UpCloud is a leading European cloud service provider with a global cloud platform spanning four continents. We offer a reliable, cloud-native product portfolio available from 15 different data centers.
Formed in 2011, UpCloud is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland with an international team working across the globe. Our 99.999% SLA ensures uninterrupted services, empowering businesses worldwide to thrive.
Joel, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
We set out to revolutionize the global cloud services landscape, starting with Europe as our foundation. We are driven by a relentless pursuit of performance, data security and sovereignty.
Our team goes above and beyond to ensure exceptional performance, reliability, and scalability by challenging the status quo and redefining the possibilities in cloud services to break barriers and unleash the potential of a Europe-made cloud platform.
Together, we will change how businesses harness the power of the cloud on a global scale. Embrace the future with confidence and choose UpCloud as your trusted partner.
Bringing together people across the world
We are a cloud provider that cares deeply about our customers. We offer 24/7 in-house user support, custom onboarding, and a dedicated account manager for all our business customers.
We have data centers in 12 countries, with 15 data centers in total. The majority of our data centers are running on renewable energy and ready to help you grow in a sustainable and future-proof way.
We have an easy-to-use control panel, and hundreds of tutorials and other resources to help you get started on UpCloud. Find out more about our services in FAQ and Documentation sections.
We build enterprise-grade products to scale our SMB business customers forward. Together with our in-house developed software and proprietary MaxIOPS storage technology, you will get industry-leading performance at all times.
We take massive pride in having the most talented and most motivated team of engineers and artists, working as camaraderie to solve our customers current and future challenges.
People and products are nothing without a solid service culture. Our in-house local customer support is available to help our users 24/7.
Culture
Trust is the sum of honesty and respect.
We apply these in all our interactions with each other and with our customers. Trust comes with great responsibility: we take accountability and ownership of our decisions and actions. We build relationships by sharing knowledge and welcoming everyone’s ideas.
Diverse minds make us fly.
Respect and inclusion are the foundation for our creative spirit. We are passionate about the success of our customers and UpCloud. We ask and offer help without hesitation. We win and keep the bar high together.
When we’re true to this, our work stands out and people notice.
To build and sell superior products and develop our ways of working we must proactively innovate and improve. We reject the ordinary and prioritize what matters and impacts the most and tell the world about it.
To fuel creativity and to succeed on our growth journey we need to enjoy our work and life. We fail, learn, grow and celebrate together.
Leadership
Joel is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at UpCloud. With 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, he has been at the forefront of building technology companies. Joel has led UpCloud since its spin-off in 2011 from his earlier venture, Sigmatic — one of Finland’s largest shared web hosting providers with over 20,000 customers — which he later sold to a multinational company.
Driven by the vision of creating better cloud infrastructure for international markets at a time when hyperscalers were still in their infancy, Joel has shaped UpCloud into a company that combines deep technical expertise with global ambition. Beyond his decades-long technical background, he is also a creative force in business development, brand building, and visual identity — ensuring UpCloud stands out not only through its technology but also through its customer experience.
Annukka is the Chief Financial Officer at UpCloud, responsible for the organization’s financing, planning, risk management and statutory reporting. She holds a MSc degree in Economics and an APA certification. Annukka has a strong audit and M&A transactions background gained from PwC Finland and experience on leading financial operations of fast-paced global SaaS scaleup Smartly.io.
Helena is the Chief People and Culture Officer at UpCloud, responsible for UpCloud’s global people operations, thriving culture and values, and fostering professional development. With more than 10 years leadership experience in global scaleups and corporate enterprises, including Qt Group, Deloitte and Wärtsilä, Helena brings adept global experience and views to our leadership team. She holds a Master’s Degree in Economics.
Teemu is UpCloud’s Chief Product Officer, responsible for UpCloud’s product market fit and leads our impressive product roadmap and service delivery. Bringing more than a decade of leadership experience in product development and overseeing ICT services and operations, Teemu makes sure UpCloud will now and in the future focus on customer needs while continuing with his team in bringing outstanding products to market.
Alex is the Chief Revenue Officer at UpCloud, responsible for UpCloud’s global Revenue and Partnerships. With 10 years leadership experience in startups and scaleups both backed by Venture Capital and Private Equity, Alex brings dynamic global growth experience and views to our leadership team. He holds a Master’s Degree in History.
Our community hubs and remote offices across the globe
We are headquartered in the heart of Helsinki, a carbon-negative hub with a vibrant tech ecosystem and a proud heritage of security and resilience. At the forefront of Nordic innovation, Helsinki is the backdrop to our European Sovereign Cloud mission.
Our Hamburg office sits in the center of one of Germany’s leading locations for innovation and connectivity. With its strong tech scene and international spirit, Hamburg is a key strategic location, extending UpCloud’s presence across mainland Europe
With a remote friendly work culture, we have individual home offices across the globe bringing together expertise and cultural knowledge from Seattle to Singapore and everywhere in between.
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In 2025, UpCloud introduced major enhancements across its offering, including automatic upgrades for Managed Kubernetes, improved SDN networking features, and new managed database options. The new UpCloud Essentials concept bundled powerful value-added services into every Cloud Server at no extra cost. Additionally, Pulumi provider support was launched to streamline infrastructure-as-code workflows. In a market first, UpCloud led the market with next-gen AMD EPYC Turin processors, boosting performance by 30-40% over prior generations.
Start of the 2024 we announced a game-changing update to our pricing model: zero-cost egress – Never pay for Internet traffic.
Announced four new product offerings, Developer Plans, Cloud Native Plans, Standard Tier Storage and VPN Gateway. Returning to our roots and building from developer to developer, these new products are a direct response to our community’s valuable feedback.
Enjoy seamless scalability and global reach without concerns about hidden and variable costs.
The year started with a change from USD to EUR as the base currency to bring our customers more benefits and reduce uncertainty. Together with the currency change, we launched a suite of complimentary features to all cloud server plans including Firewall service, Private networking, and 24h Backup service.
Continuing our efforts to increase network customizability, we launched NAT Gateway. It enables our users to easily connect networks on-site and in the cloud or even between cloud providers.
Definitely one of the highlights of the year was the launch of our long-awaited Managed Kubernetes which allows users to deploy containerized applications without having to install and maintain the needed cloud infrastructure.
2022 was our 10-year anniversary! To celebrate this, we brought everyone together during our yearly company retreat, this time in Rome, Italy.
The first product release of the year was Managed Load Balancer. It empowers users to effortlessly build resilience and increase application throughput with a simple yet flexible configuration.
We unveiled a new unique quality-of-life feature with Hot Resizing. It allows users to quickly react to the increasing demands of their services by scaling up their Cloud Servers without restarting.
Launched High CPU and High Memory Cloud Server plans
We also launched Managed Databases for Redis adding to the lineup of our managed database services. Redis is an in-memory database with a clear focus on performance, which has always been a priority for us at UpCloud.
At the end of the year, we announced that we’d joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a community of true Kubernetes experts. Our Managed Kubernetes service was in development and we were dedicated to building it in alignment with the cloud-native community.
We kept busy developing new features, forming exciting partnerships, and welcoming new talent to our continuously growing team at UpCloud throughout the year.
At the beginning of the year, we unveiled the UpCloud Command-Line Interface. The CLI provides a time-saver to power users for managing UpCloud services more efficiently.
One of the biggest releases in 2021 was the introduction of UpCloud Managed Databases. It continued our focus on offering user-friendly turn-key solutions as managed services.
On the infrastructure side, we continued our regional expansion in Oceania with the announcement of the opening of a brand new data center AU-SYD1 in Sydney, Australia.
We also released a major update for our Terraform module and kept improving it over the course of the year. The module was verified by HashiCorp and added to the Terraform Registry making it easier than ever to get started with Terraform on UpCloud.
Despite the global challenges, we at UpCloud continued operations as normal to provide our customers with many new features and services throughout the year.
In 2020, we were proud to open three new data centers, US-NYC1 in New York, the US as well as ES-MAD1 in Madrid, Spain and PL-WAW1 in Warsaw, Poland.
We launched our brand new storage solution, UpCloud Object Storage! It had been one of our most frequently requested features and highlights our dedication to listening to our customers.
Our networking also saw substantial updates. We lowered our outbound transfer pricing considerably to just $0.01 per GB. Furthermore, we unveiled a new feature to bundle transfer quotas afforded by our public cloud services into a single account-wide Network Transfer Pool.
We also launched our backups to new heights by making them easier than ever before. The introduction of Simple Backup enabled our customers to simply choose their preferred backup schedule with minimal maintenance.
Migrating servers from on-premise or another cloud provider should be as efficient as possible. To make the migration easier, we launched UpCloud Storage Import to allow customers to bring in data securely over the internet.
To further empower our customers using automation, we launched the UpCloud Metadata service which can be of great help when bootstrapping new services.
Last but not least, we launched a new product for our SDN Private Networks in the form of a gateway SDN Router. It can be used to join any number of SDN Private Networks within a data center to quickly and easily join parts of the customers’ services.
The year 2019 was certainly eventful with product launches, new hires, events and meetups even with fewer headliner topics than in previous years.
Undoubtedly the main event of the year was the launch of our long-awaited network upgrade to SDN. After extensive development and testing, we finally launched Software-defined networking in October to much fanfare!
Customers looking for absolute privacy and security were treated with the launch of UpCloud Private Cloud. It was one of our larger projects to date and we were excited to launch the new offering in late July.
Our networking also saw major upgrades which culminated in the doubling of all Public network interface speeds to 1Gbps.
We kept ourselves busy with news, announcements, and community events around the globe throughout the year.
We started the year strong with the announcement of FI-HEL2, our second data center in Helsinki, Finland. It greatly increased our home turf capacity and provided new exciting opportunities for service redundancies.
In August we brought a ton of brand new capacity to our growing western front. Our newest data center, US-SJO1, launched in San José, US to much applause.
On top of our growing infrastructure, team UpCloud grew a lot internally with new great hires to each of our offices. To facilitate our growth, we opened our 4th office in Seattle, US.
Throughout the year, we took part in and sponsored more community events and meetups than ever before. From London to Singapore and many in between.
Further along the year, we were excited to see our efforts recognized by Cloud Spectator ranking UpCloud as the best cloud provider in the EU.
The year also saw our largest pricing refresh in UpCloud’s history. We announced entirely new monthly plans starting at just $5 per month.
Introduced new preconfigured plans by launching four new larger monthly plans to provide the same cost-effective options for our more demanding users.
Announced the user referral rewards program to celebrate our success which has been much thanks to our dedicated users and we wanted to give something back.
Launched 24/7 support proud to announce that UpCloud Support is officially always available and ready to help whenever you need us via email and phone!
Launched the NL-AMS1 data center in Amsterdam, Netherlands at a great location right by the AMS-IX internet exchange which ensured great network connectivity and minimal latency.
We also brought our developer-driven cloud computing to an entirely new region with the launch of the SG-SIN1 data center in Singapore. The expansion to Asia opened our services to new audiences with high demand for exceptional cloud services.
We made a move to using multiple currencies, which brought us closer to the industry standard and offered increased transparency to our prices by having all deposits reflect the daily market rate of the respective currency in USD.
Deploying a new Cloud Server often consist of the same set of initial tasks. To make those tasks easier than ever, we launched a new feature called Initialization scripts. It allows our customers to automate a lot of their deployment steps with reusable scripts.
To make access management to our customers’ cloud servers a lot more convenient, we introduced a simple way to include all SSH keys to the control panel and have them added to the Cloud Server at deployment.
To accommodate our quickly growing user base and better meet the challenges of our users, we made significant infrastructural upgrades behind the scenes. This allowed us to double the maximum number of CPU cores, amount of memory and disk size configurable for Cloud Servers.
We were also happy to announce the option to enable two-factor authentication on customer accounts. Two-factor authentication added an additional layer of security through randomly generated passwords that are only valid for a limited time.
Introduced group accounts to allow our customers to add additional users to their accounts in a secure manner with granular permissions while eliminating the need for password sharing.
Launched server tagging which allowed users to group their servers with tags making managing Cloud Servers easier than ever before.
We were proud to announce the opening of a new data center in Frankfurt, Germany. DE-FRA1 was our fourth data center and the first in central Europe.
Launched preconfigured Cloud Servers that match or exceed the resources provided by the competition, and most importantly, at the prices customers have learned to value. The four pre-configured server instances offered even better value for the money than before.
We were happy to announce the new lower prices in Helsinki for CPU and memory resources. CPU pricing was reduced by 15% and memory by almost 33%.
Due to our continued focus on international growth and push for better comparability, we made the decision to move from Euro based pricing to US dollars.
Improvements in networking enabled us to increase the public network port speeds to 500 Mbps.
Our developer and infrastructure teams worked intensely allowing us to announce full support for IPv6 on UpCloud.
We are very happy to be able to launch our new Cloud Concierge service providing premium customer support.
In Fall 2014, we opened a new data center US-CHI1 in Chicago, US. The brand new location was our first data center across the pond and our third overall.
Performance has always been one of our core values and the highlight of it came with the launch of our signature in-house developed MaxIOPS block storage. It outright doubled cloud server performance when put head to head with our competition.
We increased the maximum memory and CPU limits configurable on UpCloud. Our customers were able to equip their Cloud Servers with up to 10 CPU cores and 64GB of memory.
We reduced our infrastructure costs in our London data center across the board. The price reduction was a big part of our commitment to offering our customers the best technology for the best price.
We were happy to announce a price reduction of outgoing traffic by 50%. This meant that outgoing traffic from both London and Helsinki was charged at 0,05€ per gigabyte.
We launched our SSD based storage devices that crunch out highly impressive IOPS. SSDs offered a great choice, for example, for database servers that require high IO performance.
In 2012 we launched our services for the public. Following the successful launch, we were excited to see our service filling a vacuum in the Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service supply and how enthusiastically it has been received.
We launched our backup service based on snapshots, which can be taken either manually or scheduled to be done automatically at desired times on a daily or weekly basis. The system stored the backup copies for up to three years, if necessary, and special attention was paid to their easy recovery.
Advances in our infrastructure redundancies and performance enabled us to guarantee an even-quality service in different error and load situations.
Contact us now, we are happy to help get you started on UpCloud!