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UpCloud

Helsinki-based European cloud with proprietary 100k-IOPS MaxIOPS storage, 99.999% Premium SLA, free 24/7 chat + phone support, and zero-cost egress

Pick when database IOPS, free 24/7 human support, and EU/GDPR data residency matter more than rock-bottom price. Avoid if you want Hetzner-class price-per-resource, ARM economics (UpCloud is x86-only), or if you're a brand-new sign-up from a high-risk region — fraud-screening on signup has been a recurring complaint.

84 AI-generated estimate This score is generated by AI based on multiple factors and is an estimation — it may not perfectly reflect reality. See the full breakdown below.
Trust score
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Starts at
€3 / $3.50 /mo
1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB MaxIOPS storage, 1 TB transfer (Starter plan)
Datacenters
15
global locations
Uptime SLA
99.999% on Premium plans (with 50x service credits for breaches >5 min); 99.99% on Starter plans
Management
Unmanaged

Overview

UpCloud is a Finnish cloud provider founded in 2011 that has built its reputation on three things: proprietary MaxIOPS clustered storage hitting ~100,000 IOPS at 4K (independently benchmarked at ~5-6x DigitalOcean Premium SSD and 2-3x Linode NVMe), a 99.999% uptime SLA on the new Premium tier with 50x service credits for breaches over 5 minutes, and free 24/7 live chat plus phone support with sub-90-second human response — none of which is gated behind a paid support add-on. As of April 16, 2026, UpCloud streamlined its lineup to two tiers: Starter (replaces Developer plans, ~25% cheaper, 99.99% SLA, from ~€3 / $3.50 per month) for development and self-hosting, and Premium (replaces General Purpose, runs on 5th-Gen AMD EPYC 9575F Turin + MaxIOPS, 99.999% SLA) for production. The trade-offs are well-known: pricing sits above Hetzner and Vultr's entry tiers for comparable specs, there is no ARM/Ampere/Graviton equivalent, no native CDN product, fraud screening occasionally suspends new signups without warning, and the network footprint is European-heavy with thinner US/APAC coverage than DigitalOcean or Vultr.

Trust score breakdown

Ease of Use 78/100

The UpCloud Control Panel is intuitive enough that AWS/DO migrants frequently call it polished, with one-click provisioning, real-time billing, and integrated Terraform export. upctl CLI, Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers, and a stable REST API cover IaC. Trade-offs: the marketplace of one-click apps is smaller than DigitalOcean's, some reviews call the web console 'awful' compared to DO, and the breadth of products (Cloud Servers, Private Cloud, Managed Kubernetes, Object Storage, Load Balancers, Managed DB) gives non-technical users a steeper learning curve. Documentation is solid but not at AWS/Azure depth.

Performance 90/100

MaxIOPS proprietary clustered storage independently benchmarked at ~98,000 IOPS at 4K random reads — Cloud Spectator ranked UpCloud the #1 performance leader in Europe. Premium plans run on 5th-Gen AMD EPYC 9575F Turin (3.3 GHz base, 30-40% faster than prior EPYC generations). DigitalOcean and Linode benchmarks show UpCloud delivering 50% faster CPU and roughly 2x disk transfer rates on equivalent plans. Network speed on Starter caps at 500 Mbps which can be a bottleneck for heavy-egress workloads on the entry tier; Premium and Cloud Native plans get higher caps.

Reliability 88/100

Premium plans carry a 99.999% uptime SLA — five nines, with 50x service credits for any unscheduled downtime over 5 minutes — which is best-in-class among general-purpose VPS providers (Vultr 100% network, DO 99.99% per-Droplet). N+1 redundancy is enforced on every infrastructure component. The recent SG-SIN1 compute-node incident (April 21, 2026) and a planned April 27 storage-network maintenance window show the platform is not immune to regional issues, but the SLA framework and credit policy genuinely back the claim. Long-tenured users frequently cite multi-year zero-downtime experiences.

Support Quality 92/100

24/7 live chat plus phone support in four timezones, free for every customer, with sub-40-second average human response and a documented under-90-second SLA. This is the single biggest UpCloud differentiator vs DigitalOcean ($99/mo for 24/7 chat), Vultr (ticket-only, no chat at any tier), and Linode/Akamai (phone exists but quality varies). Trustpilot reviews repeatedly highlight support speed as the platform's standout dimension. The few negative threads concern account-suspension reviews where the abuse team is slower than the front-line chat staff.

Transparency 85/100

Pricing is flat-rate, identical at signup and renewal, with public hourly + monthly tables, public 99.999% SLA, public zero-cost egress policy, and a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment up to €500 — a cleaner exit window than DO, Vultr, or Linode offer. Knocks: Fair Transfer Policy throttles at an undefined threshold (the exact GB/TB limit per plan isn't published prominently), the abuse-team response time on suspended accounts is opaque, and the legacy plan retirement on April 16, 2026 caused some grandfathering confusion in community threads.

Value for Money 70/100

On a pure $/vCPU/GB basis, Hetzner and Vultr's entry tiers undercut UpCloud — a $5 Starter buys 1 vCPU / 1 GB / 25 GB, while Hetzner CX22 buys 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB at €4.55/mo. Where UpCloud earns the premium: MaxIOPS storage performance (~100k IOPS read, 5-6x DO Premium SSD), free 24/7 chat+phone, zero-cost egress under fair use, and 99.999% Premium SLA. For database-heavy and IOPS-bound workloads the math favors UpCloud; for raw bulk compute, Hetzner still wins.

Plans

Plan vCPU RAM Storage Transfer Monthly
Starter 1 vCPU / 1 GB 1 1.00 GB 25 GB MaxIOPS 1.00 TB $5.00
Starter 1 vCPU / 2 GB 1 2.00 GB 50 GB MaxIOPS 2.00 TB $10.00
Starter 2 vCPU / 4 GB 2 4.00 GB 80 GB MaxIOPS 4.00 TB $20.00
Premium 4 vCPU / 8 GB 4 8.00 GB 160 GB MaxIOPS 5.00 TB $40.00
Premium 6 vCPU / 16 GB 6 16.00 GB 320 GB MaxIOPS 6.00 TB $80.00
Premium 8 vCPU / 32 GB 8 32.00 GB 640 GB MaxIOPS 7.00 TB $160.00
Premium 12 vCPU / 48 GB 12 48.00 GB 960 GB MaxIOPS 9.00 TB $240.00
Premium 16 vCPU / 64 GB 16 64.00 GB 1280 GB MaxIOPS 10.00 TB $320.00
Premium 20 vCPU / 96 GB 20 96.00 GB 1920 GB MaxIOPS 12.00 TB $480.00
Premium 20 vCPU / 128 GB 20 128.00 GB 2048 GB MaxIOPS 24.00 TB $640.00
GPU Server 8 vCPU / 64 GB / NVIDIA L40S 8 64.00 GB — — $851.00

Starter plans from €3 / $3.50/mo, Premium plans on AMD EPYC Turin + MaxIOPS with 99.999% SLA, Cloud Native plans unbundle storage/IP for Kubernetes, GPU Servers from $851/mo (NVIDIA L40S). Hourly billing capped at 28 days/mo, zero-cost egress under Fair Transfer Policy.

Performance & infrastructure

Storage
MaxIOPS (proprietary all-flash, ~100k IOPS at 4K); NVMe + HDD/Archive Block Storage tiers
Network
Up to 500 Mbps on Starter plans; higher (typically 1-2 Gbps) on Premium and Cloud Native plans
DDoS protection
Included
IPv6
Included
Uptime SLA
99.999% on Premium plans (with 50x service credits for breaches >5 min); 99.99% on Starter plans
Control panel
UpCloud Control Panel (own); upctl CLI; Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers; full REST API
Root access
Yes
Management
Unmanaged

Capabilities at a glance

✓
GPU instances
UpCloud GPU Servers offer NVIDIA L40S from ~$851/mo (~$1.267/hr) on dedicated single-tenant hosts. Private Cloud GPUs add NVIDIA L4, L40S, and H200 NVL options for reserved capacity. No fractional GPU plans — each GPU is dedicated. No H100/B200 in the public Cloud Server SKU as of April 2026.
✗
Free tier
No always-free tier. The closest equivalent is the €25 / $25 signup credit combined with a 3-7 day free trial — one-time, expires if unused. Not comparable to Oracle Always Free or AWS Lightsail recurring free allowances.
✓
Windows OS
Windows Server Standard and Datacenter editions available with per-instance license surcharge on top of the Linux plan price. License cost scales with vCPU count via Microsoft SPLA.
✗
macOS
✗
ARM CPU
No ARM / Ampere / Graviton instances. UpCloud Cloud Servers run exclusively on x86_64 (5th-Gen AMD EPYC 9575F Turin on Premium; AMD EPYC on Starter). Pick Hetzner CAX, AWS Graviton, or Oracle Ampere if you need ARM economics.
✓
Hourly billing
Pay-as-you-go available
✗
Crypto payment
Card / PayPal only
✓
No setup fees
No setup fees, no minimum commitment. Hourly billing rounded up to the next full hour and capped at the monthly rate at 28 days × 24 hours = 672 hours/month, regardless of actual days in the month.
⇆
Bandwidth: Metered with throttling (no overage bill)
Zero-cost egress under the Fair Transfer Policy as of May 2024. Per-plan transfer allowance is 1-24 TB monthly. Exceeding the fair-use threshold may trigger a 100 Mbps throttle for the rest of the month — but no overage billing. Streaming/CDN/VPN providers can opt in to the paid €0.01/GB unlimited model. Inbound is always free.

SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)

UNBLOCK ON REQUEST

Outbound SMTP on port 25 is blocked by default on all new accounts. UpCloud's documentation explicitly outlines the unblock path: contact support, supply proof of identity / payment-method verification, and explain the use case. Unblock is generally granted for legitimate self-hosted mail / transactional use without the multi-month wait some larger clouds impose, but timing is not formally SLA'd. Hestia and Mail-in-a-Box community threads report functional outcomes once the request is processed. Ports 465 (SMTPS) and 587 (submission) are open by default for relay-based sending.

Source

Datacenter locations

SG Singapore, Singapore
DK Copenhagen, Denmark
FI Helsinki (HEL1), Finland
FI Helsinki (HEL2), Finland
DE Frankfurt, Germany
NL Amsterdam, Netherlands
NO Stavanger, Norway
PL Warsaw, Poland
ES Madrid, Spain
SE Stockholm, Sweden
GB London, United Kingdom
US Chicago, United States
US New York, United States
US San Jose, United States
AU Sydney, Australia

Support

24/7 live chat 24/7 email phone (4 timezones)

Response SLA: Average human response under 40 seconds on chat; guaranteed under 90 seconds on chat or email

All support channels are free for every customer with no paid support tier — a clear differentiator vs DigitalOcean (24/7 chat starts at $99/mo Standard) and Vultr (ticket-only, no chat at any tier). Phone lines available in four timezones. Trustpilot reviews consistently single out support speed as one of UpCloud's strongest dimensions.

OS & apps

Supported OS

Ubuntu Debian AlmaLinux Rocky Linux CentOS Stream Windows Server FreeBSD OpenBSD

One-click apps

WordPress Docker LAMP Plesk cPanel GitLab OpenLiteSpeed

What to watch out for in pricing

  • Starter and Premium plans launched April 16, 2026 — older plans grandfathered. UpCloud retired Developer, General Purpose, High CPU, and High Memory plans for new deployments on April 16, 2026, replacing them with two simpler tiers: Starter (development / self-hosting / 99.99% SLA, ~25% cheaper than Developer) and Premium (production / AMD EPYC Turin / MaxIOPS / 99.999% SLA). Existing instances on legacy plans keep their pricing and SLA. The pricing-USD page mirrors EUR rates 1:1 (€5 ≈ $5).
  • Zero-cost egress with Fair Transfer Policy — soft cap, not hard cap. All UpCloud public-cloud services include zero-cost outbound transfer as of May 7, 2024. There are no overage fees if you exceed the per-plan included transfer (1-24 TB), but exceeding the Fair Transfer Policy threshold can trigger a notification and a 100 Mbps bandwidth throttle for the rest of the month. Streaming, CDN, and VPN providers should opt in to the paid €0.01/GB unlimited model. Inbound is always free.
  • 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, capped at €/$500. UpCloud refunds your first payment in full within 30 days, up to a €500 / $500 maximum, if you contact support. Minimum payment to activate the guarantee is €/$10. Subsequent top-ups are non-refundable. Combined with the €25 / $25 signup credit and 3-7 day free trial, this gives the cleanest exit window of any major cloud — DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode all explicitly disclaim refunds.
  • Backups add ~20-60% on top of plan cost or €0.056/GB/month. Simple Backups (the legacy mode) charge a flat +20%, +40%, or +60% surcharge on the Cloud Server plan price depending on retention. Flexible Backups and on-demand backups for Starter / Premium / Cloud Native plans, plus any extra Block Storage, bill at €0.056/GB/month. Either way, build the surcharge into your monthly TCO when running the math against Hetzner or Vultr.
  • Windows Server license is a separate per-instance surcharge. Linux is included in the base plan price; Windows Server (Standard or Datacenter edition) is licensed per-instance and added on top of the Linux plan price. No flat published surcharge — license cost scales with vCPU count via Microsoft's SPLA model. Plan for the surcharge if Windows is required.

Known pitfalls

  • New-account fraud screening can suspend signups without warning

    Trustpilot and forum threads report a recurring pattern where new accounts — particularly free-trial signups, accounts funded with cards from regions UpCloud considers high-risk, and signups that don't match name-on-card to ID — are suspended within 10-15 minutes of provisioning a second server, sometimes with the abuse team taking 3+ days to respond. If you're evaluating UpCloud, fund with a card matching your verified name, expect identity verification, and don't run a production workload on a fresh trial account before completing manual review.

    Source

  • Premium pricing — Hetzner gives 2-3x the specs for the same money

    On a pure resources-per-dollar basis, UpCloud sits above Hetzner Cloud and Vultr's entry tiers. A €5 Starter buys 1 vCPU / 1 GB / 25 GB, while Hetzner CX22 buys 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB at €4.55/mo. The premium is justified for MaxIOPS-bound workloads (databases, container registries, CI runners) and for the free 24/7 chat+phone support — but if you're hosting a static site or a low-IO app, the spec/dollar gap is hard to ignore. Run the math on what you actually need before defaulting to UpCloud.

    Source

  • SMTP port 25 blocked by default — unblock requires manual review

    Outbound SMTP port 25 is blocked on all new accounts. Unblocking requires opening a support ticket with proof of identity / payment method and a use-case explanation. The process is documented and generally faster than Vultr's discretionary 60-day-good-standing policy, but it is not instant and not formally SLA'd. Ports 465 (SMTPS) and 587 (submission) are open by default for relay-based sending. If self-hosted mail is your primary use case, validate the unblock works on a test server before committing — or pick Hetzner / OVH for documented same-day paths.

    Source

  • No native CDN product — pair with Cloudflare or Bunny for edge caching

    Unlike DigitalOcean Spaces CDN or Vultr's Object Storage CDN bundle, UpCloud has no edge CDN product for caching Cloud Server content. Object Storage egress is free, which softens the blow, but if you need POP-edge caching for static assets you must front your servers with Cloudflare, Bunny CDN, or Fastly. The good news: zero-cost egress means pairing with an external CDN doesn't compound bandwidth costs the way it would on AWS.

    Source

  • No ARM / Ampere / Graviton instances — x86 only

    UpCloud Cloud Servers run exclusively on AMD EPYC (Turin on Premium). No Ampere Altra, no AWS Graviton equivalent, no ARM SKU at any price tier as of April 2026. This rules UpCloud out for teams optimizing cost-per-performance on ARM-native workloads (where Hetzner CAX, AWS Graviton, and Oracle Ampere all win 30-40% on price). If your stack is x86-tuned this doesn't matter; if you've already moved to ARM containers, look elsewhere.

    Source

  • Fair Transfer Policy can throttle to 100 Mbps without published per-plan limits

    Egress is zero-cost, but the Fair Transfer Policy reserves the right to notify and throttle Cloud Servers to 100 Mbps for the remainder of the month if usage 'exceeds normal business' — without a single published threshold per plan tier. For typical web hosting and APIs this never triggers; for high-egress use cases (video streaming, file distribution, VPN gateways) you should pre-emptively opt in to the paid €0.01/GB unlimited model rather than risk a mid-month throttle. The lack of a published per-plan TB threshold is the single biggest transparency gap in an otherwise honest pricing page.

    Source

Community pulse

Sentiment in early 2026 splits along expected lines. The technical developer crowd — Hacker News, r/sysadmin, r/selfhosted, LowEndTalk, the HestiaCP and Mail-in-a-Box forums — rates UpCloud strongly on three axes: MaxIOPS performance (5-19x AWS provisioned IOPS in independent benchmarks), free 24/7 live chat with sub-90-second response, and EU/GDPR data residency. The narrow technical complaints cluster on Starter plan network caps (500 Mbps), the lack of an ARM SKU, and the friction of getting port 25 unblocked. Trustpilot at ~3.8-4.0 with 140-150 reviews is more bimodal: long-tenured users post glowing zero-downtime testimonials and praise the support team, while a steady stream of negative reviews concern account suspensions on signup that take 3+ days to review. The pattern tracks who's reviewing — power users who fund the account, get verified, and use the platform for years see a different UpCloud than first-time trial signups from non-Western payment regions.

Last full audit: April 27, 2026

Founded 2011 — 15 years in business · Based in Helsinki, Finland