# Civo

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/civo/

Cloud provider built around managed Kubernetes, also selling compute instances, managed databases, object storage, volumes, load balancers and NVIDIA GPUs, plus private cloud.

## Who it suits

Small managed Kubernetes clusters and instances billed by the hour, with a free control plane and free, unlimited data transfer: nodes and instances from $5.43 a month, a 99.95% SLA, and $250 of starting credit.

Consider something else if You need many regions or documented backups: Civo has four public regions (London, Frankfurt, New York, Mumbai), instance backups are documented only for private regions, and its SOC 2 and ISO 27001 claims name no report type or certificate.

## iScore

57 / 100 (80% interval 50–64), rank 10 of 16 in hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/civo/alternatives/

- Price: 39 (23–55), weight 29%, 5 of 5 criteria scored
- Capacity and limits: 49 (37–60), weight 29%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, bandwidth_included, file_count_limit
- Capabilities: 77 (71–84), weight 10%, 5 of 11 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: connection_pooling, docker_deploy, edge_network, git_deploy, persistent_processes, scheduled_jobs
- Trust and compliance: 79 (71–88), weight 14%, 9 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: customer_managed_keys, hipaa_eligible, pci_dss, support_response_time
- Evidence: 88 (88–88), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 51 (9–94), weight 10%, 0 of 2 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: No — A one-off $250 introductory credit, not an ongoing free plan. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/faq), read 2026-09-27)
- Kind of free offer: Free credit ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/faq), read 2026-09-27)
- What the free plan includes: $250 of introductory credit, usable on any Civo service, claimed by adding a card within 21 days of signing up. The FAQ says it is valid for a month from when it is applied, and elsewhere until the end of the month following its application; expired credit is lost. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/faq), read 2026-09-27)
- Credit card to start: Yes — Prepaid and virtual cards are not accepted, and each card can claim the credit once. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/faq), read 2026-09-27)
- Entry paid plan: $5.43/month ($0.007440/hour) for the xSmall Standard compute instance: 1 core, 1 GB RAM, 25GB NVMe, with free and unlimited data transfer. A standing hourly list price in US dollars; no introductory or promotional rate. The smallest Kubernetes node (Standard Extra Small: 1 GB, 1 core, 30GB NVMe) costs the same $5.43/month, and the Kubernetes control plane is free, so a one-node cluster is $5.43/month. ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Pricing model: Pay as you go by the hour: usage is billed hourly, rounded up to the next full hour, and invoiced on the first of each month for the previous month. Listed monthly prices assume an average 730-hour month. Stopped instances and clusters are billed as if running. Prices are in US dollars, excluding VAT. For Kubernetes only worker nodes and add-ons are charged; the control plane is free. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/account/billing), read 2026-09-27)
- Egress over allowance: Free: Civo charges nothing for egress or ingress, so there is no per-GB overage price. ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- When you exceed a cap: No overage: data transfer is sold as free and unlimited, with no egress or ingress fees or limits, so there is nothing to bill or throttle past an allowance. ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): 25GB of NVMe storage on the cheapest compute instance, xSmall ($5.43/month, 1 GB RAM). The equivalent Kubernetes node, Extra Small, has 30GB. ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Memory (entry plan): 1 GB on the cheapest compute instance, xSmall ($5.43/month, 1 core, 25GB NVMe). ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Included bandwidth: Unlimited and free: Civo charges no egress or ingress fees and sets no transfer limit on compute instances, Kubernetes nodes or load balancers. ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)

### Deployment

- Containers: Supported — Managed Kubernetes (K3s or Talos) with a free control plane that Civo says has built-in high availability ([source](https://www.civo.com/public-cloud/kubernetes), read 2026-09-27)

### Infrastructure

- Persistent storage: Supported ([source](https://www.civo.com/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Managed databases: Supported ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/database), read 2026-09-27)
- Scales to zero: Not supported ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/account/billing), read 2026-09-27)
- Autoscaling: Limited — Kubernetes node pools only, via the cluster autoscaler Marketplace app (1 to 10 nodes by default) ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/kubernetes/advanced/scaling-nodes), read 2026-09-27)
- Regions: 4 public regions: London (LON1), Frankfurt (FRA1), New York (NYC1) and Mumbai (MUM1). CPU Kubernetes, CPU Compute, object stores, volumes and databases are available in all four; GPU Kubernetes and GPU Compute only in LON1. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/overview/regions), read 2026-09-27)
- Uptime SLA: 99.95% monthly uptime for all Civo public and private cloud services. Missing it earns service credits of 10% (99.0% to under 99.95%), 40% (95.0% to under 99.0%) or 100% (under 95.0%) of the month's fees for the affected services, claimed within 30 days. ([source](https://www.civo.com/legal/sla), read 2026-09-27)

### Data

- Backup retention: Documented only for CivoStack Enterprise Private Regions: instance snapshots on demand, and snapshot schedules (minimum interval 10 minutes) that keep at most 10 snapshots per resource, deleting the oldest. No instance backup product is described for the public cloud, and Civo's terms make the backup policy for instances the customer's responsibility. ([source](https://www.civo.com/api/snapshot-schedules), read 2026-09-27)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: 24/7 ticket support, plus a community Slack of over 30,000 developers and access to cloud-native specialists. No paid support tiers are listed. ([source](https://www.civo.com/public-cloud/compute), read 2026-09-27)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Civo says its infrastructure is certified with SOC 2. The page names no report type (Type I or II) and no way to obtain the report. ([source](https://www.civo.com/india), read 2026-09-27)
- ISO 27001: Civo says its infrastructure is certified with ISO 27001. No certificate or scope is linked from the page. ([source](https://www.civo.com/india), read 2026-09-27)
- GDPR / data residency: Civo sells its UK region as a UK sovereign cloud where data stays in the UK under UK law, including the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. It also runs an EU region in Frankfurt (FRA1). ([source](https://www.civo.com/uk-sovereign-cloud), read 2026-09-27)
- Encryption at rest: Civo's government page says storage is encrypted by default, alongside isolated tenant networking. It gives no algorithm or scope beyond that. ([source](https://www.civo.com/government), read 2026-09-27)
- Role-based access control: Teams: an account owner groups users into teams and grants pre-defined roles (such as Technical Administrator, which gives access to cloud resources without billing) or custom roles built from individual permissions, including view-only. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/account/teams), read 2026-09-27)
- Private networking / VPC: Private networks isolate instances and Kubernetes clusters within a region; resources in the same network route to each other internally, and each region gets a Default network. ([source](https://www.civo.com/docs/networking/private-networks), read 2026-09-27)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Private cloud only: private-cloud workloads can run on dedicated hardware, isolated in hardware-level enclaves (Intel SGX). Public compute instances and Kubernetes nodes are not described as dedicated. ([source](https://www.civo.com/government), read 2026-09-27)