OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

Octave Klaba, the CEO of France-based cloud operator OVH, has warned that it will soon hike the price of server rental by up to 87 percent. Klaba said the price OVH pays for memory rose 6x in the year to June 2026, will rise to 9x by September, and hit 12x next year. He has also seen a 7x price increase for NVMe drives, hard …

[Lee D]

I use OVH to operate a small dedicated server, that I use for a very complex home setup(*).

Given that it's a dedicated server, the same one I've been renting for years, and that it's never needed intervention in all the years I've had it, if they raise my prices by anywhere NEAR that amount... I'll find another host.

Sure, I'm not their target market but equally... you aren't gonna penalise me because your other customers want something expensive. I'm not there to subsidise your other customers. New servers, fine. Upgrades, fine. Those people who rent virtual servers and the like where your costs might increase, fine. But people with existing dedicated servers shouldn't be seeing a price hike unless they make changes, or the price of electricity changes.

(*) My external domains are pointed to the dedicated server. That means that they sit on a static, globally-accessible, always-on IP. They use LetsEncrypt to renew, so they're always online and "available". But the actual SITE they are providing is in my house. My home systems VPN up into the server (which avoids all kinds of port-forwarding, NAT, even double-NAT, etc. nightmares) from any of 5G, DSL or fibre connections. The dedicated server then uses Apache to reserve-proxy and load-balance the sites, getting the pages from my home systems via the VPN (with a special "fallback" load balancer which basically serves a page which says "VPN is down" instead of the site when things are disconnected from home).

No ports to open. No dynamic IP worries. No NAT-punching. No changes when my connection fails over. Static locations to access everything even internationally. TLS-wrapped and authenticated at the dedicated server end. Nothing else open or accessible on my home network to make it work.

Given that I host everything from my home TV (tvheadend), Plex, my car GPS tracker (Traccar), etc. on them, it works amazingly well and nothing "external" cares about my internal setup. My GPS tracker just sends the data to my dedicated server and it gets authenticated and proxied all the way back to my home system via secured channels (TLS, VPN, etc.).

[Lon24]

Fascinated by our setup. Are you using Wireguard, OpenVPN or ... Is your dedicated server the VPN server or client? How do distinguish outging trafic from the server to the home system or the open internet?

Sorry for the hijack but this would a great solution for me in giving up a /29 for a single IP from my ISP.

[Lee D]

The OpenVPN clients at home dial into the fixed, static-IP of the server to connect to the OpenVPN server there. That external server has an IP whitelist to only allow OpenVPN connections from my IPs (static IPs and dynamic DNS that my router automatically updates every 10 minutes or so), so nothing else can connect to OpenVPN at the external server.

Because OpenVPN assigns a 10. network to the connection (and I don't use 10. at home or at the server end), the only traffic that goes out over the VPN is that coming from the server itself (reverse proxy requests down to the home servers) and their responses. Firewalling at both ends (with UFW) means that nothing else can go over that interface but HTTP(S) and ICMP ping at either end of it.

The external server is then just set to use Apache reverse proxying to access the "10." address of one of the home machines for its content, depending on the service required. Multiple machines from my home each dial in on their own separate VPN connection to the external service, and each get a unique "10." address which allows the server to contact them. So there's no complex network configuration that could be mis-read or bring unintentional remote access to the whole subnet. Each machine at home has their own certificates for OpenVPN and they each verify the server's OpenVPN certificate on connection. They initiate the connections to the server, the server assigns them their (fixed) 10. IP based on their certificate, and then the Apache sites push any traffic for that service down the VPN connection via reverse proxy to the 10. addresses.

I went a stage further and made Apache not just reverse proxy, but also "load balance" so that if the 10. service is unavailable (i.e. the VPN is down), then it goes to "localhost" and retrieves a page that says that the VPN must be down. That was actually surprisingly simple.

So homeclient1 triggers an OpenVPN connection on itself to connect to externalserver's OpenVPN port.

externalserver accepts the connection and gives homeclient1, say, 10.0.0.1.

mydomain1 points to externalserver's public static IP address.

externalserver's Apache listens on that IP and then has a "site" defined for each service.

The Apache config of that site tells Apache to reverse proxy all accesses (except for LetsEncrypt /.well-known/acme) to the 10.0.0.1 address, which proxies the requests/responses to homeclient1's web server to actually serve content.

homeclient2 also connects to the server and is given 10.0.0.2, and Apache does the same for mydomain2 to that address. And so on.

If you're interested, I can post some Github gists's with the critical parts of my config.

[doublelayer]

Welcome to the economics of renting. It's not about how much it costs for your particular system, it's about how much their business costs in total and most importantly how much other people will pay for the same thing. If expensive memory means people want something cheaper and they're willing to pay more than you, then your prices will go up. They may choose to offer a benefit for existing customers, but only if they think there's a benefit in your future business that they would lose otherwise.

[mark l 2]

It seems a bit cheeky to put the prices up on 2024 equipment (even if less than for a new server) when surely that kits has already been paid for several times over. I have a VPS with OVH which i have had since well before the AI caused RAM price increases. But if the renewal price goes up beyond that of inflation then ill be moving to another host when this year subscription comes up for renewal.

[Lon24]

But to the new host you will be a new customer probably using new hardware and hence being charged the new device/storage prices.

The obvious alternative to OVH is Hetzner. They have already hiked their prices across the board by a 'modest' 30% as existing Hetzner users share the pain.

So its either share or restrict increases to new users. If the latter than 100+% increases are likely. Which makes it uneconomic to move.

Looks like it's in your interest to share the pain if your hoster is to stay in the game.

We need a new adjective for AI. Anglo-saxon expletives are becoming increasingly insufficient.

[Lon24]

PS You may be running the same VPS but is it running on the same hardware?

Hosters will be rotating new hardware for old to gain power efficiences and reliability of intensively used kit. The hosters will be trying to delay as much as possible but us oldies will be exposed to some of the new levels of traditional hardware pricing.

I use AI but as sparingly as possible unlike many people I meet who use it for every whim. That, sadly, is becoming the norm these days so consumers as a whole have to share the blame with the AI protagonists.

[Pascal Monett]

a return to normal hoped for in 2029

Yeah, sure.

Just like gas prices will go down (hint : they never do).

[VoiceOfTruth]

AI - we all pay one way or another

You may try to avoid AI, but that doesn't mean AI will avoid you and your data. We have the NHS giving confidential patient data to Palantir, with no way for patients to opt out.

We are all paying for this. I don't use OVH (and frankly the OVH networks are a huge source of malignant traffic that I would prefer them to go away). But no doubt legitimate companies do use OVH, and they will pass on their price increases to their customers.

Those people who think they will move from OVH to somewhere else, the next hosting company down the line will be putting up their prices too.

[lordminty]

Euro Cloud

I see world domination of 'The Cloud' by Europe is going well then...

Perhaps it might be cheaper if they bought all that European made hardware, storage and RAM instead?

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

[IGotOut]

Re: Euro Cloud

So prices in the USA haven't gone up.

Oh dear, never mind.

Muppet