UpCloud Specs (2026): Starter Against Premium, and What MaxIOPS Is Worth

1. Two families, and what separates them

UpCloud's pricing page now presents Starter and Premium as the two ways to buy a cloud server, with Premium described as the one "for production and business-critical workloads" and as the company's "default recommendation for production use". The published differences are storage, processor generation and SLA rather than cores or memory: Starter runs on "Standard performance SSD storage" and "Previous-gen AMD CPUs" behind a 99.99% SLA, and Premium runs on MaxIOPS storage and "Premium AMD CPUs" behind a 99.999%. Both are billed the same way and both carry the same 28-day monthly cap.

UpCloud frames the Starter family as a price move rather than a new product: "The new Starter plans will replace our current Developer plans at on average 25% less expensive than previous-generation while offering the same 99.99% SLA."

2. The Starter ladder

Nine plans, printed in euros in September 2026, with the port speed and storage stated per row.

Two footnotes attach to this family and both are limits rather than prices. The 1 GB plan is "limited to 5 concurrent deployments per customer", so it is a plan for one small server rather than for spinning up five of them. And every plan is "billed by the starting hour, maximum of 28 days per month", which matters if the intent is to run one server continuously: 28 days of billing covers a month that runs 28 days, and the page does not state what happens on the 29th.

3. The Premium ladder

Twenty-four plans from EUR 5 to EUR 2,552, with MaxIOPS storage sized alongside the memory. The entry rungs and the top of the ladder are below in full because the shape is what matters: MaxIOPS volume rises with the plan rather than being configurable at the cheap end.

The family also lists "1000 Mbps Internet", IPv4 included, 15 global datacentres, 45-second deployment and transfer included, the last of which is qualified by the fair-transfer policy in section 6. The same 28-day billing footnote appears here.

4. MaxIOPS and standard storage, by the numbers UpCloud publishes

Most providers on this site state a storage type and stop. UpCloud puts figures beside its own: MaxIOPS is described as "a high-performance block storage technology developed in-house, delivering over 100k IOPS read performance at 4k block size, regardless of storage size or plan pricing", and standard storage as "up to 10,000 IOPS for general use".

Three qualifiers belong with those numbers. The 100k figure is stated at a 4k block size, which is the block size at which IOPS counts run highest, so a larger block size will show a smaller number. The word "up to" governs both figures. And "regardless of storage size or plan pricing" is a claim about consistency rather than speed: on many platforms a bigger volume gets more IOPS, and UpCloud is stating that its MaxIOPS tier does not work that way. All three figures are UpCloud's own and this site has measured none of them.

One wording on the block storage page predates the current line-up: it says MaxIOPS "is included by default with all Simple plan Cloud Servers", while the pricing page publishes the Starter family with standard storage and lists MaxIOPS as the Premium family's storage. Both statements are UpCloud's, so the phrase most likely refers to an earlier plan name; a buyer who needs MaxIOPS should confirm which family the order is in rather than relying on the sentence.

5. Block storage tiers and their limits

Three tiers, priced per gigabyte per month in euros, all attachable to a cloud server and mixable on the same machine.

The limits are stated on the same page: each device is "sized from 1 GB up to 4 TB, in 1 GB increments" and can be resized later, and a server takes "up to 16 storage devices per Cloud Server, for a maximum of 64 TB". The arithmetic is exact: sixteen 4 TB devices is 64 TB, so the per-device cap and the per-server cap are two views of the same rule rather than independent limits. Archive is described as capped "up to 4TB per device", which is the same figure as the general rule.

One architectural detail is worth carrying: UpCloud says block storage sits on "a dedicated storage backend, separate from the compute hosts, so a host failure doesn't take your data down with it". That is a design statement rather than a benchmark, and it is the kind of claim that shows up in a postmortem rather than in a price table.

6. Zero-cost egress and the Fair Transfer Policy

UpCloud prices egress at zero on every plan and governs it with a policy rather than a meter. The policy says transfer allowance "scales with your cloud spend", so a larger bill carries more transfer, and it addresses the overage directly: "Even if you exceed your monthly share, don't worry, there are no excess fees. We will simply notify you when you reach the fair transfer policy, and may reduce the bandwidth of your Cloud Servers to 100 Mbps for the rest of the month."

That is the trade to understand before building on it: exceeding the share does not produce a bill, it produces a slower server until the month ends. The alternative is opt-in: "you may opt in to a paid transfer model at $0.01/GB", which the page describes as unrestricted egress with costs only on the portion above the fair share. The policy also names who is likely to need that: "Only the most intense high-network-traffic use cases, such as video streaming, CDN, or VPN providers, might need to read the transfer terms."

Note the currency switch inside the policy: the plans are printed in euros, and the transfer overage is printed in dollars.

7. Prepaid, hourly, and capped at 28 days

UpCloud bills from a prepaid balance rather than by invoice: "UpCloud uses a prepaid system where you can add balance to your account by making a payment at any time. Your services are then deducted from this balance on an hourly basis." Both plan families carry the same footnote under their tables: "billed by the starting hour, maximum of 28 days per month".

The currency question has a published answer as well: "We support payments made in EUR, USD, GBP, and SGP. Payments that are not in EUR will be exchanged to EUR. The day's exchange rate, which is the market rate of the currency, will be applied." So the euro price on the page is the price, and a card in another currency settles at the day's rate rather than at a locked one. UpCloud also states that prices "exclude any applicable local taxes".

8. Fifteen datacentres, three in the US

The locations page lists fifteen, of which three are American: San Jose (US-SJO1), New York (US-NYC1) and Chicago (US-CHI1). The rest are Helsinki, London, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Madrid and Frankfurt in Europe, plus Singapore and Sydney in Asia Pacific. For US buyers that is both coasts and the middle, which is a wider spread than several providers on this site, and the US datacenter guide maps the three to the latency each one suits.

9. What UpCloud does not publish

• A processor model. "Premium AMD CPUs" and "Previous-gen AMD CPUs" are the statements; the demo environment mentions 5th Gen AMD EPYC without tying it to a plan.
• What happens on the 29th day of a month under the 28-day billing cap, on the pricing page read for this one.
• The transfer share itself. The Fair Transfer Policy says it scales with spend and does not print a number per plan, so the threshold is not knowable in advance from the page.
• A latency figure for MaxIOPS, or a throughput figure to go with the IOPS numbers.
• An IOPS figure for Archive storage. Two of the three tiers have one; the cheapest does not.
• Which datacentres stock which plan, on the pages read for this one.

10. Measuring the parts that are not published

The processor, the disk and the achievable throughput are measurable on the server itself. A buyer who wants those figures can run lscpu for the CPU model, sysbench cpu --threads=1 --time=60 run for single-thread speed, a 4K fio run for the disk, and iperf3 against a machine near the users for the network. This site publishes none of those measurements. The benchmarks hub has the commands and the reasoning, and the storage page compares what other providers publish about their disks.

The fio run is the one that matters most here, because the claim to check is a block-size-specific one: the same test at 4k and at 64k will produce very different numbers, and UpCloud quotes the 4k figure. Running both on the same server is the way to see how much of the 100k claim survives at the block size an application actually uses. Hourly billing is what makes that cheap: the server can be created, measured and deleted the same afternoon.