Octave Klaba was born in Poland in 1975. He moved to Roubaix as a teenager with no French, and later studied engineering at ICAM in Lille.
He founded OVH in November 1999 and sold cheap hosting by building his own servers. His father Henryk designed a water-cooling system for the data centres. The first foreign subsidiary opened in Poland in 2004.
In December 2014 OVH raised €267 million with KKR and TowerBrook, and in June 2017 it secured a €400 million financing line led by Société Générale. Klaba stepped back as CEO in 2018.
On 9 and 10 March 2021 a fire destroyed the Strasbourg SBG2 data centre and hit about 464,000 domains. OVHcloud listed on Euronext Paris in October 2021. In 2024 it had revenue of €993.1 million and a net loss of €10.3 million. Klaba returned as CEO in October 2025.