I’ve created a guide which includes my solution here:
My main err was assuming bind9 was of absoute importance. It wasn’t. Bind9 is necessary if you would like to host your own nameservers and run a control panel. Once I tried everything raw, the process went smoothly. I allowed godaddy to host the nameservers, created A records for each doman/sub pointing to cloud IP, then setup nginx reverse proxy on the front-end with discourse and apache vhosts on the back end. All is well with OVH when you do away with control panels, nameservers, and a need for bind9.
Give me a little slack, I didn’t even know what ssh was 90 days ago, LOL!