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Was OVH KS-Mystery supposed to be for French customers only?
Heard from someone that the KS-Mystery server was meant to be a France only deal. Which is why it only showed up on the French page and nowhere else.
We could possibly be looking at future deals be region locked, mostly just for France.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start limiting the number of promotional servers a customer can purchase.
And if they don't lock ownership transfers on promotional servers, the OVH server transfer black market would start seeing some crazy prices.
Region locked deals
- Your thoughts about deals being region locked?30 votes
- F OVH46.67%
- W OVH20.00%
- Meh! W Hetzner33.33%

Comments
"j'heberge du l'art" - Our Local Frenchman, @beanman109
It was only published to the French website, but all region catalogs.
To even load a catalog, you have to specify a subsidiary, and some do have different options. These servers were added to all subsidiaries so I suspect they did it as a scalper thing and wanted people to order via the API.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Fixing the scalper thing by automating the scalping
What are the odds that the Sales team in France forgot to lock these servers to the French subsidiary only in the API?
What I heard (read) is that Sales teams outside of France are claiming these deals were meant for French customers only and anyone outside of France should not have been able to purchase these servers.
As a wise man once said, the end is nigh.
My thoughts exactly
At OVH the one arm doesn’t know what the other is doing. They probably never told sales people in the other regions cos they only wanted sales by the API. Even the French webpage they did make public only sold servers in GRA… what about the other datacentres?
That doesn't make sense, anyone can make account in FR/EU and buy it, even through the website, right? And trying to restrict selling something to only French citizens in the EU also wouldn't fly.
Very good theory.
anyone with a french or european address* and usually the KYC docs to back it up
Anyone could make an account, but only French people can put valid details (French address), so it’d get stopped for fraud validation and account closed.
Little to none I think
The ovh French subsidiary would see a sharp decline in sales of their servers if they only sold to French citizens, which shouldn't be what they want.
@barbarza You're correct about their lack of comms internally but my fear is if they will rectify this mistake for the future. The server page did switch from GRA to RBX. LIM was sold out very fast. SBG and BHS have been sold mainly through the API.
@jnd @Coldmood Thats not correct. UK, Irish, German, Polish will get redirected to their own subsidiaries. A lot of other EU countries are managed by Germany or Poland subsidiaries. France handles a lot of Asian countries aside from the French. Alot of new signups from outside France are now redirected to https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/, which is handled by the Canadian subsidiary. Some may have old grandfathered accounts in France from before the individual EU, CA and US subsidiaries were created. Even APAC has their own subsidiary now.
@TomasSystems I pray to god you're right.
@Coldmood You have to keep in mind, promotional servers are to attract new customers. That is their main goal. You go ask the OVH sales team from any subsidiary that you want the same BF or flash sale deal, and you're willing to buy in bulk and pay 5 years upfront, they will tell you those are just to invite new customers. If France went french only, it wouldn't affect their sales at all as global customers are handled by https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/
jean bean bilou
OVH IRELAND FTW
All my homies use OVH IE
@barbaros moved there just to get an OVH account
OVH not the only one in the cheap market. It is possible that they have fix target for an offer but I think that they do not want to limit the real availability. Probably with French site and API enough France citizens can order and money is money from other sites. As it is a gambling, and most of these servers idling and canceled in the first month, it might be a profitable business for OVH.
This forum confirms well, the 20--30 eur range is the ceiling where most people order, so they need this user base. When I have good experience with this Mistery box with lottery, I might bring up my company infra here, or offer OVH to others. And as a hobbyist I can gambling and keep the good deals, a company need guaranteed resources and fixed prices.
OVH try to increase their user base in the past time and we can only try to look the real reason behind this.
But do not forget, OVH has an infra and experience to be a big cloud company in EU. Weak point is support but I see a radical higher quality in the past.
So enjoy this offers, I think that it might be ended in the next yrs but now OVH need customers, need brave persons who try and relly on their infra so prepare your budget, API knowledge and go.
(only my opinion!)
Their main competitor is likely Hetzner and Hetzner has increasingly started to suck
Hetzner is starting to become the definition of enshittification and maximizing profits
Even if you go by the french landing page, you could change the "fr" in the express checkout url (not the landing page url) to a country code of another subsidiary. I did not try ordering but via that it at least looked as if you could order via webpage (not API) through a different subsidiary.
You guys expect much for a company that still don’t modify bandwidth option to auto renew when you change a server to auto renew so that you without API tweaks still get renewal notices even when having turned on auto renew
if you went to the french orderpage, but were logged into a different subsidiary (ie for example), it would inform you of the order page being different for your logged in user and then allow you to redirect to that subsidiaries order page, and that worked fine for me
That is illegal under the EU Geo-blocking Regulation. It is not allowed to restrict access to the website or payment methods. It's not even allowed to redirect customers to a different subsidary without their explicit consent. Even if such consent is given the original website needs to be also accessible.
When I went to order via the French page, and logged in with CA account, it redirected me to IE to pay 🤷♂️ Didn't go through with it cos damn that was a lot of tax they added.
@beanman109 only knows how to give "French lessons" but he can't speak it
Palais de l'Élysée
55 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré
75008 Paris, France