OVHcloud Brand Guidelines: Oles Van Herman, Roubaix & the 2019 Rename

A student’s nickname, reduced to three letters.

OVHcloud began as OVH in 1999. English Wikipedia dates the founding to November 1999 and names the founder as Octave Klaba; the company’s own history says he was then a student at ICAM, the engineering school in Lille, and set up OVH to meet a need for internet hosting. The name has a student origin too. Numerama explained in 2021, citing a portrait in the magazine Capital, that OVH stands for Oles Van Herman, the nickname Klaba used as an engineering student; readings such as “On Vous Héberge” (“we host you”) came later, Numerama noted.

The start was small. French Wikipedia says the first machines sat in Paris premises lent by Xavier Niel. In 2001 OVH rented racks from Claranet, then moved into a former Free data centre in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, where the fleet grew to about 1,200 machines.

The Klaba family shaped the business. English Wikipedia says Octave Klaba was helped by three family members; the company’s history names his father Henryk, his mother Halina and his brother Miroslaw as joining in the years from 2004, and says profits were reinvested to keep the company independent. In 2004 OVH opened its first foreign subsidiaries, in Poland and Spain, the company says; French Wikipedia adds one in Africa the same year.

Soon afterwards OVH bought a run-down industrial site in Roubaix, in northern France, for its head office and its first data centres, according to the company. French Wikipedia lists the Roubaix buildings as RBX-1, then RBX-2 in 2008, RBX-3 the following year and RBX-4, a design without air conditioning, in 2011. The company says it introduced its own water-cooling system for servers in its early years.

From hosting to cloud, and onto the exchange.

From 2010 OVH moved into cloud services, its history says, starting with a Hosted Private Cloud offer and then a Public Cloud. Expansion abroad followed. On 26 January 2012, French Wikipedia says, the company and Canadian partners made its site at Beauharnois, Quebec, official, and in 2013 it launched a data centre at Gravelines. The company’s history adds data centres at Vint Hill and Hillsboro in the United States, the acquisition of the vCloud Air business from VMware, and moves into Singapore and Australia in 2017 and India in 2018.

In 2016 the investment firms KKR and TowerBrook Capital Partners took a minority stake, the company says, with the Klaba family keeping the majority. Leadership changed several times. In August 2018 Michel Paulin, formerly of SFR, became chief executive while Klaba remained chairman, French Wikipedia says; on 20 October 2025 the board brought the two roles back together and named Klaba chairman and chief executive.

The rename came on 8 October 2019, when OVH announced that it would become OVHcloud, French Wikipedia says; Numerama wrote that the new name stressed the weight cloud computing had taken in the business, and the company says it structured its offer around four cloud categories at the same time.

On 15 October 2021 OVHcloud listed on Compartment A of Euronext Paris under the ticker OVH, the exchange announced that day. Euronext then described a group running more than 400,000 servers in 33 data centres on four continents for more than 1.6 million customers in 140 countries. Euronext said it was the 50th listing on Euronext Paris that year. English Wikipedia says OVHcloud joined the SBF 120 index in December 2021, and that the company builds custom servers from standard components and uses a modular, shipping-container design for some of its data centres.

How hosts present themselves.

Web hosting and cloud companies sell something their customers rarely see: machines in buildings far away. Their identities therefore lean on what can be shown — the customer interface, the data-centre building, the names on the order page and the corporate page that says who owns the business.

The control panel is often the part of the brand customers use most. Providers give these interfaces names of their own and place them in the main menu beside the product lines: Hetzner’s website links to customer interfaces called Robot, Console and konsoleH, and OVHcloud’s to a customer account and webmail. Documentation, status pages and programming interfaces sit in the same menus, so the brand reaches into technical writing as much as into advertising.

Data-centre photography carries the physical side of the business: rows of racks, cabling and building exteriors. Hetzner’s company pages include a 360° tour of a data centre, and its press kit sets out logos and colours for journalists. Plan names do similar work in text. Some providers use letter codes for server lines, as Hetzner does with its AX and EX lines; others use words, as OVHcloud does with ranges named Kimsufi, Advance, Game and Scale. A mascot is a further option for a host’s brand.

Corporate pages answer the questions that buyers of infrastructure ask: who owns the company, and where its machines stand. Hetzner lists data-centre parks in Germany and Finland and further sites in the United States and Singapore; OVHcloud’s corporate site gives counts of data centres, customers and countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — founding, ownership and locations — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Innovation for freedom.

Today OVHcloud describes itself as a vertically integrated company that designs its own servers, deploys its own fibre-optic network and runs its own data centres. Its corporate website gives 46 data centres on four continents, 1.7 million customers in 140 countries and more than 3,000 employees, and names Octave Klaba as founder and chief executive. Its server ranges carry names such as Kimsufi, Advance, Game and Scale. French Wikipedia says the company has held ICANN accreditation for generic domains since 2002 and offers its own .ovh extension. In France it also runs telecom services: French Wikipedia says OVH Télécom offers ADSL, SDSL and VDSL2 lines and voice over IP.

Certifications are part of the pitch. French Wikipedia says OVHcloud’s hosted private cloud offers were qualified under SecNumCloud 3.2 by ANSSI, the French cybersecurity agency, in January 2024, and English Wikipedia says its Bare Metal Pod platform received the same qualification in March 2025. English Wikipedia also lists OVH among the sponsors of Let’s Encrypt, the free TLS certificate service, as of 2016.

The identity has moved with the strategy. On 7 October 2014, at the second OVH Summit, Klaba presented a new logo and the slogan “Innovation Is Freedom,” French Wikipedia says; the corporate website now opens with the line “Innovation for freedom.” The 2019 rename then added the word “cloud” to the three letters, keeping the founder’s nickname at the front of the name.

For a design guide, OVHcloud shows how three initials from a student nickname can carry a company from borrowed premises in Paris to a listed group. Compare Scaleway, another French cloud provider, and IONOS. For this guide we use an ink blue, a signal blue and a blue-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep OVHcloud’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.