There are two ways a provider can charge you more. The loud one is a headline rate increase, the kind that makes the news. The quiet one is unbundling: the advertised instance price does not move, but things that used to be included in it are pulled out and billed on their own. OVHcloud's public-cloud change, effective October 1, 2026, is a clean example of the second kind, and it is worth reading closely because the mechanism is spreading.
What actually changes
On the current-generation instances, the B3, C3 and R3 lines, the compute price stays exactly where it was. What moves out of the all-in price are two items: local storage, now branded "Local Low Latency," and the public IPv4 address. The earlier-generation B2, C2 and R2 instances keep their included storage, so the change hits only new deployments on the current tier. OVHcloud frames it as a shift away from an all-in-one model toward granular billing, so a customer can size storage independently of the instance. That framing is fair, and the effect is still that the same configuration costs more.
The new line items
Local Low Latency storage is priced at €0.0001458 per gigabyte per hour, which works out to roughly €0.11 per gigabyte a month, or about €109 per terabyte a month. The public IPv4 address is €0.0027 per hour, roughly €1.97 a month. Neither number is large on its own. That is exactly why unbundling works as a pricing tactic: each separated item looks trivial, and the increase only appears when you add the instance, the storage and the address back together into the figure you actually pay.
The money, put back together
Here is what the split does to a real bill. Take a small current-generation instance that used to arrive with local disk and one public address in the price. Give it 50 gigabytes of local storage: at €0.11 a gigabyte that is about €5.50 a month, plus €1.97 for the address, so roughly €7.50 a month reappears on the invoice for things the sticker price used to cover. On OVHcloud's own numbers, identical configurations end up costing between 1.4 percent and 21.9 percent more, and the smaller the instance the closer it sits to the top of that range, because storage and the address are a bigger share of a small bill. A large instance barely notices; a €10 box can jump a fifth. The people most exposed are exactly those running the smallest, most price-sensitive servers.
The fine print that came with it
The same update reworked the commitment discounts. From September 1, 2026 the savings plans are twelve months at 15 percent off and thirty-six months at 30 percent off, and the one, six and twenty-four month options are gone. The discount applies to compute only: the newly separated storage and IPv4 are billed at full rate no matter how long you commit. So the headline "up to 30 percent off" now covers a smaller part of the bill than the phrase suggests.
What to do about it
Unbundling is not dishonest, and granular billing genuinely helps anyone who wants a lot of instance and very little disk. The trap is comparing a provider's new unbundled price against a competitor's old all-in one and thinking you have found a deal. The only fair comparison is total cost for the configuration you will actually run: compute, plus storage at its per-gigabyte rate, plus the address, plus anything else the price page footnotes. That is why we normalize the total rather than the sticker in the catalog, and why the matching formula is published in full. When you price a European instance, add the separated lines back before you decide, and check whether the provider you are comparing against still bundles them.
The broader point outlasts this one change. When a provider announces that instance prices are "unchanged," that sentence is now worth a second look, because the money can move without the number on the button moving at all.
Sources
The figures here are taken from OVHcloud's own public-cloud pricing-update notice describing the changes effective October 1, 2026 and the savings-plan terms effective September 1, 2026. The percentage impact range and the per-gigabyte and per-address rates are OVHcloud's; the small-instance example is our own arithmetic on those rates. This article was not commissioned or paid for by any company mentioned.