OVH is a French national champion under French AML/CRBF identity verification, with massive infrastructure concentrated in a handful of sites. NordBastion is KYC-free, crypto-paid, and physically distributed across four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions by design.
OVH signup runs French AML/CRBF identity verification — name, address, often passport and proof of address. NordBastion runs zero KYC.
Comparable per-spec price at the VPS tier — Sentinel $5.90/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 120 GB NVMe) versus VPS Comfort €10/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB SSD).
Distributed across four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions by design — not concentrated in Strasbourg or Roubaix, where one fire can take a region offline.
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| KYC | None — email + password only | Required at signup under French AML/CRBF — name, address, often ID |
| Billing | Crypto prepaid — BTC, XMR, ETH, LTC, USDT, USDC + more | Credit card / SEPA / PayPal — no crypto rail |
| Jurisdiction | Nordic constitutional (SE / FI / NO / IS) | France — EU framework, deep institutional integration |
| Entry tier | $5.90 / mo · Sentinel · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe | VPS Starter · €3.50 / mo · 1 vCPU · 2 GB · 40 GB SSD |
| Comfort / mid tier | $5.90 / mo · Sentinel · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe | VPS Comfort · €10 / mo · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 80 GB SSD |
| vCPU policy | Pinned, reserved on every tier | Shared at lower tiers; dedicated at Game / Elite tiers |
| Storage | Local NVMe included in tier | SSD-backed; Public Cloud block / object storage as add-on |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered, 1–10 Gbps uplink by tier | Unmetered at most VPS tiers; metered at Public Cloud |
| Regions | 4 Nordic bastions · STO, HEL, OSL, RKV | 37 global regions · heavy concentration in Roubaix + Strasbourg |
| Eco bare-metal | No — fixed bare-metal tiers $99 – $1,099 / mo | Yes — Eco range from €40 / mo |
| DDoS mitigation | Always-on, included | Anti-DDoS Game / Pro, included by tier |
| Warrant canary | Yes — monthly, PGP-signed | No |
| Managed services | No — infrastructure only by doctrine | Public Cloud S3-compatible, managed Postgres, Eco bare-metal |
OVH prices and policies reflect publicly listed values in early 2026 and may have changed since.
No French AML at the door, no concentration in a single Strasbourg or Roubaix data hall, no card-on-file requirement. Four physically distinct Nordic bastions across four legal jurisdictions, by design.
The OVH Eco range starts at €40/mo for real bare-metal servers — no NordBastion equivalent. If your workload needs a cheap dedicated box with no managed-services premium, the OVH Eco range is genuinely hard to beat.
OVH Public Cloud has S3-compatible object storage, managed PostgreSQL, and 37 regions across four continents. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only and Nordic-only — by doctrine, not by absence of engineering.
Take a snapshot from the OVH panel or `ovh` / `ovhai` CLI, then export the snapshot as a raw image to a temporary object-storage bucket and generate a short-lived URL.
Create the NordBastion account (email + password), top up a prepaid balance in Bitcoin or Monero, no identity check.
Pick the Nordic bastion of your choice, order the equivalent NordBastion tier (the spec table above maps OVH VPS sizes directly) and supply the image URL for a custom-image install.
Lower the TTL on the affected A/AAAA records 24 h before the move. At cut-over, swap the A record to the NordBastion IPv4 — propagation typically completes in minutes.
Terminate the OVH VPS or bare-metal server, empty the staging object-storage bucket. Cancel any Public Cloud add-ons — they bill independently.
OVH is a serious, capable, French national-champion cloud. It is also subject to French AML, French jurisdictional reach, and a topology that the 2021 SBG-2 fire showed is more concentrated than its global footprint suggests. For the workloads that need KYC-free + Nordic-constitutional + distributed-by-default, it is not the right shape.
Move the compute. If you depend on Public Cloud S3-compatible storage, managed Postgres or the Eco bare-metal range, keep those on OVH for now — there is no managed-services equivalent on NordBastion, by doctrine, and no Eco-equivalent at the same price point. As your stack consolidates around the Nordic bastions, the bridge shortens.
NordBastion will not be OVH. It will be a KYC-free, crypto-paid, Nordic-constitutional VPS distributed across four jurisdictions with a published canary, and that is exactly the part you came here for.
The questions privacy-seeking European teams actually ask before moving a workload away from OVHcloud.
Three reasons. First, OVH is bound to French AML/CRBF identity verification — the signup requires full legal name, address, and for higher-spend accounts often a government-ID upload and proof of address. Second, OVHcloud is a French national champion with deep integration into French institutional frameworks; legal process flows through French and EU channels. Third, the 2021 SBG-2 fire at Strasbourg destroyed an entire data hall and brought down customers who had not configured multi-DC redundancy — a useful lesson in jurisdictional and physical concentration risk. NordBastion is the opposite shape: KYC-free, Nordic constitutional, four physically distinct bastions by default.
At equivalent specs, comparable to better. A NordBastion Sentinel at $5.90/mo ships 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 120 GB NVMe. An OVH VPS Starter is €3.50/mo for 1 vCPU and 2 GB; the equivalent OVH VPS Comfort is €10/mo for 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 80 GB. The NordBastion Sentinel is roughly half the price of the comfort tier with more NVMe storage. OVH wins decisively only at the bare-metal end with its Eco range from €40/mo — a different product class.
Yes. NordBastion bills exclusively in cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDT, USDC and others. You top up a prepaid balance, the cost of running servers is drawn from it. OVH requires a credit card, SEPA direct debit, or PayPal — all routed through a verified, identity-bound account.
Yes, as a topology lesson rather than a swipe at OVH. The Strasbourg fire destroyed one of four halls at SBG and damaged a second; thousands of customers who ran a single VPS in one room lost data. The lesson is that geographic and political concentration is a real failure mode — \"all in Roubaix\" or \"all in Strasbourg\" is fragile. NordBastion runs four physically distinct Nordic bastions across four legal jurisdictions by design; the doctrine is that no single fire or no single subpoena should be able to take a customer offline.
Snapshot the OVH instance via the panel or the ovh CLI, export to a temporary object-storage bucket as a raw image. Top up a NordBastion balance in crypto, order an equivalent NordBastion tier in the Nordic bastion of your choice and supply the image URL for a custom-image install. Re-point DNS, terminate the OVH instance. Total wall-clock for a small VPS: about 35 minutes.
No to all three. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only: VPS and dedicated servers, snapshots, networking, DNS, panel. OVH Public Cloud has S3-compatible object storage, managed PostgreSQL, and the Eco bare-metal range from €40/mo. If those are part of your stack, run them yourself on top of NordBastion or split.
OVH spans 37 global regions across four continents — strong in Europe, expanding in North America and Asia-Pacific. NordBastion runs four Nordic bastions on purpose — jurisdictional focus is the product. If your latency target is Singapore, Sydney or Mumbai, NordBastion is wrong for you today. If your target is European users with constitutional jurisdiction guarantees, the Nordic locations are precisely the point.
Terraform and Ansible: yes — NordBastion exposes a REST API v1 with first-class server / snapshot / SSH-key / network resources, plus a Terraform provider in development and SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust. The CLI is `nb` instead of `ovh` and reads NB_API_KEY from the environment. If you script OVH today, you will script NordBastion the same way tomorrow.
Same editorial rules — facts only, dated, no disparagement. Each page is the honest migration story for that source host.
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