OVH Reviews by Users & Experts

OVH is a true international hosting company. Founded by a Polish family in France, this host now operates in 5 continents and has 19 localized countries. With more than 260,000 servers in 22 datacenters, this company has a well-earned reputation of a 'business giant'. Millions of users all around the world use OVH shared, VPS, cloud or dedicated hosting services, as well as purchase domain names. Between them, there are beginners, professionals, family businesses and huge companies. All of them trust this provider to be secure and fast - after all, OVH host WikiLeaks, a world-famous secret information organization.

These things make this host a very interesting one to inspect and analyze. In this OVH review, I will see whether this company provides high-quality hosting and do so securely.

OVH Services

• 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.

As many big providers would, OVH offers a great array of services for many types of clients. They are at different price points and have varying strengths and weaknesses. You can also clearly see the host putting a lot of emphasis on new, developing projects. If you are a part of one, you may love these great features of OVH hosting.

Digital Launch Pad

OVH is not a product of a huge corporation. It was born as a startup which gradually made its way up. That legacy can still be seen, as OVH offers its support to small businesses looking to achieve success. Professional help and expert software are two very important ways to reach that. If you are a small company that has promise, OVH may select you - and you don't even need to buy a hosting plan.

Daily Backups

Even the best websites can go down or lose their data. To make sure your valuable information stays put, OVH has your backups at the ready. Do not worry if something bad happens, as there is always a way to get back your files. It may not restore independent databases or multi-domains but that is a good feature nonetheless.

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 in both Europe and USA, making sure your visitors from these continents get the best possible load times.

OVH attempts to be international, quick, secure and care for the emerging new clients and companies. It provides multiple plans and tries to deliver them at the best price possible. In order to see, whether with good price comes good quality, in this OVH review I've decided to test its web hosting services. Let's get right into it.

What’s included in OVH hosting packages?

As it is pretty much a rule between the companies, OVH offers 3 shared web hosting plans. Although it is a bit different - here's how:

• Personal - a simple 5-website plan with 100GB of space and just enough resources to run regular projects.
• Professional - a more advanced 10-website plan with 250GB of space, extra databases, and configurations for IPv6.
• Performance - the best of them all, this plan provides many extra small features, unlimited websites, 500GB of disk space and scalable performance.

It is important to note that the 'Performance' plan only starts at €9.99. This plan has four different plans, their price going up to a hefty €33.99 a month. With each upgrade, you get an extra CPU core and extra 2GB of RAM. Other features do not change - the real difference is in the performance (hence the name).

In this table you will see the key differences between the three main shared hosting plans:

First Impressions

Features

There are plenty of great things included, even if you are picking the least expensive shared hosting package. DDoS and malware protection come as standard and there are free automated backups. A fixed amount of space is very nice too. Although many providers offer "unmetered" space, you can still get suspended for using too much of it. Knowing the exact limits may prove beneficial to you, as there will be a clear amount of space for you to work with. You won't have to be afraid of losing access to your files.

On the other hand, there are serious concerns about some other things. For example, you only have 4 auto-installer scripts you can work with. There is no File Manager you can use as well, which means that for most of the part, you may be setting up databases and working with FTP servers. Also, there is no true 24/7 support. Phone service works during regular work hours and there is no live chat.

In many ways, it feels like OVH hosting is working more to please the clients who have solid experience in the field and are not expected to require constant help.

Prices

There is only one plan length to choose from - that is quite disappointing, considering sometimes you may just want a couple months or would instead like to extend your hosting to multiple years. Only one option is quite limiting.

Renewal prices are a pleasant surprise. As your initial year is about to run out, you will be prompted to renew your services. The prices won't increase. The current offers are not "deals" or "promotional discounts" - they are genuine prices of the web hosting. When taking that into consideration, OVH is very cheap. £1.69/€1.99 a month for 5 websites and 100GB of space is very good.

OVH Customer Service

Customer service is an important measure of how a company values its clients. If it's good, helpful and always available, that means the company is doing everything to keep the paying subscribers together with it. In this part of the OVH review, we will test what customer support does this host provide. Currently, there are only two methods of contacting OVH.

• Live Chat
• Phone

This is how the host did:

Ticket Service Evaluation

It is important to remember than OVH hosting doesn't have a 24/7 support - which means that if you send your ticket request at 6PM, you can at best expect an answer by about 10AM the next day. When sending a ticket early in the day, it tooks about 2-3 hours to get a response. During daytime, it took around an hour. Time of the day when you send a request is quite important. Also, it is interesting that even if you send a request in another language, you will get a response in a language of a country you registered with. If you live in a country whose language you don't understand, this may prove to be a slight problem. =

Phone Service Evaluation

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. Here is a list of all 19 countries with their separate phone lines:

As we have already established, OVH has no website builder. Therefore, I manually installed ImpressPages - our go-to website software which is very similar to a regular builder. This is a website that I made:

Server Overall Uptime

Click here to see the current status and uptime statistics of the OVH website (opens in new tab).

In order to see whether the host is responsive and always available, I created a WordPress website and monitored it with an uptime tool. This is going to help us see whether the host is reliable. Click the link above to see the current status of the website.

It took several months of testing but currently, I must admit that OVH is one of the surprise packages. 55 total minutes of downtime from September 2017 to January 2018. No outages over 10 minutes. Decent? Absolutely.

The fluctuations of the response times are actually pretty good too. Here's what they look like, with pretty much no spikes going over 3 seconds.

And here are the full response times: a full progression of speed and uptime since the day we started to the day of the latest update:

Apart from the suspiciously weak period during Christmas (hey, you don't work during holidays, why should their sysadmins?), OVH had an overall solid run. Under 600 ms on a regular day, this host lags behind the best ones in the business but it's definitely not bad. Stability should also be appreciated. Overall it's a decent performance, combining good uptimes and reputable speeds. Not a world-beater but fine for most operations.

June 2018 update: Since we last checked in on OVH, we were hoping to see some performance increases. Well, we were pleasantly surprised by this!

200ms faster than previously! Uptimes are solid for the most part too. It's really nice to see a host actually improve over time, as we have seen plenty of hosts do the exact opposite.

Anti-Theft Protection Evaluation

You should be expecting superior security from a provider which has been chosen to host WikiLeaks. However, this wouldn't be a proper OVH review if I didn't try to steal my own account. Therefore, I've devised two simple methods people use to break into an account that doesn't belong to them.

First, I've attempted to simulate a brute-force break-in. That means typing an incorrect password in for numerous times and eventually guessing it right. Usually, I do it for 20 times and then guess it right on the 21st. However, on my 11th attempt, OVH has stopped me in my tracks:

 

OVH Review - Conclusion

OVH hosting provides inexpensive services and has plenty of worldwide databases. That by itself makes this host worth attention. However, there are some problems. A frustrating panel and only decent performance are the first ones that spring to mind.

This provider offers a decent combination of price and quality if you know exactly what you're doing. Choose OVH if you can handle manual installs with no additional support required. This host is decent but is not suited for beginners.