OVH Review

OVH is an international hosting company with more than 260,000 servers in 28 data centers worldwide. OVH focuses on start-ups, small business, professionals, and huge corporations.

Millions of users all around the world use OVH VPS, cloud or dedicated hosting services, as well as purchase domain names. All of them trust OVH to be secure and fast - after all, OVH hosts WikiLeaks, a world-famous secret information organization.

In this OVH review, we will see whether this company provides high-quality hosting and do so securely.

OVH Features and Services

OVH has a number of services focused on all kinds of businesses. It can equip both freelancers and huge corporations with the right hosting solution:

• Shared web hosting
• Cloud hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated hosting
• Reseller hosting
• Domain names

NOTE - some OVH services may not be available in certain locations. For example, as of September 2017, shared web hosting is unavailable for the United States.

Right now, OVH focuses on an affordable VPS solution for its US clients. So if you need an affordable and powerful host, OVH may be a good choice.

Let's see what it offers.

Daily Backups

To protect your website data, you can opt for daily automated backups. This will ensure that you have a copy of a functioning website if you decide to test a new feature, or a problem happens.

GeoCache CDN Solution

A content delivery network (CDN) is a series of servers which deliver information to a user, depending on their geographic location.

OVH has wide networks of servers both in USA and Europe.

It makes sure your visitors from these continents get the best possible load times.

And it also serves as a safety measure. If anything happens to one server - another one can jump right in and save your website form the downtime.

OVH control panel

For most of the part, this control panel feels needlessly complicated. It is text-based and completely custom.

There is no File Manager to sort your files with - not even a web-based FTP client!

One of the simple tests I wanted to do for this OVH review was finding nameservers and then creating a subdomain. Nameservers were relatively easy to find but creating a subdomain required a lot of failed attempts and even a bit of guesswork.

I believe that using cPanel would have been a better option. However, it costs $13.99 to install, while regular hosts provide cPanel for free.

OVH customer support

Unlike most of the host, OVH has only two options of customer support available - 24/7 email and phone. Unfortunately, you won't be able to contact it through live chat. But in case you have a minor problem, OVH also has a community forum.

But apart from OVH not having live chat, there are some good things too.

Email support works 24/7 and once you send a request, you can expect a reply in 2 to 3 hours. And that is fast when compared to a number of different providers.

Also, it is interesting that even if you send a request in another language, you will get a response in the language of the country you've registered with.

If you live in a country whose language you don't understand, this may prove to be a slight problem. But we can praise OVH for its internationality.

OVH is localized in 19 countries. In each of them, there is a separate phone number you have to call to get the support you need.

And the phone support is fast.

After dialing a number, it took less than a minute to be connected. Multiple times.

Support agents were polite and helpful as well - I easily got some advice on how to install WordPress on my account, as well as how to optimize it.

OVH Performance

In this part of the OVH review, we are going to test its performance.

OVH promises 99.95% server uptime. However, in the last 30 days, it was able to score this number. OVH was up for 99.85% of the time, meaning, that your website would have been down for over 21 minutes should you've hosted with OVH.

Server response time was not exceptional too. It averaged at 630ms. And that is below the industry average of 550ms. 

Overall, OVH had a solid run. A bit over 600ms on a regular day, this host lags behind the best ones in the business but it's definitely not bad.

OVH Pricing

OVH does not offer shared hosting in the US and the cheapest VPS plans cost from $3.35/mo. You can get VPS Cloud plan with 99.99% SLA for $8.96/mo, and VPS Cloud RAM will cost $11.87/mo if you pay yearly.

So what do you get with each plan?

• VPS SSD plan includes 2GB RAM and 20GB SSD storage.
• VPS Cloud gets you 99.99% SLA, 2GB RAM, and 25GB storage.
• With VPS Cloud RAM you'll be guaranteed 99.99% uptime, 6GB RAM, and 25GB storage space.

Each plan additionally has Anti-DDoS protection, 1-click installs, and OVH API.

You can also purchase add-ons, but the upselling is not annoying. None of the fields are pre-marked for me.

Snapshots cost $4.19/month and each additional 50GB of disk space will cost $7.

You can compare the plans in the table:

OVH Review - Conclusion

In this OVH review, we can conclude, that it provides competitive pricing for its VPS plans. That by itself makes this host worth attention.

However, there are some problems.

Control panel is not easy-to-use and there could be more support options.

And while performance is just average, it's not bad. Many hosts cannot achieve even that.

So, if you know what you are doing and want clear pricing - OVH is a decent host. But it might not be the best option for beginners.