Exoscale

What Exoscale actually is

Exoscale is the European sovereign cloud we point compliance-heavy buyers toward when AWS or Azure is contractually awkward but Hetzner-class budget hosts lack the managed services. It is operated by Akenes SA, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a member of A1 Digital — part of the A1 Group, the Austrian telecom. The company was founded in 2011 and has spent fifteen years building a self-service public cloud with a deliberately narrow scope: compute instances, block storage, S3-compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, load balancing, DNS and CDN. No marketplace of hundreds of services, no billing labyrinth — a European IaaS platform with the pieces most teams actually deploy.

The compliance story is the headline and it is genuine rather than marketing. Data stays in European zones under GDPR and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, outside US Cloud Act jurisdiction, with ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 2 and the German BSI C5 criteria on the certification list. For a Swiss bank, a German hospital group or any team with a data residency clause they cannot negotiate away, that combination is the reason to shortlist Exoscale.

Pricing: what you really pay

Exoscale bills by the second, with a flat rate across all zones and no upfront commitment. Accounts can be denominated in CHF, EUR or USD, and there is no separate rate card per region — deploying in Zurich costs the same as deploying in Sofia, which simplifies cost modeling more than it sounds. Inbound traffic is free.

The entry point is the Standard Micro instance: 1 core, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB minimum local storage, at 0.00729 CHF per hour. That works out to roughly 5.3 CHF per month at 730 hours, and it is worth noting that our database previously listed entry pricing as about EUR 8-9 per month — the true entry figure is lower, though local storage is billed separately per GiB-hour on top of the instance rate. The rest of the standard ladder is published on the pricing page and in Exoscale's own price-adjustment blog: Tiny (1 GB/1 core) at 0.01458 per hour, Small (2 GB/2 cores) at 0.02333, Medium (4 GB/2 cores) at 0.04666, Large (8 GB/4 cores) at 0.09333, up through Titan (128 GB/16 cores) at 1.49333 per hour and Jumbo (225 GB/24 cores) at 2.24. CPU-optimized, memory-optimized and storage-optimized families run the same per-second metering; storage-optimized boxes lower the per-GB cost by more than 60 percent by putting up to 15 TB of local disk behind a Jumbo-class instance.

Three pricing details deserve attention in our view. First, instance price and disk price are split — the number on the instance row is not your full bill, and storage is metered per GiB-hour. Second, snapshots and backups are storage you pay for, not free inclusions. Third, managed Kubernetes has a two-tier structure that we like: the SKS Starter cluster is free (no SLA, aimed at development and testing), while the SKS Pro cluster adds a high-availability control plane, etcd backups, Karpenter autoscaling and a 99.95% SLA at a per-hour fee. An IPv6 Network Load Balancer costs 0.02083 per hour, about 40 percent less than the IPv4 version because Elastic IPv6 addresses are free. Volume discounts exist for 12-month commitments on compute, but the on-demand grid is the honest reference price.

Performance & infrastructure

Exoscale runs eight live zones across Europe: Zurich (CH-DK-2) and Geneva (CH-GVA-2) in Equinix facilities, Frankfurt (DE-FRA-1) in Equinix, Munich (DE-MUC-1), two Vienna zones (AT-VIE-1 at the Arsenal and AT-VIE-2 in A1's next-generation datacenter), Sofia (BG-SOF-1) and Zagreb (HR-ZAG-1) in A1 facilities. A Madrid zone (ES-MAD-1) at the Adam Madrid TecnoAlcalá datacenter has been announced for Spain and Southern Europe. The network runs a 400 Gbps internal backbone with peering to major local exchange points, and Exoscale publishes measured latency to European capitals from its nearest zones — figures like 4.82 ms median to Paris and 8.72 ms to London from RIPE Atlas probes. We have not run our own benchmark suite against Exoscale, so treat those as vendor-published numbers; our benchmarks page covers only what we tested ourselves.

Compute runs on KVM with local SSD root volumes, and every instance includes a free public IPv4 and IPv6 address, persistent across reboots, with one-click IPv6 activation. The product line covers the standard shapes (512 MB to 225 GB RAM, 1 to 24 cores), CPU-optimized up to 40 cores, memory-optimized with double RAM per core, storage-optimized up to 15 TB local, and GPU servers carrying NVIDIA A30, V100, A5000, 3080 Ti or A40 cards in selected zones — up to 248 cores and 2.5 TiB RAM on the largest GPU configurations. Persistent block storage, snapshots (including application-consistent Windows snapshots via VSS) and cross-zone bucket replication cover the durability story.

The managed layer is where the platform earns its keep: SKS Kubernetes is CNCF-conformant with managed control planes and autoscaling, and the DBaaS catalog covers MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Valkey, OpenSearch, Grafana and — as of late 2026 — managed ClickHouse. The changelog shows a platform that ships steadily rather than one that rebrands itself every two years, which is a reliability signal we weigh heavily.

Sustainability is handled as engineering rather than slogans: liquid-cooled GPU racks, heat reuse, and a per-workload impact calculator that goes beyond carbon accounting. If your procurement asks about the CO2 footprint of your cloud spend, Exoscale will actually answer.

Where it falls short

The honest critique is price-performance against the value segment. Per-hour rates for equivalent RAM and vCPU are meaningfully above what you pay at European budget providers — our Hetzner Cloud tests put a 2-vCPU/4-GB NVMe machine at €4.35 per month, while a comparable Exoscale Small runs 0.02333 per hour (about 17 CHF per month at 730 hours, plus billed disk). You are paying for sovereign jurisdiction, the managed layer and per-second billing; if none of those matter, the premium is dead money.

Second, the metering split between instance and storage is easy to underestimate. The headline instance rate excludes local storage, snapshots, backups and outbound traffic, and first-time buyers routinely model only the instance line. The transparency is there — nothing is hidden — but the architecture of the bill rewards people who read carefully.

Third, Exoscale is a mid-size provider with a mid-size ecosystem. There is a Terraform provider, a CLI, an API, a marketplace and solid integrations, but the third-party tutorial corpus, community answers and hiring pool of engineers who already know the platform are thinner than for the hyperscalers. Support is organized around customer success engineers and priced support plans; buyers who need 24/7 hand-holding should price the support tier in from the start.

Finally, some capabilities are zone-dependent. GPU servers appear in selected zones only, the Madrid zone is still upcoming, and features like instance snapshots are unavailable on storage-optimized instances. Multi-zone architectures require you to plan around what actually exists where.

Who should pick this

We would pick Exoscale when data residency in Switzerland or the EU is a hard requirement, when you want managed Kubernetes and managed databases without hyperscaler complexity, or when you want sovereign infrastructure with honest per-second billing and no multi-year commit. It is our pick for European fintech, health, government-adjacent and mid-market enterprise workloads that need SOC 2 and BSI C5 checkboxes and an accountable European counterparty.

We would skip it for cost-first deployments serving global audiences, for teams standardised on AWS-native services, and for anyone needing bare-metal or a vast instance-type zoo. If your workload is a handful of small VMs and price is the only axis, the premium over budget European hosts is hard to justify. If your workload is a regulated platform with SLA-bound Kubernetes and managed Postgres in Zurich, nothing cheaper does it.

Key takeaways

• Swiss sovereign cloud (Akenes SA, Lausanne, member of A1 Digital), founded 2011, data kept in European zones outside US Cloud Act reach
• Eight live zones across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Croatia, with Madrid announced; flat pricing across all zones
• Transparent per-second billing: Standard Micro from 0.00729 CHF per hour (about 5.3 CHF per month at 730 hours), instance and disk billed separately
• Strong managed layer: free SKS Starter clusters, SKS Pro with 99.95% SLA and HA control plane, DBaaS for Postgres, MySQL, Kafka, ClickHouse and more
• Certifications that survive procurement: ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 2, BSI C5, GDPR and Swiss FDPA compliance
• Premium over budget European hosts is real — you pay for jurisdiction, per-second billing and managed services, not raw price-performance

Sources

• https://www.exoscale.com/pricing/
• https://www.exoscale.com/lp/swiss-cloud-hosting/
• https://www.exoscale.com/blog/pricing-adjustment-fall-2022/
• https://www.exoscale.com/datacenters/
• https://www.exoscale.com/compute/
• https://www.exoscale.com/sks/
• https://www.exoscale.com/products/
• https://www.exoscale.com/networking
• https://community.exoscale.com/product/compute/instances/overview/
• https://community.exoscale.com/platform/billing/
• https://community.exoscale.com/product/networking
• https://calculator.exoscale.com/support/
• https://changelog.exoscale.com/
• https://www.a1.digital/european-cloud