OVH's account creation, documentation, support and account deletion is possibly the worst I have ever encountered. Please use someone else. For why, read on. To find out how to delete your account, skip to the end.
For a while now I have been wanting to move my servers over to a French based hosting company because I live in France and wanted to be fully under the GDPR. I had looked at Gandi and a couple of others and eventually settled on opening an account with OVH as some of the other people who run Yunohost use it and they had a special on VPS's for US$0.97/month for the first year.
And that is where things started to go downhill.
Registration
Something I didn't realise was that it can take up to 48hrs after registration to be
approved for a new account. I am OK with that, but it is a long time. What really bit me though was because I registered in English I somehow ended up at their Canadian URL. I am still not sure how that happened.
OVH.com correctly gave me an English version of their website, I went to register and did so at ca.ovh.com and that is a problem. Why? Because for some reason registering with OVH Canada ties you to OVH Canada. You cannot log in at OVH France and while all the services are the same, as far as I can tell, my account is now tied to Canada. Not what I wanted.
Changing login portal
I then looked at their support pages which lacked any information the subject but eventually I found a Reddit post saying that if you wanted to change your registration/login point you would need to create a new registration and then transfer you services.
OK, so tried to do that... which didn't work. OVH apparently doesn't allow you to log into another portal but does share your email address, or more likely a hash of your email address, so that when you go to register you are unable to because the email address is already in use.
Support ticket
So my next step was to submit a support ticket to see if they could swap me to the French login portal but unfortunately submitting a support ticket appears to be impossible. Every option I chose in their drop down menus did not allow me to submit a support request.
GDPR request
I then tried to contact the GDPR officer for OVH to see if they could get me swapped over or have my account/information deleted so I could start again. Same problem. Just a run around without resolution.
Account deletion
At which point I went to delete my account so I could start over only to find that to delete my account I couldn't have an active service. That at least makes sense so I went to delete my service.
At the time of writing it has been 2 days since I requested to delete my service. This request has not yet been fulfilled. It actually looks like the service has to complete before it can be deleted which is a whole month of wasted time.
OVH Review
I do not understand this company. Perhaps I have been spoiled by using Linode but the setup of their login portals, lack of available self service information, the run around trying to get support and their inability to perform a relatively simple automated task such as cancelling a service doesn't give me a huge amount of faith in their ability to deliver any services.
What is wrong with OVH? It is the age of computers and the internet and yet their on-boarding and off-boarding processes make me feel like someone is running around behind the screen with stacks of paper trying to get them signed off by a manager on vacation. It's bizarre.
Account deletion
It is now a month later. I tried to remove my cancelled service from the services section as per their instructions and was unable to. I tried to open a support ticket to cancel my account and was unable to. I tried to find documentation on how to delete my account and was unable to.
So, here is how to delete an OVH account if you live inside the European Union.
Go to the OVH personal data protection page. Enter your details, provide a form of ID* and in the message subject list select, "Right of Deletion".
* To not use ID, you can try the method provided on this page.
