OVHcloud explained: Public Cloud, VPS and bare metal in one account

OVHcloud is the largest European cloud operator by infrastructure, and it sells four fairly different things under one account. Most confusion about it comes from comparing the wrong product against the wrong competitor.

The four product lines

Public Cloud. An OpenStack based platform with instances, volumes, object storage, managed Kubernetes and managed databases, driven by an API and billed hourly or monthly. This is the line that compares directly with AWS EC2, and it is what people usually mean when they say OVH cloud.

VPS. Fixed monthly plans for a single virtual server. Simpler than Public Cloud, cheaper for a static workload, and without the API surface. Good for one machine that runs a website.

Bare Metal. Physical servers across several ranges, from the budget lines up to high grade machines with enterprise components. Provisioning takes minutes to hours rather than seconds, and the value per unit of hardware is excellent.

Hosted Private Cloud. Managed VMware and similar, for organisations moving an existing virtualised estate without redesigning it.

Picking the wrong line is the usual mistake. If you need to create and destroy instances programmatically, you want Public Cloud. If you need one predictable server, VPS or bare metal is cheaper.

Public Cloud instance families

The naming follows the pattern most providers use: general purpose instances with a balanced ratio, compute optimised with more cores per gigabyte, memory optimised with the reverse, storage optimised with large local NVMe, and GPU instances for training and inference. There are also low cost discovery and sandbox tiers for development work.

Because the platform is OpenStack, the API and tooling will feel familiar to anyone who has used OpenStack elsewhere, and Terraform support is solid.

Bandwidth and DDoS protection

Two things distinguish OVHcloud commercially.

Bandwidth. Most European products include generous or unmetered public traffic on a given port speed rather than charging per gigabyte. For content heavy workloads this is the difference between a predictable bill and an unpredictable one. Confirm the policy for the specific product and region, because it varies.

Anti DDoS. Mitigation is included across the infrastructure products at no extra cost. On most other platforms, equivalent protection is a paid service. This is a large part of why OVHcloud is common in game hosting, streaming and anything that attracts attention.

Locations and residency

The footprint is strongest in Europe, with sites in France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom, plus Canadian, United States, Asian and Australian locations. For European organisations with data residency requirements, having a European operator with European legal domicile is often the point, not just the latency.

What to check on the account

Two things behave like account properties rather than product features:

• Instance and vCPU quotas. Public Cloud projects have quotas on instances, cores, RAM, volumes and public addresses per region. New projects start conservative and increases are requested through the control panel or support.
• Outbound SMTP. Port 25 is restricted by default on new accounts, as it is nearly everywhere. Access is granted on request, and some accounts come with it already open.

Where it fits, and where it does not

OVHcloud suits European workloads with real bandwidth requirements, teams that want bare metal and virtual machines under one account, and anyone who needs DDoS mitigation without a separate contract. The price per unit of hardware is among the best available from an operator of this size.

It is a weaker fit if you want a broad managed service catalogue, a polished console, or the depth of documentation the hyperscalers publish. The control panel has improved considerably and is still not the reason anyone chooses OVHcloud.

The natural comparison is with the other large European operator: Hetzner vs OVHcloud. For a broader view of the European options, the Hetzner guide and the UpCloud guide cover the alternatives.