OVHcloud Price Increase 2026: Both Waves, in Full
OVHcloud raised prices twice in 2026. Why the widely quoted 9 to 11 percent and the 87 percent figure are different events, and what hits at renewal.
If you have seen two different numbers for the OVHcloud 2026 price increase, both are correct. The widely repeated figure of 9 to 11 percent comes from an announcement on 5 March 2026. The alarming figure of up to 87 percent comes from a completely separate announcement on 17 August, five months later, covering different products. They are not competing readings of one event, they are two events, and anyone quoting either one alone has described roughly half of what OVHcloud did this year. The company also gave an unusually specific reason: founder Octave Klaba says OVHcloud paid six times more for RAM in June 2026 than in June 2025.
Wave one: March 2026
OVHcloud announced on 5 March 2026 that it was adjusting prices across Public Cloud, Bare Metal and VPS, effective in April. It attributed this to a global memory market that had been disrupted since autumn 2025 by an industrial shift toward GPUs, which reduced stock and extended lead times.
The headline was an average increase of 9 percent to 11 percent on newer equipment covering the 2026 to 2028 generations, with older pre-2025 equipment rising only 2 to 6 percent. That restraint on legacy hardware was deliberate and is the first hint of the logic running through both waves: the increase tracks how much current-generation memory a product contains.
The 9 to 11 percent figure then travelled much further than it deserved. In the same announcement, the VPS 2026 range rose roughly 44 to 48 percent, with the worked example being VPS-1 moving from 4.49 to 6.49 euros a month. A reader who took away only the average understated their own VPS increase by a factor of four. OVHcloud also offered a genuine mitigation that received almost no coverage: customers who renewed before 1 April 2026 could hold their existing rates for up to two years.
Wave two: August 2026
The second announcement, published 17 August, is the one that produced the up-to-87-percent headlines. It covers dedicated servers and splits into three dates: memory and storage option pricing from 1 July 2026, new server configuration pricing from 11 August, and existing customers at renewal from 1 October.
OVHcloud stated that it reviewed every range and model individually to adjust only what was genuinely affected, rather than applying a flat increase across the catalogue. The published per-range figures bear that out, and they are graded almost entirely by hardware generation.
| Metric | Gen 2024 | Gen 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Advance | +36% | +74% |
| Scale | +49% | +70% |
| High Grade | +42% | +83% |
In every range the newer generation rose further, and the High Grade gap is the widest, at up to 42 percent for Gen 2024 against up to 83 percent for Gen 2026. The Game Gen 2026 range, excluded from the chart because no comparable Gen 2024 figure was published, moved 74 to 100 percent. That band is where the widely quoted 87 percent sits: it is inside the published range rather than at the top of it, which is a small but telling example of how a single number extracted from a range acquires a false precision on its way through the news cycle.
What OVHcloud says it is paying
The most concrete evidence in this whole story is Klaba quoting his own purchase ledger, indexed to June 2025. Reported by InfoQ in August 2026, the figures are:
| Component | Multiple vs June 2025 | Status |
|---|---|---|
| RAM, June 2026 | 6x | Observed |
| RAM, September 2026 | 9x | Forecast |
| RAM, early 2027 | 12x | Forecast |
| SSD, June 2026 | 3.23x | Observed |
| Hard drives, June 2026 | 1.48x | Observed |
These are one company purchasing figures rather than a market index, which is both their value and their limit. They are real transacted costs for a large buyer, and they are not necessarily what anyone else pays. The two forecast rows are projections and should never be quoted as prices. Klaba has also said the situation is exceptional and will last until 2028.
The gap between the observed 6x already passed through into 2026 pricing and the projected 12x for early 2027 is the single most useful planning number in this article. It says plainly that 2026 prices are a floor rather than a peak.
When it reaches your invoice
For most existing OVHcloud customers the answer is 1 October 2026, at renewal. That is the date the second wave applies to existing contracts, and it is when the majority of people will actually notice, months after the headlines.
At renewal, RAM upgrades rise 20 percent on Gen 2024 and 40 percent on Gen 2026, with storage upgrades up 10 and 15 percent respectively. Those renewal figures are much lower than the new-order option figures quoted earlier, and the two must not be compared: 40 percent at renewal and 652 percent on a new order are different pricing channels, not contradictory reports. Reading one as a correction of the other is the most common error in coverage of this topic.
OVHcloud also stated that older equipment at renewal is priced three to six times lower than new orders, and that the Kimsufi, So you Start and Rise ranges were untouched entirely. If you are on one of those ranges, the 2026 increases have largely passed you by. The full cross-provider record, with the channel each change applies to, is in the 2026 hosting price hike tracker, and the Hetzner side of the same shortage is in the Hetzner price increases.
The case that this is overstated
OVHcloud handled this better than the headlines suggest, and three points deserve stating in its favour.
It segmented rather than applying a blanket increase. Legacy hardware rose 2 to 6 percent, three whole ranges were exempted, and older equipment at renewal is priced well below new orders. A company purely exploiting a shortage would not have left the cheap ranges alone. It also published per-range percentages in both announcements, which Hetzner did not do at all, so the criticism that the communication was confusing is partly a criticism of how the numbers were reported rather than how they were disclosed.
The eye-catching figures are also the least representative ones. The 652 percent is an add-on rather than a server, and the 87 percent is a gaming-specific range. A typical customer on Advance Gen 2024 saw 16 to 36 percent, which is a serious increase but an ordinary one for a genuine input-cost shock.
Against all that, one criticism does stick: the 9 to 11 percent average in the March announcement described a range in which the VPS tier actually moved 44 to 48 percent. Publishing an average that far from what a major product line experienced is how a technically accurate figure becomes misleading in practice.
Bottom line
OVHcloud raised prices twice in 2026 for a reason it documented unusually well, and the confusing part is not the pricing but the reporting. The 9 to 11 percent figure belongs to March and covers newer Public Cloud and Bare Metal equipment. The 74 to 100 percent Game figure belongs to August and covers one dedicated server range. Between them sit a VPS line that rose 44 to 48 percent and a memory option that rose up to 652 percent, and none of those four numbers is a summary of the others.
The practical dates are 1 October 2026 for renewals and early 2027 for the next likely round, given Klaba projects RAM at twelve times its June 2025 price by then. If you are choosing hardware now, the generation gap is the lever: Gen 2024 and the exempted legacy ranges carry a materially smaller increase than Gen 2026, precisely because they carry less DDR5. For the component market underneath, see why RAM got so expensive and the current server memory street prices.
Frequently asked questions
- How much did OVHcloud raise prices in 2026?
- It depends which of two announcements you mean. The 5 March 2026 announcement raised newer Public Cloud and Bare Metal equipment by an average of 9 to 11 percent, legacy equipment by 2 to 6 percent, and the VPS 2026 range by roughly 44 to 48 percent. The 17 August announcement raised dedicated servers by 16 to 36 percent for Advance Gen 2024 up to 74 to 100 percent for Game Gen 2026.
- Was the OVHcloud increase 9 percent or 87 percent?
- Both figures are accurate and they describe different announcements five months apart. The 9 to 11 percent average came from the March 2026 announcement covering newer cloud and bare-metal equipment. The 87 percent figure comes from press coverage of the August 2026 dedicated-server announcement, where the Game Gen 2026 range moved 74 to 100 percent, so 87 percent sits inside that published band.
- When does the OVHcloud increase affect existing customers?
- From 1 October 2026, at renewal. New-order pricing changed earlier, from 1 July 2026 for memory and storage options and 11 August for new server configurations. At renewal, RAM upgrades rise 20 percent on Gen 2024 hardware and 40 percent on Gen 2026, and storage upgrades rise 10 and 15 percent respectively.
- Which OVHcloud ranges were not affected?
- Kimsufi, So you Start and Rise were excluded from the dedicated-server changes. In the March announcement, Cloud GPUs and Metal Instances, Managed Kubernetes, Load Balancer and Gateway, Object and Block Storage, and AI Solutions were listed as unaffected. Legacy pre-2025 equipment rose only 2 to 6 percent.
- Why did OVHcloud memory options go up more than whole servers?
- Because an option price is close to the raw component while a server price is a bundle. Memory options on new orders rose 68 to 652 percent, but whole servers rose 16 to 100 percent, because a server price also includes CPU, motherboard, network card, chassis, storage, power, cooling and margin, and those inputs rose far less. Klaba puts the increase on CPUs, motherboards and network cards at 15 to 20 percent.
Sources
- OVHcloud (2026). Pricing evolution of Public Cloud, Bare Metal and VPS at OVHcloud. OVHcloud Blog, March 5, 2026. Vendor statement. The 9 to 11 percent average, the 2 to 6 percent legacy figure, the VPS-1 move from 4.49 to 6.49 euros, the list of unaffected products, and the pre-April renewal lock. Verified September 1, 2026.
- OVHcloud (2026). Dedicated servers: new pricing in second half 2026. OVHcloud Blog, August 17, 2026. Vendor statement. Per-range percentages for Advance, Scale, High Grade and Game across Gen 2024 and Gen 2026, the 68 to 652 percent memory option range and 8 to 166 percent storage range, the July 1, August 11 and October 1 dates, and the renewal upgrade figures. Verified September 1, 2026.
- InfoQ (2026). OVHcloud Raises Prices as AI Memory Demand Reprices Non-AI Infrastructure. August 23, 2026. Secondary source reporting OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba, attributed as such. The component multiples indexed to June 2025, the quoted statement that OVHcloud paid 6x for RAM in June 2026, and the expectation that the situation lasts until 2028. Verified September 1, 2026.
- Hetzner Online GmbH (2026). Price Adjustment 15 June 2026. Hetzner Docs. Used only for the cross-provider comparison. Verified September 1, 2026.