The family was being watched. Before the Berlin Wall fell, the communist regime in Poland kept an eye on the Klabas, according to a portrait of Octave Klaba published in 2021. Octave was a teenager who already believed computers could change the world, and he grew up understanding that who holds your data decides how free you are.
He arrived in Roubaix, in northern France, as a teenager with no French. Roubaix was a textile town past its prime. He studied engineering at the ICAM school in Lille, spent a short time at Alcatel, and in November 1999 he started a hosting company.
His father Henryk invented a water-cooling system for the data centres.
His online handle at the time was Oles Van Herman. The company name came from its initials, and later got a second reading, 'On Vous Héberge'. He has said that on the internet 'if you're not paranoid, you get hacked', a line from a 2020 radio interview.
What made OVH unusual was how it was built. Klaba made his own servers rather than buying branded ones. His father Henryk invented a water-cooling system for the data centres. Other family members worked in the company from the early days. Poland became the first foreign subsidiary in 2004, a nod to where the family came from.
Then came the reveal that nobody on the outside expected. In the early 2000s the head of the French telecom Free lent OVH a cellar in Paris, and 10,000 servers ended up there. Klaba, according to Challenges, offered the owners of the building a deal. He would heat their flats using the warmth from his machines.
The cheap, home-built approach turned a Roubaix start-up into Europe's largest hosting group. By 2024 revenue reached €993 million.
The cost showed on the night of 9 to 10 March 2021. A fire destroyed the SBG2 data centre in Strasbourg and damaged its neighbour. Nearly four million websites went dark, and more than 100 companies later sought compensation. Seven months later OVHcloud listed in Paris. Its market value in 2025 was about €1.7 billion, below the figure hoped for at the IPO. Klaba, who stepped back as CEO in 2018, took the job again in October 2025.
The lesson is that a founder's fear can become a design principle. A boy raised among watchers built a company around owning every layer: the servers, the cooling, the buildings. The same independence made it cheap, and the fire showed what it costs.