OVHcloud
France
French cloud provider with its own global data center infrastructure, running everything from bare metal to managed Kubernetes.
European Alternative to:
Europe's largest hosting company, founded in Roubaix in 1999 by Octave Klaba. OVHcloud runs its own data centers, designs its own servers, and is listed on Euronext Paris, which makes it one of the few real European cloud providers operating at hyperscaler-adjacent scale.
What you get
- Bare-metal dedicated servers, the original product, still strong
- Public Cloud, with VMs, managed Kubernetes, object and block storage, and an OpenStack-compatible API
- Hosted Private Cloud built on VMware, popular for enterprise lift-and-shift
- A web hosting and domains business that funds the cheaper end of the catalog
- A growing AI offering with GPU instances and an inference endpoint product
Where it runs
Data centers across France, Germany, Poland, the UK, plus Canada, the US and Asia-Pacific. The European footprint is the relevant one if you're choosing OVH for sovereignty reasons. The company explicitly markets a SecNumCloud-qualified offering for French public-sector workloads.
Honestly
Pricing is good, the catalog is broad, and the EU-jurisdiction story is straightforward. The 2021 fire at the Strasbourg site is also part of OVH's history; the company has since rebuilt and changed practices, but it's worth designing your architecture as if any single region can disappear, which is true of every cloud provider anyway.
Germany
Slovenia
Switzerland