UpCloud is a Helsinki-based cloud hosting provider with MaxIOPS storage and European data centers. Cloud servers start from around 3 euros per month.
UpCloud is a cloud infrastructure provider offering virtual private servers, managed databases, object storage, and networking products for developers and businesses. It was founded in 2011 by Joel Pihlajamaa in Helsinki, Finland, and remains headquartered there today with roughly 130 employees.
The company has raised about 24 million dollars in funding, including an 18 million euro round in 2020, from investors such as Connected Capital and Partners, Finnish Industry Investment, and Inventure, and it positions itself as a European-owned alternative to large US hyperscale cloud providers.
UpCloud runs cloud servers from roughly a dozen data center locations across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, with particular emphasis on keeping European customer data within European data centers for GDPR compliance.
UpCloud's core differentiator is MaxIOPS, a proprietary storage layer that combines in-memory caching with enterprise SSDs to deliver high, consistent random-access performance, with the company reporting over 100,000 IOPS on standard virtual machines and several times better throughput than comparable plans from some competitors.
Server plans are billed by the hour, providing flexible scaling for workloads that come and go, and the company advertises zero-cost data egress across its network with a Fair Transfer Policy applied to outbound traffic.
Beyond core compute, UpCloud offers managed databases, S3-compatible object storage, private networking, load balancers, and a REST API and CLI for infrastructure automation.
UpCloud offers two main server tiers: Starter plans aimed at development, testing, and self-hosting workloads starting from around 3 euros a month, and Premium plans for production and business-critical workloads starting from around 5 euros a month.
All plans are billed by the hour up to a maximum of 28 billed days per month, with transparent, predictable pricing that the company contrasts against the more complex billing structures of large hyperscale clouds. Both Starter and Premium plans carry a 99.99 percent uptime SLA.
It is used to host cloud servers, databases, and applications, similar to other VPS and IaaS providers like DigitalOcean or Linode.
Starter cloud servers begin at around 3 euros a month, with Premium production-grade servers starting around 5 euros a month, both billed hourly.
UpCloud is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, and was founded there in 2011 by Joel Pihlajamaa.
It is UpCloud's proprietary storage technology that layers in-memory caching over enterprise SSDs to deliver high, consistent input/output performance.
UpCloud operates data centers across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, including Finland, Germany, the UK, the US, Singapore, and Australia.
Yes, its European ownership and data centers make it a common choice for companies wanting to keep customer data within Europe.
Servers are billed hourly up to a maximum of 28 billed days per month, with zero-cost data egress under a Fair Transfer Policy.
UpCloud reports significantly higher random IOPS performance thanks to MaxIOPS and emphasizes European data residency, while DigitalOcean has a larger global footprint and broader managed-service catalog.