o2switch or OVHcloud for an association: WordPress and five mailboxes

The requirement: one site and five real mailboxes

Your association wants to publish news in WordPress and have five mailboxes on its domain. Each mailbox must be able to retain at least 5 GB of messages and have its own credentials. This differs from five addresses that all forward to the president’s personal email. You need to fund the site, but also organize access and preserve correspondence when the board changes.

This report compares two named plans: o2switch’s Offre Unique Grow and OVHcloud’s Perso hosting in the Eco range. Official pages were checked again on November 2, 2026, without reusing prices from an earlier comparison. The scenario is a self-hosted WordPress informational website, without a store or demanding custom development. Hosting accounts and domain settings must be accessible to an authorized person.

No service was ordered and no restoration or email test was performed for this article. We compare documented capabilities and an explicit spending scenario, not measured speed or supposedly experienced support quality. Limits specific to your installation still need to be checked before a transfer.

Qualifying the plans: why Grow and Perso are included

The Grow documentation advertises included email accounts with no limit on their number. The quota documentation allows a mailbox’s capacity to be set or left uncapped. Five accounts configured with at least 5 GB each therefore fit within the documented scope. This reasoning does not turn the plan into infinite computing capacity or a guarantee that every message will be received.

OVHcloud Perso’s current French page advertises ten 5 GB accounts, with WordPress, 100 GB of web storage and five 1 GB databases. The five-mailbox requirement is covered without buying five additional email licenses. Starter is excluded from this comparison: its two accounts are insufficient for the requested configuration, even if its displayed price is lower.

Unused Perso mailboxes do not oblige you to create more addresses. Simply allocate five accounts to the functions you actually need. Higher plans or separately sold collaboration services address other criteria; they are not added to the cart by default. If your association also needs a shared calendar or fine-grained delegation among several users, assess those features separately rather than assuming they are included.

Mailboxes, aliases and forwarding do not provide the same service

A mailbox has storage where messages are retained, along with access to read them. An alias is another name for a destination; forwarding sends messages elsewhere. Neither automatically creates an independent mailbox with 5 GB of history. In your inventory, therefore, count five storage accounts, not just five names usable after the at sign.

For example, the names president, treasurer, secretary, membership and contact can represent five separate mailboxes. These names are illustrative: choose them to suit your organization. Avoid creating many role-based addresses if nobody is responsible for checking them. Also define who handles a request received by several people to avoid conflicting replies and forgotten messages.

The site can use the contact address as a form recipient, but creating that mailbox does not prove that the form can send its notifications. WordPress’s sending route must be checked separately. Do not immediately install an email plugin to compensate for an incorrect recipient or a domain configuration that is still unknown.

A common domain for comparison without a misleading freebie

The financial scenario uses a .fr domain already registered with OVHcloud, kept there regardless of the site’s hosting provider. Its recorded public renewal price is €7.79 excluding tax per year. This assumption makes it possible to compare the same digital identity and domain expense. It is not a statement about the domain your association actually owns: replace this item if its contract differs.

We count three annual renewals of this domain within the period studied, totaling €23.37 excluding tax. Both hosting plans may offer a free domain at signup under certain conditions, but we do not deduct that gift from an existing domain retained without transfer. A new project could have a different first payment; its calculation would need to be redone without mixing registration and renewal. The three renewals correspond to three years of domain use in the model; for actual cash flow, use your domain’s dates, which may differ from the hosting dates.

Keeping the registrar does not mean keeping every service in the same place. The domain can remain at OVHcloud while the site and mailboxes run at o2switch. DNS settings determine the technical destinations. The board must know who can change them and where the record of existing values is kept, without having to track down a former volunteer for every intervention.

Plan prices and the first payment to budget for

Grow is advertised at €84 excluding tax for twelve months, both at signup and annual renewal. Perso displays a promotion of €35.88 excluding tax for twelve months, then renewal equivalent to €5.99 excluding tax per month, or €71.88 excluding tax for twelve months. The main scenario uses annual payments in both cases. A monthly equivalent is therefore not presented as twelve small charges. At o2switch, the minimum billing period is indeed one year; the shared-hosting plan cannot be paid month by month.

When opening the hosting account, the amount for the web service and five mailboxes is €84 excluding tax at o2switch or €35.88 excluding tax at OVHcloud. If domain renewal falls at the same time in our scenario, the combined starting budget becomes €91.79 excluding tax or €43.67 excluding tax respectively. The domain remains a separate service even when its due dates coincide.

VAT must not be ignored simply because the buyer is an association. We do not determine its tax status here. The tax-inclusive equivalents below use only an assumed VAT rate of 20%, to be checked in the summary and invoice. Rounding each component separately, the initial hosting-plus-domain budget would be €110.15 including tax for Grow or €52.41 including tax for Perso.

The renewal method must be checked separately from the price. OVHcloud states that automatic renewal is enabled by default at signup; removing the payment method does not count as cancellation. At o2switch, also check whether automatic renewal is enabled before deciding not to continue. Record the contract’s due dates and applicable procedures in the board’s records. Detailed refund conditions are not assessed here: the calculation includes no early refund or free exit during a prepaid period.

Three years of expenses without artificially extending the promotion

Over three years, Grow involves three payments of €84 excluding tax, totaling €252 excluding tax for hosting and the selected email service. Perso costs €35.88 excluding tax in the first year, followed by two payments of €71.88 excluding tax, for a total of €179.64 excluding tax. These projections use renewal prices published at the time of review, without claiming that providers will never change their prices.

Adding the common domain, the total over thirty-six months is €275.37 excluding tax with Grow and €203.01 excluding tax with Perso. The difference is €72.36 excluding tax. Under our VAT assumption, adding each component’s payments rounded to the nearest cent produces €330.45 including tax and €243.63 including tax. An invoice that groups or rounds taxes differently may vary by a few cents.

This budget includes one site, five included mailboxes and renewal of the described domain. It includes no maintenance service, paid migration, training or paid external backup. These items are not declared free: neither the need nor the quote has been established. A cheaper plan may still cost the association more if it requires help that no volunteer can provide.

One variant deserves separate consideration: OVHcloud’s official transition schedule to the new plans documents a twenty-four-month Perso renewal at €107.76 excluding tax. The following calculation assumes that this term and price are actually offered to your service at the first anniversary. Choosing this term after the first year brings the site and mailbox total to €143.64 excluding tax over three years, then €167.01 excluding tax with the same domain. The tax-inclusive simulation calculated per component reaches €200.42. The hosting payment at the first anniversary would then be €129.31 including tax for two years, instead of €86.26 including tax for one year. At the second anniversary, only the domain would need renewal in this variant. You must be able to pay that amount upfront; this projection is neither an already secured discount nor a guarantee of the price offered in a year. The annual scenario remains the table’s common reference.

• At the start: Grow €84 excluding tax and domain €7.79 excluding tax; Perso €35.88 excluding tax and domain €7.79 excluding tax.
• At the first anniversary: Grow €84 excluding tax and domain €7.79 excluding tax; Perso €71.88 excluding tax and domain €7.79 excluding tax.
• At the second anniversary: the same renewal amounts in this projection; no fourth year is added to the total.

Size WordPress separately from the five mailboxes

The 100 GB of web storage advertised for Perso must not be presented as a pool that can be freely distributed among mailboxes. Each email account retains its own 5 GB capacity. If the treasurer’s mailbox is almost full, the fact that WordPress media use little space does not increase its quota. Monitor the two uses separately.

At Grow, the mailbox quota policy is more flexible, but computing resources and disk access are not unlimited. Sizing a small site must account for photos, meeting documents and the database. Do not choose a higher plan solely because the site has many articles: first establish its actual space use and the constraints of its features.

Before a transfer, have the WordPress, theme and plugin versions recorded, along with the database size. Check available server versions and your components’ compatibility. A multisite network or a specialized business function falls outside the simple informational-site scenario. Avoid combining migration, theme replacement and a major cleanup: you would lose useful reference points for understanding a failure.

Creating accounts and checking capacities

At o2switch, cPanel’s Email Accounts tool lets you create accounts and set their storage. The documentation also states that a cPanel administrator can access webmail without knowing the mailbox password. Giving someone this central access therefore does not mean entrusting them only with site maintenance. Those responsible for the association’s correspondence must understand this consequence.

At OVHcloud, included accounts may require activation of the email service linked to hosting. The documentation then describes account creation within the MX Plan service and distinguishes webmail technologies. Check the associated domain before creating the five addresses: if that domain already uses email linked to another hosting plan, association with the new service is not necessarily straightforward.

The expected check is an inventory of five real accounts, with each quota and responsible person recorded. For Grow, choose a quota at least equal to the requirement while respecting the interface’s units; for Perso, check the advertised capacity in the delivered service. If the expected accounts are unavailable, stop the switchover rather than replace missing accounts with forwarding addresses.

Prepare for board succession and separate permissions

Distinguish four types of access: hosting billing, technical settings, WordPress administration and access to each mailbox. A secretary publishing news does not necessarily need to change mail servers; a treasurer paying the bill does not necessarily need to read every message. A named list of responsibilities is more useful than a shared password distributed to the whole board.

OVHcloud documents administrative, technical and billing contacts, as well as access policies. This allows you to examine role separation without assuming that every desired setting is automatically accessible in every service. At o2switch, the exact fine-grained delegation your team would need has not been assessed in this report. Do not claim equivalent permissions without confirming them.

When the board changes, plan a documented handover of responsible people and recovery methods. Do not remove the old access until the new person has confirmed they can administer the service. Then revoke permissions that are no longer needed. Keep a recovery address usable even if the association’s domain or a mailbox suffers an incident; otherwise the outage can also block account recovery.

Restoring the site: files and database must remain consistent

Grow advertises daily backups retained for thirty days, covering files, databases and email. JetBackup lets you inspect available archives and restore a selection. For WordPress, identify the site’s files and database rather than returning the entire account to an older state. The presence of an archive does not justify overwriting recent data without preserving it. Some file types are excluded from o2switch archives, and those archives do not replace your independent backups. Check what is actually available before treating a document as recoverable.

OVHcloud documents several web-storage recovery points, going back to the Sunday two weeks earlier. The provider states that these shared-hosting backups are non-contractual and supplement your own copies. Files and the database are recovered through separate procedures. Restoring files alone is not enough to recover articles stored in the database. According to its documentation, a full restoration from the OVHcloud customer area also requires at least half of the FTP quota to be free. If that condition is not met, request an appropriate method or retrieve the necessary items read-only; do not free space by deleting your only copies of the data.

Before any intervention, preserve the current state and list what has changed since the selected date. If possible, begin by retrieving a copy without replacing production. The expected result is a coherent site with its content, media and access, not merely a homepage that displays. If the required date is unavailable, use an independent copy or request qualified assistance, without inventing a backup point.

Restoring email is not restoring WordPress

At o2switch, JetBackup has a procedure for email accounts. Its documentation warns that restoration replaces the account state and that mailbox activity must be controlled during the operation. First preserve recent messages; then, for this JetBackup restoration, suspend receipt in the affected mailbox as o2switch requires and prevent users from making simultaneous changes. Afterward, restore access and receipt and check that they work. This interruption must be prepared with the people responsible for the mailbox. Restoring an entire mailbox is not a trivial way to retrieve a single attachment.

At OVHcloud, recovery possibilities depend on the technology of the delivered service. The documentation consulted distinguishes OWA and Zimbra in particular and does not give uniform information about deleted-item retention. We therefore assign no single guaranteed period to all included Perso mailboxes. A deleted-message recovery feature is not a complete archive capable of reconstructing any past state.

In both configurations, decide how to export and retain important correspondence using authorized access. Email synchronization can replicate a deletion: seeing messages on a computer does not prove an independent copy exists. Archive retention must also account for confidentiality. A message folder containing members’ contact details must not be copied into a public directory on the site.

Migration: organize two transfers, not one

Prepare two inventories: one for WordPress and one for the five mailboxes. For each mailbox, record its size, important folders and the people who use a phone or email client. A site copy does not automatically include archives, passwords and device configurations. Email received during the transition also needs checking.

o2switch advertises migration help at signup, on request and subject to feasibility. Its page requires the request within thirty calendar days of registration and at least thirty days remaining before the old hosting expires. This statement is not enough to treat the complete transfer of your five message histories as ordered and confirmed. For OVHcloud, no free human-assisted service matching this exact scope was established here. Assistance costs remain unknown until you define the service and obtain a quote.

Keep access to the old service and exports before changing destinations. Distinguish the site’s records from email records. Have the previous values and rollback plan documented; simply pointing back to the old server can lose messages or content that appeared only on the new one. Do not cancel the old contract before validating both transfers.

Support: what your team will still need to do

Both plans include provider support, which does not replace an administrator for your association. Perso includes Standard support: the official page describes tickets and phone support during business hours, plus round-the-clock incident chat, in English outside business hours. Grow advertises technical tickets and email 24 hours a day and 7 days a week; phone support is advertised Monday to Friday, from 9 to 18. Channel availability is not a guaranteed resolution time. We attribute no measured response time or comprehensive custom-theme support to either provider.

The right question is operational: who identifies a full mailbox, who requests recovery and who authorizes a domain change? If the answer is always the same person who is unavailable during holidays, choosing a host alone will not solve the problem. Arrange a second trained person and a handover document clear enough to allow action without improvisation.

A useful support request identifies the affected service, exact symptom, time and expected outcome. Do not attach a complete message archive, a password or members’ data through a public channel. For work beyond the supplied service, request a quote instead of assuming hosting includes every WordPress maintenance operation.

Which choice for your association?

In the defined scenario, Perso meets the requirement for five 5 GB mailboxes and has the lowest documented three-year budget. It is a coherent option if those capacities will remain sufficient and your team can track the site, email accounts and backups separately. Renewal must be budgeted from the first year, without extending the promotion in your forecasts.

Grow deserves consideration if flexible email quotas and a backup process covering several data types are useful to the association. Its extra cost should not be justified by unmeasured speed promises: examine the operations those responsible will actually be able to use. Central permissions and protection of message history still need organizing, even with included services.

To choose between them, have the budget, inventory of five accounts and recovery procedure validated by the people who will take over the service. If a mailbox already exceeds the requested minimum, a collaboration feature is essential or nobody can manage administration, revise the scope before ordering. This comparison defines a specific case; it is not a universal ranking of hosting providers.