 100GB SSD space, 10x 1GB email accounts, and 1x 500GB MySQL database. Professional Hosting offers 250GB SSD space, 100x 1GB email accounts, and 4x 500GB MySQL databases. The Performance plan is unique as it does not share computing power and RAM (Shared Server Environment). It features 500GB SSD space, 8 vCore CPUs, 16 GB RAM, 4x 1GB MySQL databases, and supports up to 1000x 1GB email accounts.

All Shared plans include a Free Let's Encrypt SSL, Automatic Daily Backups, and support HTML, CSS, and JS coding languages on static sites, as well as PHP on dynamic sites.

Their VPS plans are available in five options: Starter, Value, Essential, Comfort, and Elite. These plans range from 1vCore CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SATA SSD space, and 100Mbps unmetered bandwidth in the entry-level plan to 8vCore CPU, 32GB RAM, 640GB NVMe SSD space, and 2GBps unmetered bandwidth in their top-tier plan.

Website Builder

OVHCloud doesn’t offer a website builder on their hosting plans, however, clients can install a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, or Joomla, with a single click, from where they can access all the tools necessary to create a professional website quickly.

Security

OVHCloud maintains complete control over the physical security measures within their data centers as they are the sole operators. Building access is strictly regulated and limited, adhering to the most stringent standards and requirements to guarantee optimal site security alongside continuous 24/7 video surveillance to exercise comprehensive control over each site.

They offer various levels of protection on network and server levels, ensuring their infrastructure is as secure as possible from hackers, and even offer additional protection for applications such as gaming. 

By default, every OVHcloud product is protected from DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks with a proven capacity to mitigate attacks up to 1.3 Tbit/s in size, whilst their Gaming DDoS protection safeguards applications from more sophisticated attacks. All domains are also protected with DNSSEC, to strengthen authentication in DNS using digital signatures based on public key cryptography. These include Secure DNS and Protection against Cache Poisoning / DNS Spoofing, a technique that fools a DNS server into thinking that it has received a valid and authentic response to a request.

All hosting packages come standard with a Free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, but clients also have the option of installing Sectigo EV SSL Certificates at an additional cost (an EV certificate is the highest level of SSL certificates), for enhanced site protection. These come in 2 options, Advanced and Enterprise. The Advanced certificate includes Anti-DDoS, Metrics (1 month included), Load Balancing, and a Dedicated IP address, whilst the Enterprise features L7 Anti-DDoS protection, Metrics (1 year included), Load Balancing, a Dedicated IP address.

For an additional layer of protection, 2FA (2-factor Authentication) can also be enabled on all accounts.

OS

For Shared Hosting, OVHCloud utilizes the Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) Operating System (OS), a Linux distribution consisting of free and open-source software.

In their VPS and Dedicated Server plans, OVHCloud offers a diverse range of Operating Systems to choose from, including AlmaLinux 8 & 9, CentOS 7, Debian 10, 11 & 12, Fedora 37 & 38, Rocky Linux 8 & 9, Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 21.04, 22.04 & 23.04. Additionally, for Windows, they provide options such as Windows Server 2016 Standard, Windows Server 2019 Standard, and Windows Server 2022 Standard.

Support

They provide free standard support, Monday to Friday, from 08:00 to 18:00, via a Ticketing System, Telephone, and Online Chat. Should you be after 24/7 support, you can sign up for Business or Enterprise support at an additional, rather costly monthly fee. 

OVHCloud has a lot going for them, but unfortunately, their standard customer support isn’t one of them. They are painstakingly slow to respond to even basic questions, even the sales department doesn’t seem too eager to sign one up. If you get stuck with an error, don’t hold your breath, as it might take some time to get assisted. Maybe it was just my experience and maybe bigger clients are treated differently, but this is one area they are not performing as I expected.

Conclusion

OVHCloud offers fast, secure, and scalable hosting but they don’t perform well when it comes to their standard support and there are numerous complaints online about their server uptime, although I personally have not encountered this issue. It appears that their target audience is medium to large companies, as the expense associated with decent, reliable support might be too costly for startups and small businesses.