How Competitive Is UpCloud’s Pricing?

Today we wanted to help compare cloud providers in Europe by sharing our findings on price comparison in Europe between several players.

We’re very keen on providing the best “bang for your buck” in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) industry. This means that you get the best deal for your money spent. By no means is this only the price of the service you pay, but what is actually included in that price.

We constantly monitor the industry on the larger trends, but also on smaller improvements and changes.

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In comparison, we looked at the most well known European cloud providers that offer some form of scalable resources, per hour pricing and in general, are considered cloud hosting providers amongst clients. For the analysis, we compared UpCloud, Cloudsigma, ElasticHosts, ProfitBricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

We also put up three configurations, each with SSD and HDD storages to compare performance and price within the configuration. To anyone who has had a look at and tried to compare service provider prices can probably agree that comparison is still far from straightforward. We believe that the industry will commoditise in its offering and this will show in the pricing as well, meaning comparisons will be easier to do.

While price is perhaps the easiest attribute to compare providers with, we strongly recommend all users do their own stress and benchmark tests to understand variance in performance as well. Furthermore, we invite clients to also test support mechanisms of the company before signing up. If things go wrong at some point, you don’t want to be left out guessing if anyone will get back to you. In addition, your trust that the services purchased actually perform as expected – is a major deciding factor. We at UpCloud provide a 99.999% SLA, as does Cloudsigma and ElasticHosts. Please make sure you understand each of the SLAs so you are comfortable with what they cover.

Before we get to the data, a few notes on the providers. All the calculations for the analysis were made with the publicly available tools on the websites of the providers. Here are the links to the tools for each provider: UpCloud, Cloudsigma (instant server quote), ElasticHosts, ProfitBricks, AWS and Rackspace. If a provider had multiple locations, the European location was chosen. Below the table, you can see the locations of the servers for each provider.


Feel free to get back to us with comments or thoughts. We always want to hear what you find important when comparing providers.

Notes: Please note that this comparison has been made on July 27th, 2013. In addition, for the 8GB server we compared AWS’ 7.5GB server and in the case of Rackspace the memory amounts for the two larger configurations were 15GB and 30GB. In general, all of the resource requirements had to be met for each of the configurations. No outbound traffic charges are included in the prices.