Aruba Cloud

What Aruba Cloud actually is

Aruba Cloud is the infrastructure arm of Aruba S.p.A., an Italian company founded in 1994 and headquartered in Ponte San Pietro, near Bergamo. Better known in Europe for domains, hosting and PEC certified email, Aruba is a genuinely large incumbent: the company claims 16 million users and runs its own data center campuses, including the Global Cloud Data Center (IT3) in Ponte San Pietro — a 200,000 m² site built to ANSI/TIA-942 Rating 4 standards — plus IT1 and IT2 in Arezzo, the Rome Hyper Cloud Data Center (IT4), and Czech facilities in Prague (CZ1) and Ktiš (CZ2). Partner facilities in Frankfurt, Paris, London and Warsaw extend the cloud regions across six European countries.

The product line spans Cloud VPS (OpenStack-based virtual servers), OpenStack Cloud Server (the "PRO" tier with guaranteed resources), Virtual Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Director, bare metal, GPU on demand, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Backup. For this review we focus on the entry VPS and PRO compute lines, since those are what most of our /category/vps-providers audience is comparing.

The pitch is straightforward European infrastructure: data residency under GDPR, Italian and EU datacenter choices, transparent per-plan specs, and a company that owns its buildings rather than renting someone else's. In our view that ownership story matters more than marketing suggests — when Euronext moved its core data center services in 2022, it moved them into Aruba's Bergamo campus.

Pricing: what you really pay

Two price lists, and the difference between them is where people get confused.

Cloud VPS OpenStack is the budget line, advertised "starting from €2.49 + VAT / month". The table is public and specific: VPS O1I1 gives 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB storage and 2 TB/month of traffic for €2.49 + VAT; VPS O1I2 steps to 2 GB RAM, 40 GB storage and 5 TB traffic for €4.49; VPS O2A4 offers 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB and 25 TB for €6.29; VPS O4A8 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB, 50 TB) is €11.79; VPS O8A16 (8 vCPU, 16 GB, 160 GB, 100 TB) is €19.89; and the top VPS O16A32 (16 vCPU, 32 GB, 320 GB, 100 TB) is €38.90. All prices exclude VAT and exclude licenses and add-on services. Each plan ships with one public IP, a /64 IPv6 allocation, 1 Gb/s connectivity, and NVMe storage.

OpenStack Cloud Server (PRO) is the performance line, billed hourly, monthly or yearly. The general-purpose entry PRO O1A2 (1 vCPU, 2 GB, 20 GB) lists at €0.019 + VAT per hour or €13.20 + VAT per month; PRO O2A4 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB) at €0.029/hour or €20.10/month. Aruba's pricing page currently shows these monthly figures halved — €6.60 and €10.05 respectively, with the old price struck through — so treat the higher figures as the honest list price and the discount as a promotion. Scaling up, PRO O16A32 (16 vCPU, 32 GB, 360 GB) runs €0.22/hour or €152.60/month list, and additional disks cost €0.02 + VAT per hour per 10 GB. Extra public IPv4 addresses are €0.005/hour (€3.65/month); IPv6 /64 per IPv4 is free. Windows licensing is extra at €0.0180/hour per vCPU.

The watch-outs: VAT is excluded from every quoted number, which in Italy is 22%; the entry VPS price has moved before (our database row claimed a €1/month entry plan, which no longer exists); and "unlimited traffic" applies to the PRO line, while the VPS line caps transfer per plan. Object Storage is a separate metered product from €0.011 + VAT per GB per month (pay-per-use from €0.00028 + VAT per hour per 10 GB, or packages from €60.00 + VAT per month).

Performance & infrastructure

The datacenter footprint is Aruba's strongest card. Italian sites are Aruba-owned and certified Rating 4 (Tier IV-equivalent), with reciprocal interconnection between the two Arezzo facilities, groundwater cooling at the Bergamo campus, and more than 500 Gbps of connectivity across the network. EU data residency is structural: data processed on European regions stays in European facilities. We have not benchmarked Aruba machines ourselves — our /benchmarks numbers cover other providers — so we will not quote throughput we did not measure. Third-party listings describe the PRO line as AMD-based with software-defined NVMe storage and KVM virtualization with guaranteed (non-burstable) resources, which is the right shape for production workloads.

Network specs per plan are generous for the price: the entry VPS includes 2 TB/month of transfer at 1 Gb/s, scaling to 100 TB/month on the larger VPS sizes, with a /64 IPv6 block free per IPv4 address. OpenStack APIs and a REST/SOAP API suite are documented in Aruba's knowledge base, covering compute, storage, backup, Kubernetes and network primitives — enough to automate properly rather than clicking through a control panel.

Reliability posture: the company has run since 1994 and its facilities host regulated customers, including Euronext's migrated core services. That is a track record we weight heavily. The published SLA numbers, however, are lower than the market's top tier and split by product — details below.

Where it falls short

Start with the SLA. Aruba's own SLA page would not load during our research, so we rely on third-party documentation: Cloud Server PRO is listed at 99.95% uptime, Cloud VPS OpenStack at 99.90%, and the older VMware-based Cloud VPS at 99.80%. Even taking the best figure, 99.95% trails the 99.99% that hyperscalers and some European challengers commit to, and a 99.80% floor allows roughly 17 hours of downtime per year. For business-critical hosting, that gap is real; confirm current terms with Aruba before signing.

Documentation and tooling lag the market leaders. The control panel feels dated next to Hetzner Cloud or DigitalOcean, English-language docs are thinner than the Italian ones, and the product line is fragmented — VPS, PRO, VPC, bare metal and GPU each live on their own pricing island with different billing rules. Speaking of billing: the VPS line is monthly, while PRO supports hourly, monthly or annual plans with different downgrade semantics (hourly downgrades apply immediately; monthly and annual ones at renewal). It works, but it takes reading.

Backups are not included. Free snapshots exist but are reportedly purged after two days, and Cloud Backup is a paid, separate product. Plan accordingly — a snapshot habit on Aruba's VPS is not a backup strategy. There is no free tier either, and no managed VPS tier: you get root and you run the server.

Finally, price comparisons need care. Every headline number is ex-VAT, promotions are mixed into the pricing tables with struck-through "original" prices, and license fees (Windows, Plesk) sit on top.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European businesses that care where data physically sits and want a provider with its own Tier IV-equivalent campuses. If you are in Italy, or selling into the EU under GDPR, Aruba Cloud is a credible answer to "where do we run this so the data stays in Europe?" — and the entry VPS pricing is low enough to experiment.

We would also point budget-focused EU users at the VPS line: €2.49 + VAT per month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB and 2 TB of transfer is competitive on paper, and the per-plan specs are published in full.

We would not pick it for latency-sensitive global audiences outside Europe (the footprint is EU-only), for teams that need 99.99% contractual uptime, or for users who want a modern, fast-moving developer experience — Hetzner Cloud and UpCloud feel a generation ahead on panel and API polish. If you need hourly-billed general compute with room to grow, look at the PRO line rather than the VPS line, and if you need object storage with S3 tooling, Aruba's S3-compatible Cloud Object Storage works but meter it carefully against AWS S3 and Backblaze B2.

Key takeaways

• European provider with its own Rating 4 data center campuses in Italy (Bergamo, Arezzo, Rome) plus Czech facilities; six-country cloud footprint with GDPR data residency.
• Entry Cloud VPS O1I1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB NVMe, 2 TB/month traffic at €2.49 + VAT per month; the top VPS plan is €38.90 + VAT for 16 vCPU/32 GB.
• PRO (OpenStack Cloud Server) bills hourly, monthly or annually — €0.019 + VAT/hour for the 1 vCPU/2 GB entry — with AMD CPUs and guaranteed resources.
• SLA is the weak point: 99.95% on PRO, 99.90% on Cloud VPS OpenStack per third-party docs — below the 99.99% market benchmark.
• Free snapshots reportedly expire after two days; Cloud Backup is paid and separate, and there is no free tier or managed VPS option.
• Watch VAT (excluded from all quoted prices) and struck-through promo pricing in the tables; every headline number needs the +VAT suffix.

Sources

• https://www.arubacloud.com/vps/
• https://www.arubacloud.com/openstack-cloud-server/
• https://www.arubacloud.com/pricing/public-cloud/openstack-cloud-server
• https://www.arubacloud.com/pricing
• https://www.arubacloud.com/cloud-storage/cloud-object-storage
• https://aruba.it/en/about-us.aspx
• https://kb.arubacloud.com/en/awi-account/using-credit/price-plans-cloud-server-pro.aspx
• https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/hosters/aruba_cloud