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.
Plans
Verified against UpCloud's pricing pages.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter 1 vCPU / 1 GB | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB MaxIOPS | 1 TB | $5.00 | $0.0074 |
| Starter 1 vCPU / 2 GB | 1 | 2 GB | 50 GB MaxIOPS | 2 TB | $10.00 | $0.0149 |
| Starter 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB MaxIOPS | 4 TB | $20.00 | $0.0298 |
| Premium 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 4 | 8 GB | 160 GB MaxIOPS | 5 TB | $40.00 | $0.0595 |
| Premium 6 vCPU / 16 GB | 6 | 16 GB | 320 GB MaxIOPS | 6 TB | $80.00 | $0.1190 |
| Premium 8 vCPU / 32 GB | 8 | 32 GB | 640 GB MaxIOPS | 7 TB | $160.00 | $0.2380 |
| Premium 12 vCPU / 48 GB | 12 | 48 GB | 960 GB MaxIOPS | 9 TB | $240.00 | $0.3570 |
| Premium 16 vCPU / 64 GB | 16 | 64 GB | 1280 GB MaxIOPS | 10 TB | $320.00 | $0.4760 |
| Premium 20 vCPU / 96 GB | 20 | 96 GB | 1920 GB MaxIOPS | 12 TB | $480.00 | $0.7140 |
| Premium 20 vCPU / 128 GB | 20 | 128 GB | 2048 GB MaxIOPS | 24 TB | $640.00 | $0.9520 |
| GPU Server 8 vCPU / 64 GB / NVIDIA L40S | 8 | 64 GB | — | — | $851.00 | $1.2670 |
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
Deal-breaker for self-hosted mail & transactional email.
On request Blocked, unblocked on request Read more
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.
Verified Apr 27, 2026 · source
Capabilities & infrastructure
Known pitfalls
What the marketing pages don't tell you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trust score breakdown
Scored across six dimensions — an editorial estimate, not a guarantee.
Why 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.
Why 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.
Why 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.
Why 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.
Why 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.
Why 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.
Operating systems & apps
Control panel: UpCloud Control Panel (own); upctl CLI; Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers; full REST API · full root access
Operating systems
One-click apps
Datacenter locations
15 regions worldwide.
Support
Response time: Average human response under 40 seconds on chat; guaranteed under 90 seconds on chat or email
Verified Apr 27, 2026
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.
Sentiment verified Apr 27, 2026
Recent changes
How UpCloud compares
Top-rated alternatives on the board.
Linode (Akamai Cloud)
$5/mo
25 on req
Hetzner Cloud
€3.99/mo
25 on req
DigitalOcean
$4/mo
25 blocked
Vultr
$2.50/mo
25 on req