web services

OVHcloud is a French cloud computing company that was founded in 1999. Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of OVH and the current CEO of the company is Michel Paulin. OVHcloud offers various cloud-based services like web hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, enterprise solutions, and public and private cloud. Being a French company, it initially expanded to other European countries but in recent years its main focus has been North America and the US. Unfortunately, in 2021 the company suffered huge losses due to a fire in its Strasbourg data center. The company reported estimated damage of approximately €105 million.

Early Days

Octave Klaba at the age of 24 decided to begin his entrepreneurial journey with OVHcloud. The idea of founding a cloud computing startup strikes his mind when he realized France is in sheer need of web hosting. He didn’t have any initial capital to invest so he took support from his close friends and family. He got support from his three family members and was able to borrow 25,000 francs with which he started the company.

Web hosting was the then-new concept in France so initially, no one believed in what he was doing. But it didn’t stop Klaba from renting ten servers from a provider in Paris and starting his project. The business started growing slowly as in 2000 the company had 20 active servers and it also received entitlements for .fr and .be domain names. The net profit OVH was making was fully reinvested in adding new servers. Eventually, Klaba’s brother, Miroslaw joined the venture to help him out.

Expansion

Entering a new decade, OVH was starting to land more and more customers. It also opened the company’s first data center in Paris but soon it outgrew the space. Also, for easy maintenance of the servers, OVH decided to make in-house casings. In 2002, the company opened a new data center in Paris and built its first sever called the Greenbox. Until 2003, OVH was doing all the operational work from leased data centers. But the company opened its first wholly-owned data center in 2003 and it was a 3,000 square meter building. The company didn’t only own a data center but became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to use water-based cooling technology in a data center. In 2004, the company expanded to Poland and Spain and the old servers in the company were retro-fitted with water cooling systems.

OVH expanded to the Roubaix Valley in 2005 and expanded to Germany in the next year. By the end of 2006, OVH has 12,000 active servers and also deployed advanced network infrastructure. OVH expanded to Italy, Portugal, and the UK in 2008 followed by opening five new subsidiaries in Ireland, Netherlands, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Finland. By 2010, the company had more than 350 employees and it invested around €10 Million in R&D cloud. The company’s plan to enter the American market started in 2012 with the aim to build the world’s largest data center in Canada. After a funding round in 2016, the value of OVH surpassed the $1 billion mark. In 2017 it expanded to the US market after the acquisition of vCloud Air from VMware. OVH also became a publicly-traded company in 2021 and it is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

About the Founder

Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of the world’s one of the most successful cloud computing companies. He is originally from Poland but he moved to France when he was sixteen. Being passionate about computer science from an early age, he graduated from ICAM Lille with a computer science degree. After he graduated, his main focus was founding OVHcloud and he didn’t work for any other companies.