OVH alternatives: OVH VS Ex2 web accommodation comparison (2022)

Choosing the right web host for your project is not always easy. Today there are undisputed leaders in this field such as Hostinger or OVH, and other small lesser-known hosts, but who fight with their weapons. This is why we offer you a comparison between OVH (1.5 million customers) and Ex2 (10,000 customers). They each have their advantages and their drawbacks, but the final conclusion is not necessarily what one might imagine at first.

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Who should you choose for hosting your website? Comparative table of the 2 web hosts

If you don't have time to read in detail the different components of each of the 2 hosts, here is a comparative table that will summarize it all:

Find out more about Ex2 ➜

What do these 2 hosts in France offer?

OVH: the reference hosting provider

Who doesn't know OVH (today OVHcloud )? It is very clearly one of the leaders in the web hosting market. This company was founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba, then a student at the time. The company has grown alongside the growth of digital technologies, of course.

Since 2010, OVH has taken the turn of the Cloud for its hosting servers. The company also provides Internet access and telecommunications solutions for professionals. The French company is now present on the stock market, has around 2,500 employees among its ranks and generates 50% of its turnover outside France.

OVHcloud is totally different from Ex2, it is a host present all over the world, known to almost everyone in the industry. It is actually part of an international company that has about 30 datacenters in France and in different countries, including Ireland, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Singapore and the United States. 'Australia.

OVH now has more than 1.5 million customers worldwide, which is huge. Of course, such a big company has the means to establish itself all over the world, which helps to attract customers in places where there are few data centers.

There are really great aspects of OVHcloud services, but you have to qualify them with certain negative points that we will see later. OVHcloud's track record is more or less mixed, and there are definitely some things you need to know before buying a plan from them.

Features

OVHcloud is able to provide some features that other hosts charge extra for, and that's nice.

Everything you need to host your website(s) is available on OVH. Indeed, the latter has all the basic functionalities that one can expect from a host. This is normal when you position yourself as a market leader.

While there are disk space restrictions on all plans, OVHcloud is much more generous with its storage than most of its competitors, with storage allocations starting at 100 GB on the "Custom" plan. ", the cheapest. The only problem is that it's not the faster SSD storage that most hosts offer, but rather the older and slower HDD storage, which is a shame.

You can host multiple websites on a single hosting plan: 5 on the Personal plan, 10 on the Pro plan, and as many as you want on the Performance plan. OVHcloud supports the most recent versions of PHP. This means that you will have access to the increased performance, security and stability that recent versions of PHP offer and that you can also manage the PHP version of your website.

OVHcloud servers are specifically optimized to host websites built on content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Prestashop. In fact, these are the only apps you can install with OVHcloud because it doesn't use any of the usual one-click installers. The more expensive web hosting solutions offer optimization for all the CMSs listed here, while the Personal plan is only optimized for WordPress and the Professional plan for WordPress or Joomla (although you can install the other CMSs if you wish ). This is problematic, but logical since WordPress is by far the most popular CMS anyway.

All OVHcloud plans require an annual subscription, but you get a free domain name for the first year, like most regular web hosts.

Free SSL Certificate

OVHcloud offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with all of its plans, so you won’t find yourself having to buy an SSL at checkout. A number of hosts don't offer free SSL certificates these days, although having one is essential. The free SSL certificate is automatically selected when you go through the OVHcloud payment process.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Many web hosts put strict limits on bandwidth, even on their most expensive plans. With OVHcloud, you benefit from unlimited bandwidth, especially thanks to the Cloud (subject to fair use policies, of course), it's a nice advantage. You won't face the problem of being charged for additional bandwidth if your website suddenly gets more traffic than expected.

Pre-installed WordPress

The option to select your CMS is offered at checkout, so you can get started quickly. Normally, we can suggest this feature to beginners, but there are many reasons, which we will see later, why we do not recommend OVHcloud if you are very new to creating websites.

Daily backups and easy restore

Many web hosts (even international giants) charge extra for backups. OVHcloud generates nightly backups of your website which are stored offsite for up to 30 days. Restoring a backup is a simple process, just a few clicks to confirm the restore.

The types of hosting offered by OVH

Above, we were talking about the features available on the most common offer: Web Cloud. It is a shared hosting solution that uses Cloud methods. That is, the resources are shared between multiple servers. But, of course, OVH offers other types of web hosting to meet all your needs. You can find there almost everything that is possible and imaginable in terms of accommodation:

Getting Started

OVHcloud offers several interesting features and solutions, but when it comes to ease of use, it's not the same thing.

Purchasing a hosting plan is unnecessarily complicated, as you have to click through several screens of options before waiting for the payment page and order summary to appear. Also, some elements of the order summary page can be confusing if you are new to buying web hosting.

In fact, even before the purchase, it is difficult to find your way around their site if you do not know the vocabulary. It's a shame to make things so complicated unnecessarily.

OVHcloud claims that your site will be hosted on a server in the country where you are, but sometimes this is not the case. It is therefore necessary to contact customer service to remedy this, and it is not always easy, we will come back to this later.

Manage your account and your web environment

You will need to use the OVHcloud cloud management panel to manage your account and your web space. As it is an interface that you will only find with them, you will not be used to it at first and it will seem unfamiliar to you. With a little time and practice, you'll get used to it.

There are several small display bugs at the heart of the interface. Which complicates things a bit.

Same thing for logging into your account, it's not clear. It is an interface that is not really up to standard for a host with so many influential customers in the field. If you are a beginner, you will surely find it difficult to find your way around. In addition, their interface requires time to adapt as it is different from the others (they do not use cPanel).

Connecting a domain and installing WordPress

Your domain name will be automatically connected to your hosting space when you sign up, and WordPress may be pre-installed for you. You can add other WordPress sites to your hosting space from the hosting management panel.

OVHcloud doesn't use any of the popular one-click installers like Softaculous or Installatron, but its own installer is relatively easy to use (once you find your way to the hosting management section). Installing WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, or Drupal only takes a few minutes.

Performance

Performance is always a point not to be underestimated when choosing a host. Even if this is not what will do all the work to have a fast site, it is always important to select your host well at this level.

(the reference test site we selected is a classic WordPress site with content on the home page, and poorly optimized images)

In the page load speed tests, OVHcloud achieved excellent results with an average page load speed of 0.9 seconds. Knowing that Google recommends a maximum of 2.5 seconds, this is a very good result. Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends.

During various uptime tests (or availability rate in French), we find that the reliability of OVHcloud is not at the level of the loading time. Indeed, it fails to reach the minimum acceptable score of 99.9%. In fact, on 3-month tests, we see that the uptime is only 99.37%. Also on this test, we can see that the uptime has improved, reaching 99.96%, but you should be careful with hosts who have a history of low uptime rates.

GTmetrix is ​​a great tool for testing websites because it gives a lot of detailed information. There is also optimization information indicated by Google's tool: Page Speed ​​Insight. Of the two, the Page Speed ​​score is more valuable because it's based on what Google uses to rate your website. It is important to test at different times, during "off-peak" hours and "peak" hours. In this situation, on GTmetrix, page load speeds varied between 0.6 and 1.2 seconds, with an average of 0.9 seconds.

OVHcloud also got very good PageSpeed ​​scores, indicating that its server-side optimizations actually improve your website's performance. Surprisingly, this isn't always the case – hosts may claim to have optimized servers but their performance often tells a different story.

The PageSpeed ​​score of 80% is very good, considering that the average website scores around 75%.

Another test: Sucuri Load Time Tester. Sucuri can tell you how your site will behave when your visitors are all over the world. The results are of good quality, a European site can easily be consulted in the USA, Canada, and even in Asia. These data are completely consistent with what we saw on GTmetrix.

UptimeRobotPerformance is a tool that allows you to monitor the availability of your website for Internet users in real time. Yes, how fast your web pages load doesn't matter if your site suffers from frequent or long downtime. During the first three months of the test, OVHcloud only managed 99.37% uptime, with periods of downtime of more than two and a half hours!

At a minimum, a good host should achieve 99.9% uptime, which is a benchmark score popularized by the famous guarantees of some international hosts. Even an uptime of 99.9% allows 43 minutes of unavailability over a month, but the OVHcloud score is equivalent to 272 minutes per month (about 4.5 hours!). This is way too much for a host of such renown.

Support

I use each host's customer support department to assess what kind of help you can get if something is wrong with your website. I have already mentioned the cloud management panel which is not suitable for beginners, and I am afraid the same is true for the support of OVHcloud. Judging by the answers to my questions, OVHcloud seems reluctant to help newbies.

It was previously said that the interface and the site were not made for web beginners. Imagine that it's the same for their customer support. When you contact them to tell them about any problem on your site, they answer you in a robotic way. It's unpleasant not to feel supported in this kind of situation. Your website can mean many things to you: your work tool, your passion, sharing, etc. But OVH doesn't want to know anything about it. They prefer to redirect you to their forums or those of their partners rather than offering you real help to help you move forward.

"Support" is available by phone and email/ticket. OVHcloud recently launched a live chat service. Maybe that could make things better. Support is only available on weekdays, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

OVHcloud offers four levels of support: Standard, Premium, Business and Enterprise. Standard support is included for free with all plans, but it's described as "self-service," which explains the disappointing lack of support. To be accompanied in a stronger way, you have to pay a supplement…

The other issue with support tickets is response time. For standard support, the delay between the request and the solution can be several days. All this to tell you to go to the support forum. If you have a major problem (site out of service for example), contact them directly by phone.

The only good thing about OVHcloud support is that it has a fairly detailed and helpful help center with step-by-step guides (some with videos) for setting up and using your service web hosting, and to troubleshoot common issues. In addition, since OVH has many customers, the help forums are also well provided.

How much does it cost to host a site with OVH?

OVHcloud is among the cheapest web hosting plans on the market. With such low prices, we can say that it is too good to be true. And yes, you have to make compromises. Even if a month of hosting is worth less than 3 euros, you have to tell yourself that you will be on your own.

As explained above, the support is almost non-existent if you do not pay extra. If you are looking for premium support, it will cost you (much) more. For example, one month of Premium support, the first paying level, costs €50 excluding tax per month! That's more than two years of hosting on the Perso plan. If you are looking for good support, because you do not have the skills or because you do not want to take the lead, you should perhaps consider finding another hosting provider.

With OVHcloud, all plans are for a minimum of one year. You can pay via PayPal or any other credit card. It's worth noting that all plans are set to auto-renew by default, so if you don't want to be charged again, you'll need to turn off auto-renewal at least 14 days before the plan ends. Renewals are non-refundable, even if you forget to turn off auto-renewal. So it is best to enable manual renewal from the start. Of course, it's a bit of a practical limit, so remember to deactivate it.

If you do not renew your hosting plan, the service will be terminated at the end of the plan term and your website will be taken down. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but the remaining credit will not be refunded if you cancel before the end of the 12 months.

If you don't want to keep your website until the end of your hosting plan, you can choose to delete it immediately. As this action is permanent, OVHcloud sends you an email with a link to click to confirm that you want to end your plan.

Finally, OVH does not offer a satisfied or refunded service, as some hosts do. And since the minimum subscription period is one year, you are a bit stuck once you subscribe. Think carefully before making a purchase.

Here is an image of the price of all the Cloud offers currently offered by OVH:

Ex2: the ecological host

Who is Ex2? You may not know them yet if you are not very interested in web hosting. And yet, they do not deserve against big competitors like OVH or even Hostinger.

Ex2 is a French-speaking web host. They have datacenters in France and the United States but also in Canada, their country of origin. The company now has more than 10,000 customers for more than 20,000 hosted sites.

But beware, they do not host their sites just any old way. One of Ex2's major concerns is the environmental impact of web hosting. In France, for example, 10% of the electricity produced is directly consumed by these data centers. We understand better the concern of Ex2. After several years of development, they succeeded in building a hosting solution that reconciles ecology and performance. Not bad is not it ?

Indeed, since 2018, the company has been completely carbon neutral, and they donate 1% of their income to finance the elimination of carbon in the atmosphere. In addition, Ex2 offers a green hosting formula that finances the purchase of lamps in Africa, but we will come back to this later.

Overall, Ex2 is a very good host with one strong point that sets it apart from OVH. Here is everything you need to know about the services offered by Ex2.

Features

Ex2 offers everything found in “big” web hosts. Whether it's the variety of hosting types, basic features, etc... it's all there.

If we take basic shared hosting as a point of reference (as for OVH), we realize that in terms of price, we are almost equivalent to the starting offer: 35 cents incl. tax more per month for Ex2 (for a 3 month commitment). OVH already had a substantial disk space of 100 GB for their smallest offer. Know that Ex2 offers even more: 150 GB! However, you can only host one site.

The problem with Ex2 shared hosting is that it is not made specifically for CMS such as WordPress for example. But, WordPress is clearly at the center of their concerns and an offer specifically designed for the most used CMS in the world is offered. At that point, we are about €1 more than the basic OVH offer. In other words, we stay in a price range of less than €5 including tax per month, which is already excellent.

Managed Hosting

One of the very interesting features of Ex2, compared to OVH, is the support they offer. Indeed, we can speak for their WordPress offers for example of managed hosting. What does this mean concretely? The objective of this type of package is to provide a stress-free experience for customers. That is to say that the host will take care of all the tasks that are time-consuming, redundant, or that require specific technical skills. This is why we were talking about the fact that OVH is not really made for beginners, it is because the level of support is not sufficient.

What are the advantages of such a plan? First of all, from a performance point of view, the site will logically be faster if its environment is managed by hosting experts. If the site is no longer online, Ex2 takes care of everything in a short time to have as little downtime as possible.

Secondly, you will gain in security for the same reasons. Anything related to potential security updates and vulnerabilities is handled by your web host. You will also benefit from backups, superior assistance to help you in the event of a problem, or to guide you in the event of changes to your plan.

In addition, outsourcing can help you reduce costs. The hosting packages that offer it are generally a little more expensive but you will save precious time, which you will be able to use for what really matters to you. In fact, one can generally say that hosting of this type reduces the risks. A site that is out of service for several years costs you dearly in potential customers but also in reputation. You won't have to worry about it anymore.

Free migration to them

Still as a guide, Ex2 takes care of everything if you decide to take out a subscription with them. Indeed, the Canadian host is responsible for transferring your site to their servers completely free of charge. It doesn't matter if your site is built on WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or elsewhere and it doesn't matter which host it is with.

Security

In terms of security, there are different features that are implemented. In particular, there is a malware scanner available for WordPress offers from the Pro package. If a threat is detected, it is deleted, to ensure that the various information present on your site is always safe.

In addition, at the data center level, other measures are present. These have firewalls, and also anti-DDOS protection, to allow your site to stay online even during this type of attack.

On the other hand, in terms of the customer area, it is unfortunate not to find double authentication activated by default at the time of connection. The majority of hosts offer this kind of system to give a kind of double curtain of protection to access to the management of your site. Here, it must be triggered afterwards.

Unlimited storage

Whether on classic shared hosting solutions or WordPress hosting, unlimited storage space is available from the second offer (Plus for WordPress and Enterprise for shared hosting). Most hosts have stricter limits on disk space, but that's not the case here. In addition, for WordPress packages, this space is 100% SSD, so it's definitely worth it.

Free domain name and SSL certificate

Like their competitors at OVH, Ex2 offers you the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate with all its plans. In fact, this is something very common on hosting offers but it is always important to highlight it, since it is essential to have one. As a reminder, this makes it possible to secure everything relating to banking transactions, connection information or even data transfers.

In addition to this, Ex2, still like OVH, offers the domain name free for a commitment of one year or more. This highlights a difference with OVH that may be important to you depending on your needs. Indeed, on OVH, the minimum subscription period is one year, while you can subscribe for a minimum of 1 month on Ex2. So, of course, in terms of price, it is not profitable to take out a monthly subscription, but it can make it possible to host an ephemeral or other site.

Site builder

Soon, the Canadian web host will open its own site editor. It is not yet available, but the various features announced by Ex2 bode very well. A priori, this editor will work with drag and drop, functional blocks (texts, buttons, etc.), everything that is found in a WordPress theme builder finally. In addition to this, we will also have access to functionalities to develop a blog, integrate social networks and an e-commerce site. It only remains to know if these sites are optimized for SEO, loading times and professional use.

The types of hosting offered by Ex2

Ex2 offers a lot of different packages, maybe even a little too many. For OVH, it was difficult to navigate their site, which was not suitable for beginners. In this case, it can be complicated to navigate among the many offers, even if it is clearer in terms of navigation. Here are the different offers that are offered by this web host (for a 3-year commitment):

Getting Started

So, is Ex2 easier to get started with than OVH's somewhat special interface? The answer is yes.

First of all, the customer area is clear, and has recently been redone. Everything is easily accessible: your various services, domains, invoices, but also contact with support. It is possible to manage several accounts in a few clicks from this space. Afterwards, this opinion can be subjective, everyone has their own definition of what is easy to use or not.

Next, for the site management interface, Ex2 chose to use cPanel, which is the benchmark in this area, so not much to report on that side. It's a very popular tool, so there are a lot of resources available about it, and it's very comprehensive and smooth. Ex2 offers cPanel even for VPS and it is not necessarily common!

There isn't much more to say about getting started with Ex2, and that's a good sign!

Performance

The interface is okay, but what about performance?

As we said in the preamble, the objective of Ex2 is to succeed in combining performance with respect for the environment. We are happy to announce today that it is possible! We have subscribed to the WordPress Pro plan ourselves and the tests are even beyond our expectations in terms of performance.

First of all, in terms of availability, the Ex2 support announces an “uptime” (or availability rate) of 99.99% over more than a year of use. At the same time, the data centers they have are level 3, in other words, the best available on the current market.

To verify all this, we carried out tests on the home page of our site leptidigital.fr. You can go check it out yourself, but this page is a good performance test since there is a lot of content on it. As we mentioned earlier, GTmetrix and Google Page Speed ​​Insights are 2 excellent tools for judging the performance of a site. Nevertheless, these results are to be qualified since it is not just linked to the host.

For Page Speed ​​Insight, the most important test, the performance and in particular the loading time are very good. Google does not recommend more than 2.5 seconds, and that is the score we achieve. (for the most important content on the page)

Then, on GTmetrix, nothing to report either, everything is great. The only point that needs improvement does not really depend on the host, it is blocking times by the different scripts. It is 188 ms here and should ideally be under 150. But that's not much.

Support

Customer service is undoubtedly the major advantage of Ex2. Unlike OVH, you don't need to pay for advice from your host. Our experience with them is impeccable, there is nothing to report. Ex2 accompanied us from A to Z in the migration of the site as well as the maintenance of it. If you are a beginner or don't want to worry about complicated web hosting, this could be the solution for you.

This support is available 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and is of high quality, thanks to their team of experts. On the other hand, telephone support is unfortunately only available for the most substantial offers. It's a shame, but we can understand them.

In addition, what is problematic is that the customer community is quite small at the moment, so there is not really mutual assistance between customers as we can see at OVH for example. Nevertheless, the Canadian web host offers a knowledge base on everything you need to know to manage your web environment. There is also a small collection of video tutorials about cPanel, a bit outdated, but still useful.

The price of hosting

Compared to OVHcloud, Ex2 is a little more expensive, that's a fact. But when you see the quality of the accommodation, as well as the service, you can't complain. You will never be on your own, the support will always be responsive, and it is clearly worth the effort.

As we mentioned, it is possible to subscribe to monthly subscriptions, whereas at OVH, you have to take at least 1 year. As with their competitor, if you cancel before the end of your commitment, you will have to pay the rest (which makes sense).

Here, in image, the starting prices of each of the offers proposed by Ex2:

Which host to choose? Our conclusion

This is THE question, which web host is right for you? In reality, it all depends on your needs. But, in general, we can put Ex2 above OVH in terms of performance, customer service and ease of use. In other words, for a beginner or someone who does not want to bother, it is better to choose Ex2. In addition, their ecological commitment is a superb initiative. If you have the necessary technical skills and want to save a little money, you will find your happiness more easily with the French host OVH.

Discover the offers of Ex2!➜An opinion? post