OVHcloud Object Storage

What OVHcloud Object Storage actually is

OVHcloud Object Storage is an S3-compatible object store inside OVHcloud Public Cloud: buckets and objects addressed through a per-region endpoint (https://s3..io.cloud.ovh.net, virtual-host style per bucket), signed with SigV4, and usable from the usual tooling — rclone, Terraform, backup software, anything that speaks S3. It ships in five storage classes: High Performance (latency and bandwidth intensive workloads), Standard (general high-volume storage), Infrequent Access ("cool" data with fast retrieval), Active Archive (rarely accessed but instantly available), and Cold Archive (true archives).

The most interesting thing about it is not the class list but the billing policy: egress is free and API requests (GET, PUT, DELETE, both Class A and Class B) are free on Standard storage. Nearly every competitor — AWS, Backblaze B2, Wasabi with conditions — either meters egress or folds it into a fixed fee. OVHcloud simply publishes a price of zero in its catalog. For read-heavy workloads — content delivery, media libraries, backup repositories that get pulled back — that removes the most common source of bill shock in object storage. Verified against OVHcloud's public pricing catalog as of October 2026.

The second thing to know is where it lives. OVHcloud's official geoavailability list contains 13 regions: Gravelines, Roubaix, Strasbourg, Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, London, and Warsaw in Europe; Beauharnois and Toronto in Canada; Singapore, Sydney, and Mumbai in Asia-Pacific. North America is explicitly listed as "excluding USA" — there is no US object-storage region. Paris and Milan are 3-AZ regions; the rest are 1-AZ. That regional shape matters for anyone assuming a French cloud means US presence.

Pricing: what you really pay

Standard storage is volume-tiered rather than flat: €0.014 per GB/month for the first 51.2 TB, €0.0125 per GB/month from 51.2 TB to 512 TB, and €0.011 per GB/month beyond 512 TB. Requests and egress are €0. Billing granularity is per GiB-hour even though prices display per GiB-month, so partial months and deletions are accounted fairly rather than rounded up to a full month.

Worked example (from the verified catalog): 1 TB stored with 100 GB pulled out per month costs €14.00 — the storage stays inside the first tier and egress is free. Change the same workload to a provider that meters egress at even $0.01/GB and the picture shifts.

Cold Archive is where the price gets dramatic: roughly €0.00128 per GB/month (OVHcloud's own labs page markets it "from $0.002/GB/month"), Paris region only, with three catches you must price in. There is a 180-day minimum retention, with early deletion billed at the normal storage rate. Restoring data costs €0.005 per GB. And while restored objects sit in a Standard bucket, they incur Standard-rate storage on top. For genuine archive data — compliance copies, footage, old backups — the arithmetic still beats keeping everything hot. For anything you might restore quarterly, do the sums first.

Everything is pay-as-you-go in EUR (USD on the US storefront) with no minimum commitment. New Public Cloud projects can pull in the $200 trial credit, which at these rates is a very large amount of storage to evaluate with.

Performance & infrastructure

The performance story splits by class. High Performance is aimed at latency- and bandwidth-sensitive applications — the kind of workload that in practice wants to sit close to compute in the same region — while Standard targets websites, image libraries, and backups where price per GB matters more than single-request latency. Durability and resilience commitments are published in OVHcloud's SLA table: object storage availability above 99.9% monthly, with resiliency stated at 100%, and the wider Public Cloud SLA defines the credit scheme.

Under the surface this is OVHcloud's usual vertically integrated infrastructure: 43 data centers on four continents, 100 Tbps of network, and the always-on Anti-DDoS filtering that covers every product at no extra cost. Multi-region replication is not a built-in feature the way S3 Cross-Region Replication is; if you need geographic redundancy you design it yourself with buckets in two regions and your own sync — a real gap versus AWS, but workable and explicit.

Encryption is present (server-side encryption, with LUKS-encrypted volume classes on the block side of the platform), and the S3 API covers bucket policies, lifecycle rules (essential for moving objects between classes), and versioning through the usual tools. OVHcloud documents the S3 endpoints and region/class matrix clearly, which we appreciate: it is easy to see, for instance, that Cold Archive and Active Archive exist only in Paris and Milan respectively, before you design anything.

We have not benchmarked this storage in our own test round, so no throughput numbers from us; treat vendor figures as vendor figures and validate with your own rclone or fio-style tests against the endpoint. Our /benchmarks section covers the compute providers we did test.

The compliance angle deserves one paragraph of its own. Storage stays under EU jurisdiction end to end — French-headquartered operator, EU-region buckets, GDPR-aligned processing — and for stricter workloads OVHcloud's wider platform carries ISO 27001, HDS, and SecNumCloud attestations. For European public sector, healthcare, and any organization that spent 2023-2025 re-papering data-transfer arrangements after Schrems II, buying object storage from a provider that is not subject to US cloud-act style reach is a procurement argument on its own, independent of the per-gigabyte price.

Where it falls short

The class and region matrix is the main constraint. Active Archive is Milan and Paris; Cold Archive is Paris only. If your archive strategy assumes low-cost archive storage near your US workloads, this product does not do that. And the 1-AZ nature of most regions means a region-level failure is your problem — the SLA's availability commitment is not the same as multi-AZ durability.

S3 compatibility is good but not total parity with AWS S3. The API surface covers the everyday operations cleanly; the more exotic corners of the S3 API (some consistency behaviors, certain request types, S3 Select-style features) are not guaranteed. If your tooling depends on an obscure S3 extension, test before committing. Billing in volume tiers also means large tenants should model the breakpoints — at 500 TB the rate step is real money.

The console experience is the usual OVHcloud story: complete and API-rich, denser and less friendly than DigitalOcean Spaces or Wasabi's minimal UI. Support is ticket-based on standard tiers. And the restore mechanics on Cold Archive — retrieval fee plus temporary Standard storage — are exactly the kind of line item that surprises people who skimmed the headline price.

Finally, there is no free tier as such: the entry is pay-as-you-go, and the trial credit is a Public Cloud onboarding perk rather than an ongoing free allowance.

Operationally, we would build on this the same way we build on any S3 store: buckets per environment, lifecycle rules to push cold data down the class ladder, and a scheduled job that reports bucket growth so the volume tiers never surprise finance. The class ladder is genuinely useful here — Standard for working sets, Infrequent Access for data touched monthly, Active Archive and Cold Archive at the bottom — and because class transitions are lifecycle-driven rather than manual, the price curve can follow the data's actual age instead of somebody's guess.

Who should pick this

We pick OVHcloud Object Storage when the data must sit in Europe and the access pattern reads a lot: media and asset libraries, CMS and web backends, backup repositories that get pulled for restores, and any GDPR-scoped dataset where a US-headquartered processor is off the table. The free-egress policy makes it our default recommendation among EU-resident S3-compatible stores for read-heavy traffic, and the Cold Archive pricing makes it a legitimate tape-replacement candidate for French-resident archives.

We would not pick it for US-region storage (Canada is the closest option), for workloads needing true multi-AZ durability outside Paris and Milan, or for teams that want S3 exact-parity tooling. If you want flat, all-in pricing with no tiers to model, Wasabi-style vendors are simpler, at the cost of their own fine print.

Key takeaways

• S3-compatible object storage in 13 regions across the EU, Canada, and Asia-Pacific — explicitly no US region.
• Free egress and free API requests on Standard storage, confirmed in OVHcloud's pricing catalog.
• Standard costs €0.014/GB/month, stepping to €0.0125 and €0.011 at volume; billed per GiB-hour.
• Cold Archive (Paris only) is about €0.00128/GB/month with a 180-day minimum and €0.005/GB restores.
• Five storage classes; Active Archive and Cold Archive are limited to Paris and Milan.
• Our pick for EU-resident, read-heavy object storage with predictable bills; not for US regions or S3 exact-parity needs.

Sources

• https://docs.ovhcloud.com/en/guides/storage-and-backup/object-storage/s3-location
• https://docs.ovhcloud.com/en/guides/storage-and-backup/object-storage/s3-faq
• https://s3providers.com/providers/ovhcloud-object-storage
• https://assets.us.ovhcloud.com/legal/service-level-agreements
• https://us.ovhcloud.com/security/anti-ddos
• https://labs.ovh.com/cold-archive