European cloud providers compared: OVHcloud, Hetzner and Scaleway
By the EU Alternatives team Published
Europe has serious cloud providers, and the capability question is largely settled: OVHcloud is the largest, Hetzner wins on price for compute, and Scaleway has the most hyperscaler-like product range. For most workloads the real decision is not whether a European cloud can run your stack, but which specific managed services you depend on, because that is where these providers genuinely differ. Here is a factual comparison of the nine that matter, plus an honest note on when a US hyperscaler is still the right call.
The big three
OVHcloud is the largest European provider by most measures: founded in Roubaix, France in 1999, it runs 46 data centres on four continents and serves 1.6 million customers. The catalogue is broad, covering public cloud compute and storage, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB, Kubernetes, VMware-based private cloud, bare metal in several tiers, web hosting and domains. Its distinguishing asset is SecNumCloud qualification, France’s highest cloud security standard, which makes it the default choice for regulated French workloads. OVHcloud also markets a “reversible cloud” with no egress fees, a deliberate contrast with the hyperscalers. If you are weighing it against Google, our OVHcloud vs Google Cloud comparison goes deeper.
Hetzner Cloud is the price-performance benchmark. The German company owns and operates its data centres in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki, with additional locations in the US and Singapore, and that vertical control shows up directly in pricing. The catalogue is deliberately short: four server families from shared Arm instances to dedicated vCPU machines, dedicated servers, S3-compatible object storage, load balancers, private networks and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane. There is no managed database service; you run your own on top. Teams comfortable operating their own stack routinely cut their bill by moving here, and the Hetzner Cloud vs AWS comparison shows why.
Scaleway is the closest thing Europe has to a hyperscaler in product shape. Part of the iliad Group, the French provider lists over 100 products across four multi-AZ regions in France, the Netherlands and Poland: managed Kubernetes (Kapsule for single cloud, Kosmos for multi-cloud), serverless containers, functions and jobs, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB, S3-compatible storage, and GPU instances including H100, L40S and L4 for AI work. It is HDS-certified for French healthcare data. If your architecture leans on managed services rather than plain VMs, start with the Scaleway vs AWS comparison.
The rest of the field
The table follows the same relevance scoring we use across the cloud hosting category: a measure of feature depth and maturity, not of who paid to be listed.
| Provider | Country | Free tier | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scaleway | France | No | Hyperscaler-like range: Kubernetes, serverless, GPUs |
| Hetzner Cloud | Germany | Yes | Price and performance for VMs and dedicated servers |
| Clever Cloud | France | No | PaaS: git push deployment on French infrastructure |
| Netcup | Germany | No | Budget VPS and root servers with German certifications |
| Leaseweb | Netherlands | No | Bare metal, CDN and network scale |
| IONOS | Germany | No | Full stack from domains to VMware private cloud |
| Exoscale | Switzerland | No | Swiss operator with per-country data residency |
| UpCloud | Finland | No | Performance-focused compute with an SLA-backed uptime promise |
| OVHcloud | France | Yes | Breadth plus SecNumCloud for regulated workloads |
A fair sentence on each of the six not covered above. Exoscale takes residency most literally: a Swiss operator with data centres in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria and Croatia, workloads pinned to the country you choose, managed Kubernetes clusters ready in about two minutes, and managed databases including Kafka and OpenSearch, all aimed at enterprise and GDPR-driven buyers. UpCloud is Finnish and performance-led, with data centres across Europe and beyond and a focus on fast storage and network throughput. IONOS, part of Germany’s United Internet group, spans the whole market from shared hosting to VMware private cloud with data centres in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and the US; enterprises comparing it against Microsoft can start with IONOS vs Azure. Clever Cloud is not an IaaS at all but a French PaaS in the Heroku mould: push code via git and it builds, deploys and scales across 15+ runtimes on data centres the company owns in France. Netcup, based in Karlsruhe, is the budget pick, offering reliable VPS and dedicated root servers with ISO 9001, 27001, 27701 and 14001 certifications; the Netcup vs DigitalOcean comparison covers the trade-offs. Leaseweb is the Dutch veteran for bare metal and bandwidth, with 28 data centres worldwide, a 15 Tbps backbone, DDoS protection included and multi-CDN options; see Leaseweb vs AWS for how it stacks up.
We also keep full lists of European alternatives to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and DigitalOcean if you want the wider view.
The real cost difference is egress
Compute prices get the attention, but bandwidth is where the bills actually diverge. AWS charges roughly $0.09 per GB for internet egress at the first pricing tier. Hetzner includes 20 TB of traffic per month on cloud servers in its European locations and charges about €1.19 per additional TB. Serving 20 TB a month costs around $1,800 in egress alone at AWS list prices and nothing extra at Hetzner. OVHcloud goes further and charges no egress fees at all, and Scaleway prices traffic transparently at the product level.
For bandwidth-heavy workloads, video delivery, backup targets, download servers, media APIs, this single line item decides the platform before any feature comparison starts. It is also why like-for-like VM price comparisons understate the gap: a Hetzner Cloud vs DigitalOcean match-up looks close on instance prices and far less close once traffic is included.
When you still need a hyperscaler
Two situations still argue for AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. The first is deep dependence on proprietary managed services: if your architecture is built around DynamoDB, Step Functions, BigQuery or similar services with no drop-in equivalent, a migration means re-engineering, not re-hosting, and that cost has to be justified on its own. The second is genuine multi-region requirements outside Europe; Scaleway, OVHcloud and Hetzner all have some presence beyond the EU, but nothing like the global footprint of the big three.
Portable primitives change the calculation. Workloads built on Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and S3-compatible storage move with little friction, which is exactly what the European providers have standardised on. Teams leaving a PaaS have the same choice in miniature: Clever Cloud is the direct European analogue, while Scaleway’s serverless platform is the rebuild option, as the Scaleway vs Heroku comparison lays out.
Jurisdiction and the move itself
All nine providers here operate under European or Swiss law, which keeps your infrastructure outside the direct reach of US legal process; our guide to the US CLOUD Act for European companies explains why that matters more than data centre location. During any migration, monitor uptime from a service outside both the old and new platform so you see cutover problems the way your users do; our European uptime monitoring guide covers the options.
Frequently asked questions
Are European clouds cheaper than AWS?
For compute and bandwidth, usually yes, often by a large margin. Hetzner’s cloud servers with 20 TB of included traffic are the clearest case, and OVHcloud charges no egress fees at all. The gap narrows when you rely on many managed services, because fewer direct equivalents means engineering time replaces the savings.
Can I run Kubernetes on a European cloud?
Yes. Scaleway (Kapsule and Kosmos), OVHcloud, Hetzner (with a free control plane) and Exoscale all offer managed Kubernetes, and Exoscale clusters are ready in about two minutes. Because Kubernetes is portable by design, it is also the lowest-friction path off a hyperscaler.
What is SecNumCloud?
SecNumCloud is a qualification issued by ANSSI, the French national cybersecurity agency, for cloud services meeting strict security requirements, including protection from non-European legal access in its current version. OVHcloud holds it, and Clever Cloud offers SecNumCloud-grade environments through a partnership. It matters mainly for French public sector bodies and operators of essential services.
Do European providers have GPUs for AI work?
Yes. Scaleway operates thousands of GPUs including H100, L40S and L4 instances, OVHcloud offers AI training and managed model hosting, and Exoscale and Leaseweb both sell dedicated NVIDIA GPU servers. For inference without managing hardware, Scaleway and OVHcloud both provide hosted AI endpoints.