OVHcloud and Scaleway sell European email with EU data residency bundled in and billed per mailbox. Here is the honest trade against a flat fee with no region picker.
Picture a German agency with twenty-two client domains. Its European email hosting is spread across OVHcloud and a web host inherited from a previous contractor, and a procurement form from one client, a municipal utility, asks it to confirm, in writing, which country its email data physically lives in.
It can answer for eleven domains. Not the other eleven.
That's the actual European email hosting problem, and it isn't which host is cheapest. It's whether you can answer the question when a client asks it, and what you pay per year for the privilege.
OVHcloud and Scaleway are both real French infrastructure companies with real EU footprints, and both will sell you mailboxes. JustEmails is a flat-fee multi-domain host that will not sell you data residency at any price. Different products. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
TL;DR: If EU data residency is a written requirement on a form somebody will make you sign, use OVHcloud. Full stop.
If it isn't — if you've just absorbed a general sense that European hosting is safer and nobody's actually audited you on it — then what you're optimising is cost and admin overhead across many domains, and that's where JustEmails at $49/year flat for unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes wins on plain arithmetic. Scaleway is the odd one out here, and I'll explain why below.
| OVHcloud Email | Scaleway | JustEmails | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operator | OVHcloud (Roubaix, France) | Scaleway (Iliad Group, France) | Velocity Digital Labs |
| EU data residency | Yes, named EU datacentres | Yes, EU regions | No guarantee |
| Mailbox hosting | Yes (basic mail → Hosted Exchange) | Via web hosting / domain products | Yes, unlimited |
| Pricing model | Per account / per mailbox | Per mailbox, bundled with hosting | $49/year flat |
| Unlimited domains | No | No | Yes |
| Unified inbox across domains | No | No | Yes |
| Transactional sending API | No | Yes (Transactional Email) | Yes, 1,000/mo included |
| Calendar + contacts | Yes (Hosted Exchange) | Varies by plan | No |
| SSO / SAML | Varies by product | No | No |
| Auto SPF/DKIM/DMARC/MTA-STS | Manual DNS | Manual DNS | Auto-configured |
| Storage | Per mailbox, varies by plan | Per mailbox, varies by plan | 10 GB total, +100 GB for $99/year |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual | Annual only |
Three of those bold rows are ours. No calendar, no SSO, no data-residency clause. If any one of them is a dealbreaker, you've saved yourself twenty minutes and can stop reading.
You'll notice I didn't put euro figures in that table. Deliberate.
Competitor pricing pages change. An article that prints a per-account euro price for OVH Email Pro keeps ranking for two years after that price stops being true, and then it's just a lie with good SEO. So this post doesn't print numbers it can't keep current.
What I can tell you is the shape, which is the part that drives the decision: both OVHcloud and Scaleway charge per account or per mailbox, and on Scaleway that charge usually rides along inside a web hosting or domain plan. Open both pricing pages, note the figure and today's date, multiply by your real mailbox count, compare against $49/year. Five minutes, and more accurate than anything I could hardcode here.
(I know that reads like a dodge. It isn't.)
Here's the thing nobody selling EU hosting will tell you.
Data residency is a genuinely strong argument for storage at rest. Your mailbox archive, five years of client correspondence, the attachments — knowing that sits on a disk in Gravelines rather than Virginia is defensible and contractually meaningful. Public-sector procurement asks about it. Some German buyers won't sign without it. That's not theater, and OVHcloud built a business on being the answer.
But email is a weird product to apply it to, because email leaves your jurisdiction the instant you press send.
You can host your mailbox in Paris and still send it to a client on Gmail, where it lands on Google's infrastructure under US law, forever. The residency guarantee covers your copy. Not the copy sitting in the recipient's inbox — which is the copy that usually matters in a dispute. Most buyers never think about that distinction, and the industry likes it that way.
So my honest position, and plenty of people will disagree: EU residency for mailbox hosting is worth a premium when it's a written requirement, and mostly a comfort blanket when it isn't. If the real worry is cross-border transfer risk rather than a checkbox, the harder problem is your analytics and your third-party processors. Our sister product covered that in the Schrems III data transfer breakdown.
JustEmails does not offer residency. No region picker. Better to say that here than have you find out during an audit. (If you're the one who ends up answering those requests across a whole portfolio, the GDPR data request write-up on the VDL blog covers the operational side — it's tedious work and worth systematising before the first request lands.)
Now the arithmetic, which is where this gets one-sided.
OVHcloud and Scaleway both scale with headcount and with domains. Twenty-two client domains, three mailboxes each, and you're provisioning sixty-six accounts — each with its own storage cap, each renewing on its own plan. It works. Agencies run on it every day. But the cost curve slopes up and to the right forever, and the admin curve goes with it.
JustEmails is $49/year. That's it. Two domains or fifty, the invoice is identical. Mailboxes, aliases, and catch-alls are unlimited and free to create. Team members are $2/member/month past the owner seat; storage goes up in 100 GB blocks at $99/year each if 10 GB isn't enough.
It's the same trap the American incumbents set, just with a different accent — Google Workspace Business Starter lists at $7.00/user/month (about $84/year), and Microsoft 365 Business Basic matches it at $7.00/user/month, up from $6.00 before Microsoft's 1 July 2026 price rise, both per-user, neither with a unified inbox, each a list price as published by the vendor as of September 2026. Check those yourself before you quote me on them. Same rule I just applied to OVH; I don't get to exempt the Americans from it because the numbers happen to flatter us. Per-seat and per-mailbox pricing punishes exactly the buyer who manages the most domains: agencies, freelancers with a portfolio, studios running several products. Full argument in flat-fee vs per-mailbox email pricing.
One caveat in the other direction: 10 GB total isn't generous next to a per-mailbox allowance. If you're an archive hoarder with a decade of attachments, do the storage math before you get excited about the flat fee.
The boring section. Also the one that'll bite you.
Bundled mail — the kind that comes free-ish with a domain or a hosting plan — leaves authentication as your homework. You get MX records and a control panel, and SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and MTA-STS are yours to hand-write in a zone editor at eleven at night. Get the SPF include chain wrong across twenty-two domains and you'll find out when a client asks why their invoices are in spam.
It's an easy mistake to make: a DMARC policy flipped to reject on a domain whose DKIM key was never finished rotating. Receiving servers start refusing the mail, and if the bounces land in a mailbox nobody reads, it looks like the mail just quietly stopped arriving, which is the failure mode that costs you a contract.
JustEmails generates the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and MTA-STS records for every domain (on Cloudflare it adds them for you; elsewhere you paste them in), checks each one, and keeps monitoring blocklists and domain health after setup. Filtering is Rspamd and ClamAV. TLS 1.2+ in transit and at rest, TOTP and passkey two-factor. None of it is exotic — it's what a competent sysadmin sets up by hand. The value is that it's already worked out on domain twenty-two, when you're tired and the client is waiting. Long version: email deliverability statistics worth knowing before you're running two dozen domains.
Scaleway keeps getting listed as an OVH competitor in European email hosting. I think that's a category error.
Scaleway's headline email product is Transactional Email — a sending API with domain verification, built for password resets, receipts, and app notifications. Genuinely good at that. It is not a mailbox host. Mailboxes on Scaleway generally arrive attached to web hosting or domain products rather than as a standalone offering with its own roadmap.
So evaluating Scaleway against JustEmails means running two comparisons at once. On mailbox hosting, Scaleway's story is thinner than OVH's. On transactional sending it's a fair fight — JustEmails includes 1,000 API emails a month in the base $49/year, with stackable 10,000/month tiers at $25/year each after that. A tier raises the monthly quota only; API sends share the account's daily sending ceiling with mailbox sends, so this suits app mail, not bulk volume. Idempotency keys, webhook delivery notifications, message logs.
The pitch isn't that our API beats theirs on features. It's that you're not running two vendors, two DNS setups, and two invoices for something most small teams treat as one problem.
Pick OVHcloud if: a client, regulator, or procurement form requires named EU data residency in writing. Or you need Hosted Exchange for calendar and shared contacts, which we simply don't have. Or you're already deep in OVH infrastructure and one more line on an existing invoice beats a migration.
Pick Scaleway if: you want a European transactional sending API and you're solving mailboxes somewhere else entirely.
Pick JustEmails if: you run more than a couple of domains, nobody has ever asked you in writing where your mail is stored, and per-mailbox billing has started to annoy you. Agencies, freelancers with a client portfolio, founders with several product domains.
Run both if: you're an agency with a mixed book. Keep the two regulated clients on OVH where the paperwork demands it, move the other twenty to flat fee. Nobody's making you standardise. (Every comparison post in this category, ours included until this paragraph, writes like you're choosing a spouse. You're choosing a vendor. Have two.)
Elsewhere in Europe, Infomaniak is the Swiss-jurisdiction option, and mailbox.org and Hetzner are German ones — all worth a look if residency matters but OVH's product shape doesn't fit.
OVHcloud is a serious company with a serious EU footprint, and the March 2021 fire at their Strasbourg SBG2 site is public record they rebuilt from. Concentration risk is real with any single provider, theirs included. But nobody should read "French cloud company" as a euphemism for "not serious."
What I'd push back on is the assumption underneath most OVH-vs-alternatives searches: that residency is the deciding variable. For a minority of European buyers it genuinely is, and those buyers should stop reading comparison posts and go sign with OVH. For everyone else, the thing that compounds year over year is whether your bill grows every time you add a domain.
We're a small, young product. No calendar, no SSO, no region picker, annual-only billing that some people will hate. What we do have is one price regardless of domain count — which, if you're the one with twenty-two of them on a spreadsheet, might be the only row in the table you needed.
No. There's no region picker, no DPA clause naming a French or German datacentre, and no contractual guarantee about where your mail sits. If your procurement team requires an EU-resident mailbox — because you're selling to public sector, health, or regulated finance — OVHcloud is the honest pick and we'd rather you go there than churn in month two. If nobody has ever asked you that question in writing, it probably isn't the thing that should decide your email host.
For a lot of European businesses, yes. OVHcloud's mail products range from the basic mail that rides along with a domain or hosting plan up to Hosted Exchange, which gives you calendar and shared contacts — something JustEmails doesn't have at all. The friction shows up when you're running many domains: each one tends to bring its own panel, its own accounts, and its own line on the invoice. That's an admin problem before it's a pricing problem.
Mostly the second one. Scaleway's headline email product is Transactional Email — a sending API with domain verification, meant for password resets and receipts, not for reading your inbox. Mailboxes on Scaleway generally come attached to their web hosting and domain products rather than as a standalone flagship. So comparing Scaleway to JustEmails is really two comparisons: mailbox hosting on one side, transactional sending on the other. JustEmails bundles both, with 1,000 API emails a month included in the $49/year plan.
Because both providers change their pricing pages, and a wrong competitor price in an indexed article outlives whatever campaign it was written for. Both providers price mail per account or per mailbox, sometimes bundled into a hosting or domain plan, and both change those pages. Open ovhcloud.com and scaleway.com, note the figure and the date, then multiply by your real mailbox count. That number is the one that matters, and it's the number we're competing with at $49/year flat.
Unlimited custom domain email hosting for $49/year flat — unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, 10 GB storage, full IMAP/SMTP. Built for agencies, freelancers, and anyone managing email across more than one domain.