We recently release our Top 10 for Cloud Compute North America and Europe. With the help of our automated platform we tested near to 20 cloud providers and selected the most interesting per region. These studies outline performance/price value of Cloud Computes and bound Block Storages. We focus on maximum performance delivered by general purpose infrastructures, their associated costs and where is the best efficiency per dollar spent.

Context

For each provider, we tested 4 sets of VMs:
Category CPU RAM Extra storage
Small 2 4 100
Medium 4 8 150
Large 8 16 200
XLarge 16 32 500
From all the performance and pricing data we collected, the vendor selection was agnostically done, only by numbers with the following key metrics:
  • Hourly price
  • CPU Multi-thread performance
  • Volume IOPS
  • Volume bandwidth

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Inherent biases

1. Hourly prices

De facto, most of the hyperscalers are penalized by the documents' approach. Despite they could propose computing power at the edge of technology, the design of our subject doesn't take in account the long term billing options such as 1 year or 3 years. These options are only proposed by big players such as Alibaba, AWS or Azure and you can consider up to 60% of discount if you subscribe to them.

2. Volume throttling

Next, hyperscalers generally throttle volume performance, where small and medium size vendors let you reach 3GB/sec and/or 1MIOPS with block storage, the big players stop around 3000 IOPS. This may seem low but it is guaranteed, where the possible 1MIOPS are neither stable nor predictable.

3. Compute focused

Finally, documents focus on compute: virtual machines and volumes, but cloud providers have so much to propose and especially big players. Server-less, Object Storage, DBaaS, with the variety of existing services, the whole value of a cloud vendors cannot be just about Cloud Compute.

Our insights at a glance

For those who don't want to read the reports, here's a small list of the leading providers:
Provider Price Compute Storage Region
Hetzner Very aggressive Average Average Europe
Kamatera Low Average High Worldwide
UpCloud Average High Guaranteed very high Worldwide
Oracle Cloud Average Average High Worldwide

What next ?

These documents will be renewed and their methodology improved. We want to bring more infrastructure characteristics like network and RAM. In the pursuit of objectivity, we think that we must diversify our reports to answer real life problematics such as:
  • Small and medium size providers
  • Hyperscalers
  • Country based
  • Provider origin based
  • Object storage, CDNs, DBaaS, Kubernetes, etc
We also want to digitalize this kind of report. Instead of just PDF, we wish to let consumer explore data with a web application. This will also let user appreciate more than 10 vendors without decrease reading quality. For the meantime, do not hesitate take a look at our document center.
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