OVHcloud Public Cloud, Bare Metal and European Data Sovereignty

OVHcloud is the largest hosting provider in Europe and one of the few operators at that scale outside the American hyperscalers. It builds its own servers, operates its own data centres and runs its own network backbone.

That vertical integration produces two things that matter commercially: aggressive pricing on bare metal, and an egress policy that is structurally different from its competitors.

The product lines

The Public Cloud line is the direct competitor to other IaaS offerings. It is OpenStack underneath, which matters if you value the portability of an open API and standard tooling.

Egress: the structural difference

Most cloud providers charge for data leaving their network, and that charge is often where the real cost of a workload accumulates. OVHcloud includes generous — in many configurations unmetered — outbound bandwidth on its instances and dedicated servers.

For media delivery, backup targets, file distribution, large API responses or anything where data leaves in volume, this changes the economics rather than trimming them. It is worth modelling against your actual monthly egress before assuming a hyperscaler is competitive. The guide to egress costs sets out how to do that calculation.

Instance families

Public Cloud instances follow readable categories:

• Discovery — entry level, for development and testing.
• General Purpose (B-series) — balanced, the usual default.
• CPU-optimised (C-series) — compute-heavy work.
• Memory-optimised (R-series) — databases and caches.
• Accelerated (T/A-series) — GPU workloads.
• Storage-optimised — local NVMe for I/O-bound work.

vCPU counts scale well within each family, and the larger configurations are where OVHcloud's pricing advantage becomes most visible against equivalent hyperscaler instances.

Sovereignty, and what it actually means

OVHcloud markets European data sovereignty heavily, and the substance behind it is real: it is a French company, governed by EU law, with data centres across Europe and a corporate structure not subject to the same extraterritorial data-access regimes as US-headquartered providers.

For organisations with genuine regulatory or contractual requirements about where data sits and which legal system governs the operator, that is a material and sometimes decisive difference. For everyone else it is a preference rather than a requirement — but it costs nothing to have.

The trade-off is that the sovereign positioning does not, by itself, make the managed-service catalogue as deep as a hyperscaler's. Sovereignty and service breadth are separate axes.

Outbound SMTP

As with essentially every provider, outbound port 25 is restricted by default on new environments. The responsible path for transactional email is an authenticated submission service on port 587 with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly, and sending practice that respects consent and unsubscribe obligations.

Where an environment does have direct SMTP available, that capability carries a corresponding responsibility: reputation, complaint handling and compliance become yours. This is covered properly in the deliverability guide.

Where OVHcloud fits

It fits European workloads with data-residency preferences, bandwidth-heavy applications where egress dominates the bill, bare-metal requirements at a sensible price, and organisations that value an OpenStack-standard API over a proprietary one.

It fits less well where you want the deepest managed-service catalogue or the most polished console experience. Compared with Hetzner, OVHcloud offers more regions, more product lines and more enterprise options, while Hetzner is usually cheaper and simpler. The European providers comparison places both against the wider field.

A practical evaluation checklist

1. Confirm the region and whether it is in the EU zone you need.
2. Confirm the instance family and whether it is available in that region.
3. Check the egress terms attached to the specific configuration.
4. Verify the state of outbound port 25 if email is relevant.
5. Review the OpenStack project structure and who holds administrative access.
6. Confirm payment method and billing contact ownership.

Frequently asked questions

Is OVHcloud Public Cloud really OpenStack? Yes, and the standard OpenStack API and CLI tooling work against it, which makes migration away materially easier than from a proprietary platform.

Does sovereignty affect performance? No. It is a legal and governance property, not a technical one.

Is bare metal worth it over instances? For sustained, predictable heavy load it usually is, on both price and consistency. For variable load, instances are more sensible.

How does support work? Tiered, with paid levels for faster response. The standard tier is adequate for routine issues rather than architectural guidance.

Current configurations, including port and vCPU details, are on the Buy OVHcloud Account listing.