UpCloud
Finland
Finnish cloud infrastructure provider with a storage system that claims faster speeds than standard NVMe
European Alternative to:
A Finnish cloud provider founded in 2012 and based in Helsinki. UpCloud's pitch has always been performance and a clean developer experience, without the catalog sprawl of the US hyperscalers.
What you get
- Cloud servers with MaxIOPS, their in-house block storage, designed for low-latency workloads
- Managed databases (Postgres, MySQL, Redis-compatible, OpenSearch)
- Object storage, load balancers, private networks and a managed Kubernetes service
- A clean API and CLI, plus Terraform providers that actually work
Where it runs
Data centers in Helsinki, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Madrid, Warsaw, London, plus Singapore, Sydney, San Jose, Chicago and a few more. The European regions are the obvious choice for GDPR-bound teams; UpCloud is a Finnish company subject to EU law.
Honestly
Less well-known outside Europe than Hetzner or OVH, but the performance numbers are real and support has a good reputation. The trade-off is the catalog: you won't find the dozens of managed higher-level services that AWS ships. That's also the appeal for teams who'd rather run their own stack on solid VMs.
Germany
Slovenia
Switzerland