OVH (english website [1]) is the best French hosting company and one of the best French domain name registar (with Gandi [2]), and are starting to make themselves a name outside of France. Hubic is the "cloud" offer from OVH.
They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive, and have very fair prices (they are like the hosting counterparts of Free [3], a French ISP that drove subscription fees down to what they now are and forced other ISPs to make their prices fairer).
OVH is the largest not the best French host. They're a budget host that vastly oversells. OVH has no such reputation for responsiveness, their "fair" prices are based on many fold overselling their network and holding onto and charging the same for hardware that's ten years old. They recycle disks even when they're about to die. They overload racks and cause power issues (Your whole rack rebooted? Sorry, one of the servers on it drew enough power under load to flip a breaker) . They randomly reboot servers as part of their DDoS protection. They think sending UDP packets is nefarious and will wipe your server for it.
I've had some SLA annoyances from them and setup fees have been expensive, but overall their dedicated servers have provided me with pretty fantastic value when I was running them.
I'm a Canadian and I've been considering grabbing a box here from them, www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml the pricing is ridiculously low.
You wouldn't get 10TB, but if you mirror the disks for 50$ a month you have a reliable 2TB of disk space in a datacenter much closer (for most) and 4 cores on 32GB of ram would give you a nice gaming server or a pretty powerful database.
Their VPS product (if they still do that anymore) would most likely be oversold. They are a massive operation that competes aggressively on price.
They run the Kimsufi line, which is massively oversold (close to 40 "100mbps" clients per real 100Mbps). Their EG and HG server series is also way oversold if you've ever attempted to use the network to its fullest.
Plus Oles, the CEO of OVH, goes on tirades against his customers every few months.
"They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive"
Have you ever dealt with their support? - I for myself am quite happy with my service (Dedicated server) so far (because I rarely had to deal with the support) but I've heard a few horror stories where some of their biggest UK customers basically got kicked out even though they stayed within the TOS and the terms they signed the contract for, or the thing about their DDoS protection kicking in, rebooting your server even though they are legit requests.
Their support by email / Internet is just nonexistent: I've never had any reply to the many messages I've sent this way. The support by phone requires you to wait about ~20 minutes until someone takes your call, but then, it's very efficient (in my case, at least).
I'm very happy I almost never have any problem with OVH (I've two DSL connections with included Hubic accounts and a few web hosting with included domain names), because the support is not great at all.
Where they basically looked at their customers and said "look, you are one of our 30% top customers in bandwidth usage, you'll have to pay from now on." Even though they (Or the company I used) were using their top of the line servers which are exactly offered for bandwidth intensive services like the ones mentioned in their forum post. So it's not really a solid company if you want to work with them long term or build a business on top of their service.
The company I'm referring to is now running their own network on their own hardware in a carrier neutral facility.
Not exactly what dewey was referring to, but for example they unilaterally cancelled their VoIP service to a large part of their customers in Europe, without any kind of explanation.
That's what I've read too, but there doesn't seem to be any official story. I've also read that they closed because it was being abused with services like Classicfon where you earn a few cents per hour you call them. VoIP is a crazy world.
OVH is probably the biggest, but it's unfair to say they are the best: they are a low-cost hosting company and provide a minimal support, unless you pay the price.
Moreover, OVH sometimes take quite stupid commercial decisions without notice. For instance, two months ago, they decided to put on hold any dedicated server command without notice... during more than 5 weeks.
Why did they do that? Because OVH's CEO became angry at customers ordering upgraded servers instead of renewing the leasing of their older ones.
As of Free, they bully and racket network peers which need to send traffic over their network as much as they can. (See how slow is youtube over the Free network, for instance...)
I also use OVH as an ISP and quite happy so far. I had connectivity problems once and a technical person answered my email within a couple of hours. By the end of the day it was back to normal.
They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive, and have very fair prices (they are like the hosting counterparts of Free [3], a French ISP that drove subscription fees down to what they now are and forced other ISPs to make their prices fairer).
[1] http://www.ovh.co.uk/
[2] http://en.gandi.net/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_%28ISP%29