The state of European cloud providers in 2026
20 days ago
- Author searched for a European cloud provider due to need for VPN-external access and EU sovereignty push.
- Methodology included pricing, CPU benchmarks (Geekbench), hourly billing, IPv4, traffic allotment, and UI reliability.
- American providers like Vultr, DigitalOcean, and RamNode were used as baseline comparisons.
- Hetzner had capacity issues on budget tier; Hostinger required long-term commitment; OVH had dysfunctional instance creation.
- Scaleway failed phone verification; UpCloud offered competitive pricing and fast AMD EPYC CPUs.
- Leafcloud had CPU bait-and-switch and low free egress; Datalix and 0ping were unavailable or required commitment.
- Takehost.biz had confusing pricing and no account deletion; Contabo required German contract; Stackit restricted to companies.
- Exoscale was expensive with old CPUs; bunny.net is CDN/object storage only.
- Conclusion: UpCloud emerged as the clear frontrunner; author will trial it for a few months.