Exoscale

Exoscale is a European infrastructure-as-a-service provider founded in 2011 in Lausanne. A1 Digital, part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group, has owned it since 2017. Its catalogue covers virtual machine instances, including GPU and storage-optimised types; Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS); managed databases for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Grafana and Thanos; S3-compatible Simple Object Storage; DNS; load balancers; private networks; and key management. Its zones are in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Croatia, so all data stays in Europe. It holds ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018, BSI C5, SOC 2, HDS and TISAX certifications. That makes it a fit for regulated European organisations, SaaS companies and public bodies that want to avoid US hyperscalers. Pricing is pay as you go and billed per second, with no up-front fees or commitments. Instances are charged per hour, and local disk and snapshots are charged per GiB-hour. Inbound traffic is free, and each instance gets about 1 TiB of outbound traffic per month, pooled across the organisation. The SKS Starter control plane is free; SKS Pro adds a 99.95% SLA for an hourly fee. Database plans come in Hobbyist, Startup, Business and Premium tiers. Paid support plans cost 50 or 500 per month, and Enterprise support costs 5% of usage with a 1,500 monthly minimum. Exoscale works with Terraform, Ansible, Packer, Helm, a CLI and an API. Its main limitation is a much smaller service catalogue and community ecosystem than AWS, Azure or OVHcloud. It also has no shared or managed WordPress hosting for small sites.