the french company OVHcloud has announced that will soon raise its prices due to inflation. This has been confirmed by its founder, Octave Klaba, and its CEO, Michael Paulin, in a post in which they point out that their clients will have to pay more money for their services because energy prices have risen by 39.7% while the rate of inflation in France has reached 8.9% in France last July.
OVHcloud has an electricity supply contract that expires in December 2022, and the post explains that the next agreement that OVHcloud reaches for electricity supply will be at a higher price than the current one. Klaba and Paulin point out that «It is a significant increase that we must pass to all the services that are directly related to the electricity consumption of our infrastructures«. Therefore, it will affect practically everyone, and neither old nor new clients will be spared the increases.
As explained by both directors, price increases will start on December 1yrThey will earn 10% on web hosting, public cloud, hosted private cloud and bare metal services. For now they have not given more details about the increases, and have indicated that they will offer more information in the coming weeks.
Both Klaba and Paulin have highlighted that the prices paid by OVHcloud customers are quite low, thanks to the prior implementation of innovations and energy saving measures. In addition, they have pointed out that price increases do not imply that there will be a change in strategy.
The rise in energy prices in Europe is due in part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has left Putin the ability to complicate natural gas supplies. Since energy supply has slowed down, prices have risen because there is less quantity and more demand. The cloud is not immune to the situation, and although OVHcloud is a large consumer of energy, its providers are not going to continue selling it at the same price as they currently have.
It is unlikely that OVHcloud is not alone in the increase in cloud prices that hosting and cloud service providers are going to implement, or are already implementing. However, many of the majors have been investing in renewable energy to generate electricity for their data centers for some time now. In this way they can get energy at a cheaper price than what can be obtained from fossil fuels.
