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A cloud server buyer asks where the server is located, what is promised about availability, what traffic costs and whether the price is visible before ordering. These decide 50 points out of a hundred.
Score shows how the company does on our comparison criteria, on a 0–100 scale. Rankings cannot be bought.
Basic metrics · 77.0
+ Monthly prices and resources are shown clearly in a table without logging in, for example 1 GB RAM 5 €/month
Basic metrics: 77.0, rank 2 · ▲ 1 place
Basic metrics · 72.7
+ Very low price for a large amount of resources: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD 6.60 €/month
Basic metrics: 72.7, rank 4 · ▲ 2 places
Basic metrics · 75.1
+ A very large 20 TB of monthly traffic is included in the server and any excess is billed transparently in 100 MB increments
Basic metrics: 75.1, rank 3 · no change
– Price shown before purchase: The text of the cloud page has no prices, only a price calculator. Checked the cloud page and the service level terms.
Basic metrics · 81.5
+ The cheapest VPS-1 at 4.53 €/month with its resources (2 vCore, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe) is shown openly
Basic metrics: 81.5, rank 1 · ▼ 3 places
– Server location: The location of the data centres is not stated on the VPS page or in the text of the Global infrastructure page.
Basic metrics · 65.3
+ The cheapest Basic Droplet at $4/month with its resources (1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 10 GB, 500 GiB transfer) is shown directly on the pricing page
Basic metrics: 65.3, rank 5 · no change
– Uptime guarantee: the Droplet pricing page does not state an uptime guarantee, and no SLA page was found: legal/service-level-agreement and legal/droplet-sla returned 404, and the sitemap has no SLA page.
The buying motives of these services could not be checked; the reason is shown for each one. They are not on the list as poor performers but as unscored. The result of the basic metrics is shown for comparison.
+ Server models with prices and resources are published in an open service interface (e.g. 5 $/month = 1 vCPU, 1 GB, 25 GB, 1 TB traffic)
– The site blocks automated reading (Cloudflare security check).
Basic metrics: 64.0, rank 6 (for comparison only)
Weights are fixed. All companies are measured on the same scale. Read the full methodology.
| Buying motive | What is measured | Scale | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Server location QUESTIONCan the server be located in Finland or at least in the EU? | Nearest available data centre for a Finnish customer. | Data centre in Finland = 100, data centre in the EU = 60, outside the EU = 0. | 20 p |
| Usability guarantee QUESTIONHow much availability is promised? | Promised availability of the lowest tier, as a percentage. | 99.99% or more = 100, 99.0% or less = 0, directly proportional in between. | 12 p |
| Transfer transport QUESTIONDo I pay for outgoing traffic? | How outbound traffic is priced at the cheapest tier. | Unlimited or free = 100, quota included and excess billed = 50. | 10 p |
| Price is shown before purchase QUESTIONCan I see the price without ordering? | Is the price of the cheapest server visible on the company's own website. | Price in the page text = 100, price only in a calculator or not at all = 0. | 8 p |
| Basic metrics | Digital quality, transparency, reachability and AI quality score | Basic metrics × 0.5 | 50 p |
We scored 6 cloud server (VPS) services used in Finland on 20 metrics. The key question: is the real price per resource revealed, where your data is located, and are traffic limits and overage fees stated before you move your service to the cloud?
Server monthly or hourly price publicly shown without logging in (20), processor, memory, disk and traffic itemised in the price and scaling clear (15), data centre locations (EU or Finland) clearly stated (20), monthly traffic limit and overage charges stated (15), service level commitment or uptime guarantee shown (10), support availability and channels stated (10), operating company or owner stated on the site (10)
Transparency is 30% of the basic metrics, i.e. 15% of the total points · these metrics make up its 100 points · the full formula and the other pillars
How to read the comparison correctly: Half of the points come from buyer's questions, i.e. things the buyer finds out before deciding. The other half measures how openly the company publishes its prices, terms and contact details. Clear differences in points indicate a genuine difference: one tells you the price immediately, another only after logging in. Close scores should not be read as a ranking order, because every measurement has a margin of variation. The measurement accuracy and the full calculation formula are open in the methodology.
Customer experience is brought into the assessment separately. We also collect customer feedback and customer experiences about companies through separate surveys. The survey results will be added to the overall assessment later.
The lowest stated price is not the whole bill. Cloud server services price CPU, memory, disk space and monthly data transfer separately. Many charge extra for exceeding the traffic limit, for backups, additional IP addresses and managed add-on services. Always compare servers of the same size class and include your own estimated data transfer, not just the starting price.
Data location determines EU data protection. Some services have a data centre in Finland (UpCloud in Helsinki, Hetzner in Helsinki), some elsewhere in the EU and some only outside the EU. If you process personal data, check the data centre region before deployment; it is stated openly for each service.
All measured services publish their price openly. Services in this sector are exceptionally transparent in pricing: the differentiating factors are data location, clarity of traffic limits and overage charges, and the service level commitment and availability of support. The hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) were left out of the comparison as a different product class whose price only becomes clear in the console.
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