# UpCloud

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

Finnish cloud provider selling hourly-billed cloud servers, managed databases, managed Kubernetes, and block and object storage from 15 data centres in Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific.

## Who it suits

Hourly cloud servers at one USD price in every location, from $3.50 a month (1 core, 1 GB, 10 GB SSD), in 15 data centres across Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific, with no egress fees by default and support response times published per tier.

Consider something else if You need a fixed transfer allowance or compliance of the provider itself: traffic past the account's fair-transfer share may be throttled to 100 Mbps unless you opt into $0.01 per GB, SOC 2 and HIPAA certify the data-centre facilities rather than UpCloud, and its docs give the trial 7 days.

## iScore

56 / 100 (80% interval 49–63), rank 13 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/upcloud/alternatives/

- Price: 36 (20–52), weight 29%, 5 of 5 criteria scored
- Capacity and limits: 47 (36–58), weight 29%, 4 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, file_count_limit
- Capabilities: 78 (71–84), weight 10%, 4 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, scale_to_zero, scheduled_jobs
- Trust and compliance: 76 (69–84), weight 14%, 13 of 13 criteria scored
- Evidence: 91 (91–91), 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 free trial only: 7 days from activation in the docs, longer under some promotions. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/free-trial/), read 2026-09-25)
- Kind of free offer: Free trial ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/free-trial/), read 2026-09-25)
- What the free plan includes: For the 7-day trial: Cloud Servers up to 2 cores and 4 GB memory (no Windows), 60 GB each of Archive, Standard and MaxIOPS block storage, 2 IPv4 and 2 IPv6 addresses, and one development-size instance of the managed services; GPU servers and Private Cloud are excluded. The firewall limits traffic to standard web ports during the trial. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/free-trial/), read 2026-09-25)
- Credit card to start: Yes — The card is verified with a 0 or 1 €/$ authorisation and is not charged during the trial. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/free-trial/), read 2026-09-25)
- Entry paid plan: $3.5/month for the cheapest Starter plan: 1 CPU core, 1 GB memory and 10 GB of standard SSD storage, at UpCloud's USD 'Global price', the same in every location. Billed by the starting hour up to 28 days a month; prices exclude local taxes. The 1 GB plan is limited to 5 concurrent deployments per customer. A standing list price; no introductory or promotional rate is shown. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-27)
- Pricing model: Hourly: Cloud Server plans are billed by the starting hour, capped at 28 days a month, so the listed monthly price is the most a server costs in a month. Prices exclude applicable local taxes. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-27)
- Egress over allowance: $0.01 per GB, only for customers who opt in to the paid transfer model, and only on egress beyond the Fair Transfer Policy share. By default there is no overage charge; bandwidth may be throttled instead. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/fair-transfer-policy/), read 2026-09-27)
- When you exceed a cap: Throttled, not billed, by default: past the monthly Fair Transfer share UpCloud notifies the customer and may reduce Cloud Server bandwidth to 100 Mbps for the rest of the month. Customers can instead opt in to paid transfer at $0.01/GB for unrestricted egress. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/fair-transfer-policy/), read 2026-09-25)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): 10 GB of standard-performance SSD storage on the cheapest Starter plan ($3.5/month, 1 GB memory). ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-27)
- Memory (entry plan): 1 GB on the cheapest Starter plan ($3.5/month, 1 CPU core, 10 GB storage). ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-27)
- Included bandwidth: 0.5 TB a month of public egress for the cheapest Starter plan (STARTER-1xCPU-1GB), under the Fair Transfer Policy. Each server adds its plan's share to an account-wide limit shared across all data centres (Starter plans 0.5-2.5 TB, Premium 0.5-23 TB). Ingress and private-network traffic are included without a limit. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/networking/network-transfer/), read 2026-09-25)

### Deployment

- Containers: Supported ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/products/managed-kubernetes/), read 2026-09-27)

### Infrastructure

- Persistent storage: Supported ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-27)
- Managed databases: Supported ([source](https://upcloud.com/products/managed-databases/), read 2026-09-27)
- Autoscaling: Limited ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/managed-kubernetes/autoscaling/), read 2026-09-25)
- Regions: 15 data centres: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Helsinki (two), London, Madrid, Stavanger, Stockholm and Warsaw in Europe; Chicago, New York and San Jose in the US; Singapore and Sydney in Asia-Pacific. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/locations/), read 2026-09-25)
- Uptime SLA: 99.99% on Starter plans, including the cheapest; 99.999% on Premium and Cloud Native plans. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/pricing/), read 2026-09-25)

### Data

- Backup retention: Simple Backup plans, charged at +10% to +60% of the server plan price, keep daily backups for 1 or 7 days, weekly backups for 4 weeks and monthly backups for 12 months. Flexible Backups use a custom schedule with retention from 1 day up to 3 years. On-demand backups are kept until deleted. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/block-storage/backups/), read 2026-09-25)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: 24/7/365 support in English by live chat (website and control panel) or email. Support covers UpCloud's infrastructure and system-level issues such as network configuration and storage scaling, not software-specific issues beyond its guides. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/support/), read 2026-09-25)
- Response time commitment: Under 2 hours for incidents and under 4 hours for service requests on the Essentials tier. Advanced gets under 30 minutes and under 1 hour; Enterprise under 5 and under 10 minutes. Higher tiers are arranged through sales. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/support/), read 2026-09-27)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Data-centre facilities only: UpCloud's data-centre page lists SOC 2 Type II among the certifications of most of the third-party facilities it uses (for example CoreSite in Chicago), but not for London, Warsaw, Stavanger or Helsinki FI-HEL2. It names no SOC 2 report for UpCloud's own service. ([source](https://upcloud.com/data-centers/), read 2026-09-27)
- ISO 27001: UpCloud runs an ISO 27001-certified information security management system; the compliance page links the certificate. ([source](https://upcloud.com/compliance-and-security/), read 2026-09-27)
- HIPAA: Data-centre facilities only: the data-centre page lists HIPAA among the certifications of the three US facilities (Chicago, New York, San Jose). No business associate agreement or HIPAA-eligible service list is mentioned. ([source](https://upcloud.com/data-centers/), read 2026-09-27)
- GDPR / data residency: Customer data stays in the data centre the customer selects; UpCloud does not move it without the customer's explicit request. UpCloud is registered in Finland and follows the GDPR; for servers in its EU data centres it uses no subprocessors. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/security-privacy/), read 2026-09-27)
- PCI DSS: Data-centre facilities only: UpCloud says its data centres are certified for requirements including PCI DSS. No PCI DSS attestation for UpCloud's own service is named. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/cloud-servers/faq/), read 2026-09-25)
- Encryption at rest: Optional, free AES-256 encryption for any block storage device, including OS disks, backups and custom images, on every storage tier. It must be chosen when the storage is created, and UpCloud estimates a 10-20% performance cost. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/block-storage/encryption-at-rest/), read 2026-09-25)
- Customer-managed keys: Not for block storage: each encrypted storage device gets a randomly generated key managed by UpCloud, stored encrypted. No customer-supplied or customer-held key option is described. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/block-storage/encryption-at-rest/), read 2026-09-25)
- Role-based access control: Subaccounts: the main user can create subaccounts for team members and API users and restrict each one to specific servers, storage and network resources, or by tag. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/accounts/subaccounts/), read 2026-09-25)
- Private networking / VPC: SDN Private Networks: custom private networks created on demand within a data centre, connecting an unlimited number of Cloud Servers there, with interfaces of up to 10 Gbit/s. ([source](https://upcloud.com/docs/products/networking/sdn-private-networks/), read 2026-09-25)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Private Cloud: compute hosts exclusively reserved for a single customer, for hardware-level isolation, from $3669 a month with a personalised quote. ([source](https://upcloud.com/global/products/private-cloud/), read 2026-09-27)