UpCloud
The Finnish founder-led cloud that sells sovereignty and simplicity together, with a London data centre, zero-cost transfer under fair use and a 99.999 per cent SLA.
Who owns it
UpCloud Ltd (Helsinki, founded 2011 by Joel Pihlajamaa, founder-led, no US parent) is the European provider that most directly answers the UK buyer's wish list: a London data centre, eight EU locations (two in Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Madrid, Frankfurt) plus Stavanger, three US sites and two in Asia Pacific, 15 in all, and a company that describes Helsinki as "the backdrop to our European Sovereign Cloud mission". It holds ISO 27001, signs the CISPE data-protection code of conduct and has been audited against Finland's PiTuKri criteria; it does not claim SOC 2 or C5 and does not address the CLOUD Act, which for a Finnish company without a US owner is a footnote rather than a gap. In April 2026 it relaunched its server line as Starter, Premium and Cloud Native, retiring the old General Purpose names.
What it costs
Prices in EUR, ex VAT, read 8 September 2026 (billing is in EUR; UK customers can pay in GBP at the day's rate). Starter begins at €3 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB and 10 GB, capped at five deployments and a 99.99% SLA. Premium, the production line, is €26 a month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB of UpCloud's MaxIOPS storage (there is no 80 GB step; the next is 8 GB and 100 GB at €38), with a 1 Gbit port and the IPv4 included. Simple Backups cost 10% of the server price for a daily plan, 20% for a week of retention, 40% for a month; so the real monthly cost of the reference server with daily backups is €28.60. Data transfer in and out is free on every plan, "full stop", subject to a Fair Transfer Policy whose threshold UpCloud does not publish, which is the one number a heavy-traffic buyer will want before relying on it. Around the servers: block storage from €0.085 per GB, S3-compatible object storage at €5 a month for 250 GB (in five of the 15 locations, London not among them), managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, Valkey and OpenSearch, managed Kubernetes with a free development control plane, load balancers, a free NAT and VPN gateway tier, a firewall, an API, CLI, Terraform, Pulumi and Ansible. There is no app marketplace, only six vendor-maintained OS templates that UpCloud patches and retires at end of life, and no official MCP server (the one on GitHub is a third party's).
What you get and what to watch
The SLA is the most confident here: 99.999% on Premium with "a 50x payback for any downtime over 5 minutes", stated in marketing copy we could not match to the legal document. Support is in-house, 24/7 live chat and email, no phone. Trustpilot is 3.0 on 169 reviews, 48% five-star and 43% one-star, and the August 2026 one-star cluster is almost entirely automated anti-fraud suspensions of new accounts with dismissive follow-up; UpCloud itself acknowledged a false positive in one reply. A UK company that wants EU ownership, a London server and managed services in one place should start here.
Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews.
Pros
- +EU-owned with a London data centre and eight EU sites; ISO 27001, CISPE, PiTuKri
- +Zero-cost data transfer on every plan, backups from 10%, managed databases and Kubernetes, a 99.999% SLA with a 50x payback
- +Founder-led, in-house 24/7 support
Cons
- −Fair Transfer Policy threshold unpublished; object storage in only five locations, not London
- −No app marketplace and no official MCP server; SOC 2 and C5 not claimed
- −Trustpilot 3.0, with an August 2026 run of automated account suspensions
Pricing
Minimum commitment: €3 (€3/mo × 1 seat × 1 month (no commitment)). The least you can spend before walking away; excludes numbers, minutes and add-ons.
Starter 1 GB
€3/mo · no commitment
Same price on any term
- ✓1 vCPU / 1 GB / 10 GB SSD, 250 Mbit port, zero-cost transfer (fair use), IPv4 included, ex VAT; max 5 deployments, 99.99% SLA. Billed by the hour, capped at 28 days.
Premium 4 GB
€26/mo · no commitment
Same price on any term
- ✓2 vCPU / 4 GB / 50 GB MaxIOPS, 1 Gbit port, IPv4 included, 99.999% SLA. Backups 10% daily plan (€2.60), 20% weekly, 40% monthly. Real monthly cost with daily backups: €28.60. Next step 8 GB / 100 GB at €38.
Specifications
| Rating | 4.0 |
| Pricing and plans | |
|---|---|
| Smallest instance | €3/mo (1 vCPU / 1 GB / 10 GB (Starter)) |
| Reference instance | €26/mo (2 vCPU / 4 GB / 50 GB MaxIOPS (Premium)) |
| Real monthly cost* | €28.60/mo |
| Hourly billing | ✓ |
| Public IPv4 | Included |
| Backups | 10% (daily), 20% (weekly), 40% (monthly) of the server price |
| Snapshots (per GB/mo) | €0.056 |
| Free credit | €500 for 30 days |
| Features | |
| UK location | ✓ |
| EU locations | 8 |
| Locations | 15 |
| Managed databases | ✓ |
| Kubernetes | ✓ |
| Object storage | ✓ |
| UK cities | London |
| Block storage | ✓ |
| Load balancers | ✓ |
| Bare metal | No |
| GPU instances | ✓ |
| ARM instances | No |
| Private networking | ✓ |
| Integrations and developers | |
| Egress overage | Unmetered |
| API | ✓ |
| Terraform | ✓ |
| MCP server | No |
| Image marketplace | No |
| CLI | ✓ |
| Ownership and trust | |
| Owned in** | EU-owned |
| Sovereign offering | None |
| Owner | Independent |
| Vendor-maintained images | ✓ |
| Uptime SLA (%) | 100.00 |
| Trustpilot (reviews) | 3.0 (169) |
| HQ | Finland |
| Publicly listed | No |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ |
| SOC 2 | No |
| DDoS protection included | No |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| Support | |
| Phone support | No |
| Support channels | Live chat 24/7, Email |
*Real monthly cost: the reference instance (the nearest to 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB) with automatic backups switched on and a public IPv4 address, per month at the monthly or capped-hourly rate, in the currency the vendor shows a UK visitor on the research date; see each profile for the VAT basis, the backup rule and the egress bill on top.
**Owned in: where the company that owns the provider answers to. A US-owned provider is subject to US law (including the CLOUD Act) wherever the data centre is; a local data centre is not the same thing as local jurisdiction. "Sovereign offering" records what the vendor offers beyond a local data centre.
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
Work at UpCloud? Something not look right? Register in the vendor portal to see what we publish and send corrections.