OVH


OVH is a French cloud computing company that offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. OVH owns the world's largest data center in surface area. They are the largest hosting provider in Europe, and the third largest in the world based on physical servers. The company was founded in 1999 by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. OVH is incorporated as a simplified joint-stock company under French law.

History and growth

OVH was founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba, with the help of three family members.

Funding

In October 2016, it was reported that OVH raised $250 million in order to raise further international expansion. This funding round valued OVH at over US$1 billion. In the fiscal year of 2016, OVH reportedly had €320 million in revenue. In 2018 OVH announced its five-year plans to triple investment starting in 2021. Which represent between US$4.6 to $8.1 billion.

Operations

As of 2018, OVH has 27 data centers in 19 countries hosting 300,000 servers. The company offers localized services such as customer service offices in many European countries, as well as in North America, Africa, and Singapore.
, OVH is considered one of the largest so called "cloud computing" providers in the world, with over a million customers and one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world.
OVH is known for its offering of email hosting service, considered one of the largest in the world, in addition to its general Internet hosting services.

Partnerships

OVH is one of the sponsors for Let's Encrypt.
OVH hardware supplier is Super Micro Computer Inc.

Controversies

WikiLeaks

In December 2010, French Gizmodo edition revealed that WikiLeaks selected OVH as its new hosting provider, following Amazon's refusal to host it. 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. The case was rejected on the grounds that such a case required an adversarial hearing.

Information disclosure and multiple vulnerabilities

In January 2019, the magazine WebsitePlanet uncovered client-side vulnerability in some of the largest hosting companies in the world: Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator, iPage and OVH.

Email spam

As of November 2019, OVH is listed by The Spamhaus Project as the world's second worst Internet service provider for the proliferation of unsolicited bulk E-Mail.