Aruba Cloud
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: VPS from around €1/month — among the cheapest entry-level pricing in this list. Pay-as-you-go scaling.
Known for: Italian VPS provider with data centres across Europe. Virtual servers, managed databases, domains, DNS. One of Europe's largest hosting groups. Unbeatable price-per-VPS in Europe. Trade-off is a less polished console than Scaleway or UpCloud, but for cheap always-on instances this is the answer.
https://www.arubacloud.com
Cyso Cloud
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Virtual servers from €3.30/month. Managed Kubernetes itself is free — pay only for the underlying resources.
Known for: Dutch OpenStack cloud. Virtual servers in many sizes including GPU and memory-optimised. Object storage, load balancers, managed Kubernetes, DNS. Formerly known as Fuga Cloud. Among the cheapest entry-level instances in this list. Free managed Kubernetes is a real differentiator for hobbyists and startups.
https://cyso.cloud
Elastx
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Custom pricing. Contact sales.
Known for: Swedish OpenStack cloud. Three availability zones in separate Stockholm-area data centres, 20 km apart — designed for high-availability production workloads. Managed Kubernetes, object storage, WAF. Built for production-grade Swedish workloads where data residency is non-negotiable. Government and finance customers cluster here.
https://elastx.se
Exoscale
Ownership: Owned by Austrian telco A1
Pricing: Pay-as-you-go. Per-instance hourly pricing. Calculator on the provider site.
Known for: Swiss cloud platform with European data centres. Virtual servers (general, CPU, memory, storage, GPU), S3-compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes, managed Kafka and Redis on top of MySQL/PostgreSQL. Per-bucket API key scoping. . The most enterprise-credible Swiss cloud. Telco-backed, OpenStack-friendly, and the best fit when you need GPU instances under EU/Swiss jurisdiction.
https://www.exoscale.com
gridscale
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Virtual servers from €27/month. Managed databases from €50/month. Hourly billing.
Known for: German cloud with broad managed-database choice — Postgres, Microsoft SQL, MariaDB, MySQL, Redis. Plus managed NFS for shared Kubernetes storage. Data centres in DE, AT, CH, NL. The right choice when your bottleneck is database operations, not compute. Microsoft SQL on a European cloud is unusually rare.
https://gridscale.io
IONOS
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Pay-per-resource. About $5/month per GB RAM and from $18/month per core.
Known for: Long-established German hosting and cloud provider (part of United Internet, same parent as GMX and WEB.DE). Per-resource pricing: pay separately for RAM and cores. Virtual servers, VPC, managed databases, object storage. The most German-establishment cloud option. Stable, trusted, deeply hosted in DE, and the right pick when 'just buy IONOS' is a defensible procurement decision.
https://cloud.ionos.com
Open Telekom Cloud
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Flexible pay-as-you-go with detailed price calculator on the provider site.
Known for: Cloud from Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany's national telco. OpenStack-based — no vendor lock-in at the API level. Multiple EU regions. Sovereign cloud with telco-grade SLAs. Picked by German Mittelstand and public-sector buyers who need a national champion on the procurement form.
https://open-telekom-cloud.com
OVHcloud
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Pay-as-you-go. VPS from around €3.50/month. Enterprise contracts available.
Known for: France's largest cloud provider. OpenStack-based — configurable via standard OpenStack CLI, so no vendor lock-in at the API level. Virtual servers, object storage, managed databases, managed Kubernetes, dedicated servers. Europe's AWS scale-equivalent. If you need actual scale on EU soil, this is where Big-Tech-allergic enterprises land.
https://www.ovhcloud.com
Scaleway
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Development instances from €7.68/month. Pay-as-you-go. Transparent pricing.
Known for: French cloud provider with virtual servers, S3-compatible object storage, DNS, VPC, managed Kubernetes, managed databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), dedicated servers, and rack rental. Renewable-energy hosted. The most developer-friendly European cloud. Clean docs, clean pricing, and the best EU answer when you've outgrown a VPS but don't want AWS lock-in.
https://www.scaleway.com
Seeweb
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Pay-as-you-go. Pricing on provider site.
Known for: Italian cloud with multiple modern data centres in Italy, all on renewable energy. Virtual servers, managed databases, message queuing. Italy's most credible serious cloud. Renewable-only hosting is rare even among European providers.
https://www.seeweb.it
STACKIT
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: Detailed price calculator on the provider site. Enterprise-focused.
Known for: Cloud from the German Schwarz Group (Lidl, Kaufland parent). Managed Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch in addition to Postgres and MySQL. Two data centres — Germany and Austria. Built originally to host Lidl's own infrastructure, then opened to external customers. Strong managed-services catalogue and serious EU jurisdiction credentials.
https://www.stackit.de
UpCloud
Ownership: Privately held
Pricing: 1 core / 1 GB RAM instances from €7/month. Pay-as-you-go.
Known for: Finnish cloud platform with high-IOPS block storage. Virtual servers, VPC, managed databases, managed Kubernetes, object storage. Data centres across Europe, US, and APAC. The performance bet. Their I/O numbers genuinely beat AWS on equivalent specs. Pick this for database-heavy or memory-intensive workloads.
https://upcloud.com