Cloud providers rent out virtual servers, storage, networking and managed services by the hour or month, from plain VPS and Kubernetes to app platforms, CDNs and DDoS protection. Buyers in Europe pick a European provider to keep data and contracts under EU, Swiss or UK law, away from US laws such as the CLOUD Act. The strongest European options are OVHcloud (France) for teams moving whole workloads off a hyperscaler, Scaleway (France) for developer teams wanting a hyperscaler-style catalogue in the EU and Hetzner (Germany) for price-sensitive teams that manage their own servers.
Best first. Headcount and founding year come from LeadWave's database; prices, hosting and G2 ratings from each company's own pages and G2, checked in November 2026.
| Alternative | Headquarters | Founded | Employees | G2 rating | Free plan | Paid plans from | Your data | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 OVHcloud | Roubaix, France | 1999 | — | 3.2 (74 reviews) | No | €3.81/server/month | In Europe | No |
2 Scaleway | Paris, France | 2013 | 357 | 4.1 (20 reviews) | No | €0.00/instance/hour | In Europe | No |
3 Hetzner | Gunzenhausen, Germany | 1997 | — | 4.5 (13 reviews) | No | €6.49/server/month | In Europe | No |
4 STACKIT | Bad Friedrichshall, Germany | — | — | — | No | — | In Europe | No |
5 IONOS | Montabaur, Germany | — | — | 4.3 (13 reviews) | No | €5/server/month | In Europe | No |
6 UpCloud | Helsinki, Finland | 2011 | 78 | 4.6 (76 reviews) | No | — | In Europe | No |
7 T Cloud Public (formerly Open Telekom Cloud) | Frankfurt am Main, Germany | — | — | — | No | — | In Europe | No |
8 3DS OUTSCALE | Saint-Cloud, France | 2010 | — | — | No | €0.03/vCore/hour | In Europe | No |
9 Exoscale | Lausanne, Switzerland | 2011 | 11–50 | — | No | €0.01/instance/hour | In Europe | No |
10 Infomaniak | Geneva, Switzerland | — | — | — | No | €2.70/server/month | In Europe | No |
11 bunny.net | Ljubljana, Slovenia | 2015 | — | 4.8 (564 reviews) | No | $0.01/GB | EU region available | No |
12 Gcore | Contern, Luxembourg | 2014 | — | 4.7 (86 reviews) | Yes | €0.01/GB | EU region available | No |
13 Clever Cloud | Nantes, France | 2010 | — | 4.5 (10 reviews) | No | €4.50/instance/month | In Europe | No |
14 Scalingo | Strasbourg, France | 2014 | — | 4.6 (5 reviews) | No | €7.20/container/month | In Europe | No |
15 Cleura | Karlskrona, Sweden | — | — | — | No | — | In Europe | No |
16 Upsun (formerly Platform.sh) | Paris, France | 2010 | — | 4.6 (167 reviews) | No | €9/project/month | EU region available | No |
17 Myra Security | Munich, Germany | 2012 | — | — | No | €399/account/month | In Europe | No |
18 netcup | Karlsruhe, Germany | 2008 | — | — | No | €8.26/server/month | In Europe | No |
19 Safespring | Solna, Sweden | — | — | — | No | €0.02/instance/hour | In Europe | No |
20 Elastx | Stockholm, Sweden | — | — | — | No | — | In Europe | No |
21 plusserver | Cologne, Germany | — | — | — | No | — | In Europe | No |
22 Aruba Cloud | Ponte San Pietro, Italy | — | — | — | No | €2.49/server/month | In Europe | No |
Each page ranks the European options for that tool's users and says how each one compares.
French public cloud, VPS and bare-metal servers
Runs its own data centres and sells VPS, bare-metal servers, public cloud and hosted private cloud. Data centres in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific; Europe-only setups are available.
French cloud with VMs, Kubernetes, serverless and GPUs
Broad public cloud from the iliad group: instances, managed Kubernetes, databases, serverless functions and containers, object storage and GPU clusters. Regions in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy.
Low-cost cloud servers and dedicated servers from Germany
Cloud VMs, dedicated servers, load balancers, volumes and object storage at low prices, with 20 TB of traffic included in EU locations. Own data centres in Germany and Finland, plus US and Singapore locations.
Enterprise cloud from the group behind Lidl and Kaufland
Public cloud of the Schwarz Group, the retailer behind Lidl and Kaufland, aimed at enterprises and the public sector. Compute, Kubernetes, databases and storage run only in its data centres in Germany and Austria.
German hosting group with VPS and an enterprise cloud
German hosting group selling VPS, dedicated servers and IONOS Cloud, an IaaS platform with compute, Kubernetes, object storage and managed databases. Data centres in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and the US.
Finnish cloud servers with fast block storage
Cloud servers, managed Kubernetes, databases, object storage and load balancers, sold to small and mid-sized companies. Most data centres are in Europe, with others in the US, Singapore and Australia.
Deutsche Telekom's public cloud for enterprises
Public cloud run by T-Systems, part of Deutsche Telekom, renamed from Open Telekom Cloud. Offers compute, storage, databases and Kubernetes from European data centres and holds Germany's BSI C5 attestation.
SecNumCloud-qualified French cloud from Dassault Systèmes
IaaS with an AWS-compatible API, managed Kubernetes and hosted Mistral AI models. Its French region holds ANSSI's SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification and HDS health-data certification; it also runs regions in the US and Asia.
Swiss cloud with zones across Central Europe
Compute instances, managed Kubernetes (SKS), DBaaS and object storage, billed per second. Zones in Geneva, Zurich, Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich, Sofia and Zagreb. Majority-owned by A1 Digital, part of Austria's A1 Group.
Swiss VPS, public cloud and web hosting
Swiss hosting company with an OpenStack public cloud, VPS, managed cloud servers and web hosting, run from its own data centres in Switzerland. Also sells email and office apps.
Pay-as-you-go CDN with storage, DNS, video and edge compute
Slovenian CDN billed per GB, with object storage, DNS, video streaming, a WAF and DDoS layer (Shield), edge scripting and container hosting. Global network of 119 PoPs; an EU-only routing filter is available.
Luxembourg CDN, DNS, DDoS protection and edge cloud
CDN, DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, edge functions, video streaming and GPU cloud from Luxembourg. Global network of 210+ PoPs; traffic can be pinned to chosen regions. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.
French PaaS for apps, databases and add-ons
Git-push hosting for apps in most languages or Docker, plus managed databases and object storage. Zones run on its own Paris-area hardware and on OVHcloud, Scaleway and IONOS, not US hyperscalers.
Heroku-compatible PaaS hosted in France
Deploys apps by git push with Heroku-style buildpacks, plus managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and other databases. Both regions run on 3DS Outscale in Paris; the SecNumCloud one is on request.
Swedish OpenStack cloud, formerly City Network
OpenStack-based public, private and compliance-focused cloud with VMs, Kubernetes, storage and databases, run in European regions including Sweden and Germany. Part of the Nordic IT group Iver; ISO 27001 certified.
Git-driven PaaS with preview environments, formerly Platform.sh
Git-driven PaaS for multi-app projects with a preview environment per branch, billed on provisioned CPU, RAM and disk. Six of its seven European regions run on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure; one on OVHcloud.
German DDoS protection, WAF and CDN for regulated organisations
Security-as-a-service from Munich: DDoS protection for websites and networks, WAF, bot management and CDN. Traffic can be processed only in German data centres; BSI-qualified DDoS provider with C5 Type 2 and ISO 27001.
Budget VPS and root servers from Germany
Low-cost VPS, root servers and web hosting with flat-rate traffic, mostly sold on 1- to 24-month contracts. Locations in Nuremberg, Vienna and Amsterdam, plus Manassas (US) and Singapore. Part of Austria's Anexia group.
Nordic OpenStack cloud run in Sweden and Norway
OpenStack compute, managed Kubernetes, object storage, backup and GPUs from data centres in Sweden and Norway; customer data stays in those countries. Billed monthly on hourly use.
Swedish cloud platform for business-critical systems
OpenStack IaaS, Kubernetes, databases and storage across three Swedish data centres about 20 km apart, with 24x7 support and DDoS protection included. ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 certified.
German managed cloud and hosting for mid-sized firms
Managed cloud provider running pluscloud open (OpenStack-based), a BSI C5-certified VMware cloud, Kubernetes and colocation from its own data centres in Germany. Sold with managed services rather than self-service.
Italian VPS, cloud servers and private cloud
Cloud arm of Italian hosting company Aruba: VPS, cloud servers, virtual private cloud, object storage and backup, run from Aruba's own data centres in Italy.
A company counts as European if it's headquartered in Europe: the EU, the EEA, Switzerland, the UK, or elsewhere in geographic Europe, never Russia or Belarus. Headquarters means where it's run from, not a registered office. Companies founded in Europe but headquartered elsewhere today are listed separately, and a non-European owner is always named.
Each company was checked against its own legal notice, pricing page and data-processing terms, and its G2 page. The order weighs how fully each one replaces the US leaders, its track record and its ratings. No company paid to be listed or ranked.
OVHcloud (France) for teams moving whole workloads off a hyperscaler, Scaleway (France) for developer teams wanting a hyperscaler-style catalogue in the EU and Hetzner (Germany) for price-sensitive teams that manage their own servers. Each is headquartered in Europe; the table compares their hosting, prices and G2 ratings.
Gcore has a free plan with no time limit.
OVHcloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, STACKIT, IONOS, UpCloud, T Cloud Public (formerly Open Telekom Cloud), 3DS OUTSCALE, Exoscale, Infomaniak, Clever Cloud, Scalingo, Cleura, Myra Security, netcup, Safespring, Elastx, plusserver and Aruba Cloud store customer data in Europe by default. Being European doesn't make a tool GDPR compliant on its own: check its data processing agreement too.
Its headquarters is in Europe, and ideally its owner too: a US owner, such as KKR at Contabo, brings US law back into the picture. Also check where the data centres are, since several European providers run US or Asian regions as well.
For plain servers, often yes: Hetzner, OVHcloud and Scaleway list small servers for a few euros a month, and Hetzner includes 20 TB of traffic per server in the EU. For managed AI, analytics and databases, the hyperscalers offer far more services.
France's SecNumCloud, held by 3DS OUTSCALE's French region, and Germany's BSI C5, held by T Cloud Public, plusserver's VMware cloud and Myra Security, are the main national labels. ISO 27001 is the common baseline.
