OVHcloud

Octave Klaba founded OVH in 1999, and the company went its own way early: self-designed server chassis, water-cooled racks long before that was fashionable, and data centres in repurposed industrial buildings. The payoff was dedicated servers at prices the American hyperscalers never bothered to match. It renamed itself OVHcloud in 2019 and listed on the Paris exchange in 2021.

That same year, overnight on 10 March 2021, the SBG2 data centre in Strasbourg burned to the ground. Customers who had assumed "backup" meant another server in the same building learned the difference between redundancy and geography the hard way. OVHcloud now likes to pitch itself as the sovereign European alternative to AWS.