The three American hyperscalers account for roughly two thirds of the global cloud infrastructure market, while European providers represent less than 20% of their own market. Yet for a classic business application — a back end, a relational database, a cache, object storage and a few workers — the functional gap between a hyperscaler and a French provider has narrowed sharply: OVHcloud, Scaleway and Scalingo now cover these needs with managed services, APIs and mature Kubernetes offerings.
The movement is accelerating for regulatory and economic reasons. The SREN law (2024) and then the European Data Act, applicable since September 2025, remove transfer fees when switching providers by January 2027; at the same time, VMware's pricing overhaul following its acquisition by Broadcom has triggered massive re-platforming programmes and reopened hosting trade-offs that were thought to be locked in for a decade.
The good news is that these three providers do not compete head-on: OVHcloud plays on catalogue depth and cost per server, Scaleway on developer experience and modern managed services, Scalingo on the PaaS that removes almost all operations. This document provides the framework for deciding — and explicitly names the cases where none of the three is the right choice.
Why French cloud now
Choosing a French host for a business application is no longer an activist gesture: it is a technical and economic trade-off made possible by three converging developments. The legal framework has hardened, reversibility has opened up, and the French managed offering has reached a credible level of maturity.
These observations now have to be translated into concrete criteria: that is the purpose of the following sections, which compare OVHcloud, Scaleway and Scalingo on architecture, managed services, sovereignty, total cost and operational effort.
IaaS, cloud native or PaaS
Between a bare instance and a simple "git push" there are three distinct operating models — and it is this choice, far more than the provider's logo, that determines the workload that will land on your team.
Put a number on operations before the list price: if no engineer has the time, the skills and the on-call availability to run a cluster and its databases, a PaaS that costs more per month still costs less in total.
Comparing the three platforms
The three players partly overlap on catalogue, but each is optimised for a different team profile — and that is where the comparison becomes useful.
Comparing a Scalingo container with the hourly rate of a Scaleway or OVHcloud instance of the same RAM makes no sense: the PaaS price includes backups, monitoring, patching and support, which you would otherwise have to build and maintain.
Data, networking and reversibility
It is on data, private networking and the ability to move elsewhere that the real gaps between the three platforms appear — far more than on CPU.
Real cost and operational load
The cost of hosting is not read on a monthly invoice: it is read in the engineering time consumed every month to keep that invoice worthwhile.
Add engineering time, on-call duty and version upgrades to the monthly quote: that total, and only that total, allows an honest comparison between a PaaS and a managed infrastructure.
Key takeaways
- Have you costed the full three-year total (subscription, storage, backups, egress traffic and operations man-days) rather than the monthly list price alone?
- Can you name, without hesitation, the person or people able to restore your production database on a Friday evening?
- Have you tested a full backup restore from your current provider within the last six months?
- Are your sovereignty requirements formalised (data location, SecNumCloud qualification, nationality of the provider and its subcontractors) and validated by your legal department?
- Can your application be deployed on another host from its code and its documentation, without untracked manual intervention?
- Do you know precisely the actual load of your application (concurrent users, peaks, data volumes) over the last twelve months?
