Posted on 14.10.2014

The Seemingly Straightforward Issue of Cloud Server Pricing

We want to stay competitive with regards to the pricing of our services. It is one of our main values along redundancy, performance and privacy. And like all of our guiding principles, competitive cloud cost is built into our service. What we mean by this is that our customers get a low hourly price per resource in addition to full control over how they want to configure their resources. This is achieved through resource-based scaling rather than forcing customers to buy predefined instances with certain amounts of resources.

Test hosting on UpCloud!

In addition, our cloud pricing is linear. This means that it is easy to calculate different scenarios when scaling up as an hourly price per resource does not fluctuate based on the size of the server. This is especially helpful when you need a slight increase over one resource type. We’ll talk more about this further down.

Even with competitive cloud cost, we maintain a healthy margin in order to preserve UpCloud’s stability and ability to grow and innovate. Offering services at a competitive price isn’t a sacrifice we want to make in redundancy or performance. We want to offer a high quality, high-performance service also suitable for enterprise-level use at an affordable price point.

The straightforward price comparison

The great thing about pricing is that it is easy to quantify and compare – numbers do tell the truth. We have built the following pricing table around some typical configurations and selected some of the better-known cloud hosting companies for comparison. We tried to find the most affordable configuration of resources that completely matches the given requirement. For example, if the configuration were 8 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM and 500GB of SSD we only accept an instance for comparison that has at least those specifications.

Initial pricing comparison (prices per month)
UpCloudCloud-
Sigma
Elastic-
Hosts
Profit-
Bricks
AWSRackspaceDigital-
Ocean
Azure
S48.24 €n/a167.00 €58.72 €90.10 €91.83 €n/a103.33 €
63.36 €151.01 €178.00 €n/a94.31 €121.15 €123.81 €n/a
M99.00€n/a335.00€119.44€182.28€332.52€n/a206.81€
136.80€310.03€362.50€n/a192.88€405.94€247.62n/a
L196.20 €n/a664.98 €238.88 €364.52 €664.94 €n/a565.14 €
271.80 €620.06 €719.98 €n/a385.75 €811.87 €495.23n/a
Comparison done in September 2014. All resources (HDD/SSD, RAM, CPU) must match the requirement given. See configuration requirements below and appendix for more information.
Configuration
S2 CPU, 8GB, 100GB
2 CPU, 8GB, 100GB (SSD)
M4 CPU, 16GB, 250 GB
4 CPU, 16GB, 250 GB (SSD)
L8 CPU, 32GB, 500 GB
8 CPU, 32GB, 500 GB (SSD)

Details on how we came to these numbers can be found in the appendix. To be honest, someone else could arrive at slightly different numbers as many cloud hosting providers have very complex pricing schemes. This is actually something we have tried to avoid at UpCloud. In fact, our pricing is so transparent that you can go see our pricing page and immediately calculate what your actual costs would be (all hourly and monthly prices are linear).

Many cloud hosting companies have decided to offer predefined instances with a given amount of CPU, RAM and storage. This clearly harms some companies in our pricing comparison – however, we think that this is fair as predefined instances harm customers in real production use in a similar way. In this scheme, customers need to pay for whatever is available, not what they actually need.

The mismatch between predefined instances and customer demand is why UpCloud has decided to offer true scalability with a resource based model – the power to configure CPU, RAM and storage as freely as possible. The reasoning is quite simple: more control over resources and instance prices. Pay only for what you need and optimise your costs in all scenarios.

How cloud cost changes when you need to scale up

Another important aspect of pricing to think about is the cost of scaling: how does the cost of your infrastructure change when you need slightly more resources? With predefined instances, a small need for more computing power or memory might require a quite large upgrade both in resources and thus price. Again, another case for resource-based scaling: just bump up whatever resource you need more of and only pay for that increase, nothing more.

Table 2 shows the dramatic difference between resource-based and instance based scaling – how much you need to pay more when the previously explained S/M/L-packages are bumped up by 1 CPU core, 2 GB of RAM and 100GB of storage (again, both HDD and SSD).

Pricing comparison: delta (the increase in price per month) when scaling up from the original configurations with 1 CPU core, 2 GB of memory and 100 GB of storage
UpCloudCloud-
Sigma
Elastic-
Hosts
Profit-
Bricks
AWSRackspaceDigital-
Ocean
Azure
S+19.44 €n/a55.60 €n/a90.05 €236.04 €n/a102.59 €
34.56 €59.55 €66.60 €n/a94.31 €265.44 €123.81 €n/a
M+19.44 €n/a55.60 €n/a175.85 €318.50 €n/a331.55 €
34.56 €59.55 €66.60 €n/a180.11 €347.90 €123.81 €n/a
L+19.44 €n/a55.60 €n/a193.68 €627.71 €n/a2095.92 €
34.56 €59.55 €66.60 €n/a197.94 €657.11 €n/a
Comparison done in September 2014. All configurations (HDD/SSD, RAM, CPU) must match the required resources in the comparisons. The figures represent delta, or increase in price when scaling up. See appendix for more information.
Configuration
S+3 CPU, 10GB, 200GB
3 CPU, 10GB, 200GB (SSD)
M+5 CPU, 18GB, 350 GB
5 CPU, 18GB, 350 GB (SSD)
L+9 CPU, 34GB, 600 GB
9 CPU, 34GB, 600 GB (SSD)

The enormous price changes in some of the bigger instance based configurations are due to the requirement to upgrade to a significantly larger instance. We feel that this is a fair comparison as no other alternative is given – unless the customer would change their demand which sounds like a compromise they should not be having to do.

While scaling may not be an everyday scenario and requirement for many – it is definitely good to plan for it. A day might come when your service gets more visitors, requiring more resources to keep the application responsive. Another more commons scenario is where you end up filling your storage and need to increase it. Do you really want to end up paying for all those extra CPUs and GBs of memory as well?


Cloud cost appendix

For transparency, the following tables detail how we came up with the pricing comparisons. We provide links to relevant pricing tools and pages and information on what configurations we chose. Please note that all resources must at least match the given configurations.

Pricing Comparison Sources
CompanyPricingNotes
UpCloudUpCloud PricingZone: London
AWSAWS EC2 PricingEC2 for CPU+RAM, Zone: Ireland
AWS EBS PricingEBS for HDD/SSD, Zone: Ireland
Azure
Azure VM Pricing
VM for CPU+RAM, Zone: Europe North
Azure Storage PricingStorage for HDD, Zone: Europe North
Cloud-SigmaCloudsigma Pricing1CPU = 2GHZ, Zone: Zurich
Digital-OceanDigital Ocean Pricingall resources must at least match UpCloud
Elastic-HostsElasticHosts Pricing1CPU = 2GHZ
Profit-BricksProfitbricks PricingZone: Germany, pricing tool broken 18/09/2014 when conducting this comparison
RackspaceRackspace PricingMostly managed cloud
IaaS Pricing Comparison – Selected Configurations
CompanySMLS+M+L+
UpCloudexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact match
AWSm3.large + EBSm3.xlarge + EBSm3.2xlarge + EBSm3.xlarge + EBSm3.2xlarge + EBSc3.4xlarge + EBS
AzureA3 + storageA4 + storageA7 + storageA4 + storageA7 + storageA9 + storage
Cloud-Sigmaexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact match
Digital-Ocean$160/mo$320/mo$480/mo$320/mo$640/mo
Elastic-Hostsexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact matchexact match
Profit-Bricksexact matchexact matchexact matchn/an/an/a
RackspacePerformance 1-4Performance 2-15Performance 2-30Performance 2-15Performance 2-30Performance 2-60

 

Try UpCloud for free!

We offer a Free Trial to help you to speed up your WordPress or eCommerce! Fastest cloud servers with 2x the performance as the competition & 100% uptime SLA. Deploy in seconds, pay less. Get started now! Free trials available here

In case you would like to learn more about some specific detail of the infrastructure described here, don’t hesitate to contact UpCloud at our sales ([email protected]).

Janne Ruostemaa

Editor-in-Chief

Cloud Server vs. VPS vs. Dedicated Server comparison

In this post, we have collected information about different server options to help make the distinction among a broad range of available hosting services and service providers.

Comparisons

Cloud benchmark at Slush 2015

For the 2015 event, we wanted to show off some benchmarks and created a benchmarking game comparing UpCloud, AWS EC2, and DigitalOcean.

Community and events

Bigger Is Not Necessary Better: AWS vs. UpCloud

One of the most common questions our customers ask us is that how we can compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on price as they have economies of scale on their side.

Comparisons

Back to top