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off-prem
Gaming servers get the steepest rises but sticker shock is also coming to conventional instances running on old and new boxes
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 disk prices rise 3.5x, and the cost of CPUs, motherboards, and network cards rise by 15 to 20 percent. He thinks those prices will climb further in the near future, and blames the hyperscale buying frenzy sparked by the AI boom for the increases.
Writing on X, Klaba said OVH recently received quotes for RAM and disk prices, and argued the company must pass on its increased costs by hiking the prices for new servers as it brings them online.
The biggest rise will come to those who rent 2026-edition gaming servers, whose bills will jump by 87 percent. The cost of other recent servers will increase by 40 to 59 percent. The increases kick in from September.
The Euro-cloud will also increase the price it charges to access its 2024-era equipment when customers renew contracts, but by less than the increase charged to use new machines.
“A customer already equipped will therefore see an increase 3 to 6 times lower than for a new order,” reads a machine translation of Klaba’s Xeets.
The company is also changing the way it charges for some services, for example by decoupling storage and IP addresses from its Gen3 instances, to become separately billed line items from October 1st. OVH will charge €0.000146/GB/h for storage, and €0.0027/h for IP.
Another change will see the company drop its one-month, six-month, and 24-month saving plans that lock in prices for the duration of a contract. 12 and 36 month saving plans remain.
Klaba promised to post full details later this week, and apologized for needing to make the changes.
“It's very frustrating to increase prices for a player like OVHcloud, because we make a lot of effort to be as relevant as possible on prices,” he wrote. “But the global context imposes a very strict discipline on us to simply continue to deliver new orders. Indeed, the real risk is not being able to fulfill your orders and making your expansions complex.
“We don't know the price level of RAM and drives in 2027 yet, but the probability that prices will continue to rise is very high,” he added, before teasing us all with the prospect of eventual relief.
“We believe that this situation will last until 2028, with a return to normal hoped for in 2029,” he wrote.
The Register today met the founder of a mid-sized managed service provider, and told him about OVH’s plans. The founder was unsurprised, and said he expects Azure and AWS to make similar announcements soon. ®
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