OVHcloud

For the top level internet domain, see .ovh.
OVH Groupe SA
Company typePublic (Société anonyme)
Euronext Paris: OVH
ISINFR0014005HJ9
IndustryCloud computing, hosting
Founded2 November 1999; 25 years ago (1999-11-02)[1]
Headquarters
Roubaix
,
France
Key people
  • Octave Klaba
    (Founder, chairman)[2]
  • Michel Paulin
    (CEO)
  • Henryk Klaba
    (President)
  • Miroslaw Klaba
    (R&D director)
ProductsVPS, dedicated hosting service, cloud computing, public cloud, private cloud, web hosting, DSL
RevenueIncrease €897 million (2023)
−40,320,000 Euro (2023) Edit this on Wikidata
Number of employees
2,900 (2023) Edit this on Wikidata
ASN16276 Edit this at Wikidata
WebsiteOfficial website Edit this at Wikidata

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

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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

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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

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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, 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

As of 2017, OVH was known for its offering of email hosting service,[19] considered one of the largest in the world,[20] in addition to its general Internet hosting services.

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]

Partnerships

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As of 2016, OVH was one of the sponsors for Let's Encrypt, a free TLS encryption service,[22][23] and OVH's hardware supplier is Super Micro Computer Inc.[24]

Incidents

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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

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WikiLeaks

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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

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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]

In January 2021, OVH with other industry players joined the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which is a pledge to achieve climate neutrality of datacenters before 2030.[42]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Clabaugh, Jeff (2016-10-06). "French firm to open 1st US data center in Fauquier Co". WTOP. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  2. ^ "OVH reorganises its governance to support new acceleration phase". OVH.
  3. ^ Wood, Eric Emin (2016-10-12). "Why OVH opened the world's largest datacenter in the Great White North". www.itworldcanada.com. International Data Group, Inc. (IDG) IT World Canada. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  4. ^ MSV, Janakiram (2019-05-26). "How VMware Is Transforming Itself Into a Multi-Cloud Company". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2019-06-19. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  5. ^ Coop, Alex (2019-08-27). "Canadian customers' heads are still in the clouds, and so is VMware's | Financial Post". Financial Post. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  6. ^ Sarraf, Samira (2017-05-12). "World's third-largest hosting provider OVH opens Melbourne office". CRN Australia. nextmedia. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  7. ^ "Usage statistics of OVH as data center provider". 2024-06-08. Retrieved 2024-06-08.
  8. ^ Rosemain, Mathieu; Barzic, Gwénaëlle (2018-10-18). "France's OVH to triple spending to take on Google, Amazon in cloud computing". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2019-11-07. Retrieved 2019-11-07.
  9. ^ "For its 20th anniversary, OVH takes off and becomes OVHcloud". 10 October 2019.
  10. ^ "OVHcloud on the edge of glory in new market with Germany acquisition". www.channelweb.co.uk. 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
  11. ^ "OVH Partners with KKR and TowerBrook for Further Global Expansion". exithub. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  12. ^ Rosemain, Mathieu; Barzic, Gwénaëlle (2018-10-18). "France's OVH to triple spending to take on Google, Amazon in cloud..." Reuters. Archived from the original on 2019-09-07. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  13. ^ "Shares in French tech champion OVHcloud gain 6% in Paris debut". Reuters. 15 October 2021.
  14. ^ "OVHcloud Joins SBF 120 Index Following Euronext Paris Review | MarketScreener". 10 December 2021.
  15. ^ "About - OVH Canada". OVH. Archived from the original on 2018-07-09. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
  16. ^ "Datacenters: Security and infrastructure | OVHcloud".
  17. ^ Williams, Mike; Turner, Brian (2019-08-26). "Best dedicated server hosting providers of 2019". TechRadar. Archived from the original on 2019-09-06. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  18. ^ Max Smolaks (2019-04-29). "OVH pulls gloves off bare metal fighters as it eyes up US cloud vendors". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  19. ^ David Legrand (2017-03-27). "OVH lance une offre E-mail Pro basée sur Microsoft Exchange... mais sans ActiveSync". www.nextinpact.com (in French). Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  20. ^ "Press release for market report". 2020. Archived from the original on 2021-03-21. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  21. ^ "Beauharnois data centre a model of OVH DIY scale". insightaas.com. 2019-03-05. Retrieved 2021-03-12.
  22. ^ Lomas, Natasha (2016-04-12). "Let's Encrypt free HTTPS certification push exits beta". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  23. ^ Gilbert, Guillaume (December 22, 2015). "OVH Commits to Let's Encrypt to Provide Free SSL Certificates". OVH.COM. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  24. ^ Mawad, Marie (2018-10-18). "OVH Keeps Super Micro as Supplier, Vets Hardware In-House". www.bloomberg.com. Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 2020-02-22. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  25. ^ Rosemain, Mathieu (2021-03-10). "Blaze destroys servers at Europe's largest cloud services firm". Reuters. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  26. ^ "OVH Strasbourg Campus Data Center". baxtel.com.
  27. ^ Sharwood, Simon (2021-03-10). "OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable". The Register. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  28. ^ a b Miller, Rich (2021-03-11). "OVH Data Center in France Destroyed by Fire, All Staff Safe". Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  29. ^ a b Judge, Peter (22 March 2023). "OVHcloud ordered to pay €250k to two customers who lost data in Strasbourg data center fire". Datacentre Dynamics. Retrieved 15 March 2024.
  30. ^ Sverdlik, Yevgeniy (2021-03-10). "CEO Says Fire Has Destroyed OVH's Strasbourg Data Center (SBG2)". Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  31. ^ "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.
  32. ^ Peter Judge (29 September 2021). "Fire could cost OVHcloud €105 million, IPO filing reveals". Data Center Dynamics. Retrieved 12 October 2021.
  33. ^ @olesovhcom (13 October 2021). "Suite à une erreur humaine durant la reconfiguration du network sur notre DC à VH (US-EST), nous avons un souci sur…" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  34. ^ Greenberg, Andy (September 13, 2012). This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Hacktivists, and Cypherpunks Are Freeing the World's Information. New York (New York), USA: Random House. ISBN 978-0-753-54801-1. Archived from the original on September 7, 2019. Retrieved 2015-07-23. Within days, they had registered the URL and set up an SSLprotected site and a Tor Hidden Service in an OVH data center in the French city of Roubaix, the same one that briefly housed WikiLeaks' publications until they migrated to Sweden.
  35. ^ Vinocur, Nick; Love, Brian (2010-12-03). "France seeks to bar hosting WikiLeaks website". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2019-09-08. Retrieved 2019-09-08.
  36. ^ Greenberg, Andy (2010-12-03). "Despite Attacks, WikiLeaks' Swedish Host Won't Budge". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05.
  37. ^ "French web host need not shut down WikiLeaks site: judge". Agence France-Presse (AFP). 2010-12-06. Archived from the original on 2013-01-03. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  38. ^ "Following the wikileaks case". OVH. 6 December 2010. Archived from the original on 15 March 2012. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
  39. ^ "Servers on Demand: Custom Water-Cooled Servers in One Hour". Data Center Knowledge. September 16, 2013.
  40. ^ Julien Costagliola di Fiore (2017-05-04). "Energy efficient datacenter" (PDF). OVH.
  41. ^ Teva Meyer (2017-12-11). "Le nucléaire et le territoire : regards sur l'intégration spatiale des centrales en France" (in French). ENS Lyon.
  42. ^ Sterin, François (2021-01-21). "5 keys to understand the Climate Neutral Datacenter Pact". OVHcloud Blog. Retrieved 2021-09-15.
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