Tilaa

What Tilaa actually is

Tilaa is a Dutch cloud provider that has been building and operating cloud infrastructure since 2008 out of 's-Hertogenbosch. It is a small company by hyperscaler standards, and that shows in the product: one core offering (KVM-based Cloud VPS), a short list of add-on storage products, and a strong emphasis on doing everything inside the Netherlands. The pitch is data sovereignty first — "what happens in Europe stays in Europe" — backed by ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISAE 3402 Type 1 and PCI certification claims on their site.

The product itself is conventional in the good sense. A Cloud VPS runs on KVM with 1 to 24 vCPU cores, 1 GB to 192 GB RAM, and 60 GB to 1280 GB of local enterprise SSD in RAID10. Every server ships with a dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 address, reverse DNS, a virtual network option, and an Amazon EC2-compatible metadata service — a detail that matters if you automate image builds with cloud-init, since stock cloud-init works without customization. Management is via the MyTilaa dashboard or the Tilaa API, and you can deploy standard Windows and Linux images plus preinstalled appliances and control panels (cPanel, DirectAdmin).

Around the VPS core sits a small set of infrastructure add-ons: redundant block storage (SSD or HDD), high-available NFS shares, floating IPs for failover, snapshots, and managed backups. Tilaa also runs Nexaa, a container/application platform for deploying containers and managed database and queue clusters — we view that as a separate product line and would evaluate it on its own merits rather than as part of the VPS decision.

Pricing: what you really pay

Tilaa publishes three predefined packages plus a custom configurator, all ex-VAT. The entry "Beginner" package is €12.74 per month at list price, currently discounted to €8.28 per month for the first six months, and includes 1 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD storage and 1 core at 70% share. "Standard" lists at €35.64 per month (€18.44 per month with the first-six-month discount) with 4 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD and 2 cores at 80%. "Professional" lists at €73.77 per month (€51.64 per month discounted) with 8 GB RAM, 320 GB SSD and 4 cores at 60%. The custom configurator starts from the same €8.28 per month floor and scales to 24 cores and 192 GB RAM.

Two things to internalize before comparing these numbers against our /benchmarks database. First, the headline price is promotional: after six months you pay the list price, which is 40-60% higher depending on the package. Second, the CPU figures are honest but restrictive — "1 Core @ 70%" means a guaranteed share of one core, not a full core, and even the Professional package is 4 cores at 60%. Most competitors quote full vCPU shares at 100% (usually fair-use on shared silicon, but still). Tilaa deserves credit for printing the percentage at all; very few providers do. It also means you cannot line up "4 vCPU" specs across providers and assume parity.

What is included in every plan is genuinely useful: unlimited traffic on a fair-use policy (no per-TB billing surprises), DDoS protection at layer 4, one free snapshot, dedicated IPv4 and IPv6, and a 14-day free cancellation window. What costs extra: managed backups (€0.161 per GB per month, with backups every 4 hours aggregated into daily, weekly and monthly restore points, cross-stored between their two Dutch datacenters), additional snapshots beyond the first (which is kept a maximum of 3 months), block storage, NFS shares and floating IPs. Licenses — cPanel, Windows, and so on — are billed on top as usual.

One honesty note: the Tilaa website currently sells these plans on monthly terms. We found older references to hourly billing in our own database, but we could not verify hourly billing on any current Tilaa page, so we treat this as a monthly-billed provider until they say otherwise. If metered billing matters to your workload, confirm the billing increment with Tilaa sales before you build a business case on it.

Performance & infrastructure

Tilaa's hardware claims are specific: local enterprise SSD in RAID10 handling up to 100K IOPS per their spec sheet, a 1 Gbps network interface per server, KVM virtualization, and two redundant Dutch datacenters with backups cross-stored between them. The 1 Gbps NIC is the main bandwidth ceiling — there is no per-TB transfer quota, but you will not get 10 Gbps networking at this price either.

We have not benchmarked Tilaa ourselves — it is not in our 2026-04-01 sysbench/fio/iperf3 test set — so we will not quote performance numbers here. What we can say from the spec sheet: RAID10 local SSD is the architecture that produced the strongest random I/O results in our own testing of other providers (compare our Nuremberg and Helsinki runs on /benchmarks), so the design point is right. The 100K IOPS figure is a vendor ceiling on the storage layer, not a per-VM guarantee; on a 1-core-at-70% entry slice, your effective throughput will be bounded by CPU share long before the disks saturate.

On reliability, Tilaa states a 99.95% uptime SLA across the site, with a 24/7 SLA on support included and a claim of response within one hour during office hours. We note a conflicting "99.99% uptime guaranteed" banner on their infra-stack page; 99.95% is the figure that appears in their headline product pages and SLA language, so that is what we record. Their component comparison page also states 99.95% with redundant infrastructure. Eighteen years of operating history is itself a data point: this is not a company that appeared last quarter.

Where it falls short

Geography is the obvious limit. Tilaa runs exclusively from Dutch datacenters — there is no EU multi-region footprint, no US or APAC presence, and no edge network. If your users are in Asia or the Americas, or if you need cross-region redundancy as a compliance requirement, Tilaa is not your provider. The datacenter count is two, both in the Netherlands.

The CPU-share percentages are the second real constraint. A "4 Core @ 60%" package is meaningfully less compute than a 4-core package from a provider that grants full shares, and the pricing does not discount accordingly at list rates. Tilaa is transparent about it, which we respect, but transparency does not make the constraint disappear — for sustained CPU-heavy work (build servers, transcoding, busy databases) you will need to size up relative to competitors.

Third, the fine print on the freebies: the free snapshot lives a maximum of three months, managed backups are a paid add-on rather than included, and traffic is "unlimited" under a fair-use policy rather than a committed allowance. Fine for normal workloads; if you are running a CDN node or a file-distribution service, get the fair-use threshold in writing first.

Finally, support quality is the standard small-provider trade-off. Direct access to engineers and personal contact is exactly what Tilaa sells, and for a Dutch SMB that is often worth more than a chatbot queue. But office-hours-first response times and a small team mean that obscure problems (Windows licensing edge cases, complex networking) may take longer than at a provider with a 24/7 follow-the-sun NOC.

Who should pick this

Our pick for Dutch and Belgian organizations that need provable EU data sovereignty and want a provider small enough to talk to. Healthcare, government-adjacent and legal workloads in the Netherlands are the sweet spot: Dutch jurisdiction, Dutch datacenters, ISO 27001 plus ISAE 3402 Type 1, and a contract you can actually read. It is also a reasonable choice for developers who value the EC2-compatible metadata service and API-driven management, and who prefer a fixed monthly bill over hyperscaler metering.

We would not pick Tilaa for multi-region architectures, GPU work, bare metal, or workloads where every euro of price-performance counts — on pure spec-per-euro, larger EU providers with full CPU shares undercut it. See /category/vps-providers for how it lines up against the rest of the field.

Key takeaways

• Dutch provider since 2008, two redundant Netherlands datacenters, ISO 27001/9001 and ISAE 3402 Type 1 — the strongest part of the offer is jurisdiction, not raw specs.
• Entry plans from €8.28 per month promotional (€12.74 list) with 1 GB RAM / 60 GB SSD; expect list pricing after six months.
• CPU cores are quoted as percentage shares (70-80% per core), which is unusually honest and unusually restrictive — size accordingly.
• Unlimited fair-use traffic, layer-4 DDoS protection and one free snapshot (kept 3 months) are included; backups (€0.161 per GB per month) and extra snapshots cost extra.
• 99.95% uptime SLA published (ignore the stray 99.99% marketing banner); no published per-TB bandwidth allowance and no hourly billing evidence on current pages.
• Not the pick for multi-region, GPU, or bare-metal needs — see /benchmarks for tested alternatives in that league.

Sources

• https://www.tilaa.com/
• https://www.tilaa.com/en
• https://www.tilaa.com/en/cloud-vps
• https://www.tilaa.com/pricing
• https://www.tilaa.com/infra-stack
• https://www.tilaa.com/infra-stack/components