UpCloud is a Finnish cloud provider that has sold infrastructure since 2011, with 15 data centers across four continents and a 99.999% uptime SLA on its production tiers. Raff Technologies is a US cloud provider running 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers from a single us-east region. Both sell shared-vCPU cloud servers, managed databases, managed Kubernetes and object storage, so this is a platform comparison rather than a server comparison. At the matched production shape, Raff General Purpose is $13.99/month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 80 GB NVMe; the equivalent UpCloud Premium plan is about $30.14 with 50 GB.
UpCloud VPS and Raff at a glance
UpCloud sells three cloud-server lines. Starter is the budget tier on previous-generation AMD CPUs and Standard SSD, from €3/month with a 99.99% SLA. Premium is the production tier on newer AMD CPUs with MaxIOPS storage included, from €5/month at 99.999%. Cloud Native decouples compute from storage, from €12/month, and stops charging compute while a server is stopped. UpCloud publishes no CPU-dedication guarantee on any of the three — its only dedicated-hardware product is Private Cloud, from €3,190/month.
Around the servers sits a substantial catalog: Managed Databases for PostgreSQL and MySQL from €9/month, Valkey from €8/month and OpenSearch from €100/month; Managed Kubernetes with a free development control plane and €60/month for production; block storage in MaxIOPS, Standard and Archive tiers; managed NFS file storage; object storage; load balancers; NAT and VPN gateways; GPU servers with NVIDIA L4 through B200; and Private Cloud on dedicated hardware.
Raff Technologies runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers from us-east, with a 99.9% uptime SLA backed by service credits, rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot and 4.6/5 on G2. VMs run AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe storage in two lines: General Purpose with shared vCPU from $4.99/month, and CPU-Optimized with dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Every plan includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, automated Daily or Weekly backup schedules, uncapped snapshots, firewall controls, private networking and full root access.
Raff's platform covers managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, managed Kubernetes with a free control plane and workers from $9.99/month, Functions with a free monthly tier, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month, and Raff Apps from $3/month.
One structural difference is worth stating up front: UpCloud has 15 regions to Raff's one. If your users sit outside North America, that matters more than anything else on this page.
UpCloud VPS pricing vs Raff pricing
UpCloud publishes no CPU-dedication guarantee on Starter, Premium or Cloud Native, which makes Raff General Purpose the like-for-like match and means Raff CPU-Optimized has no UpCloud counterpart short of Private Cloud.
Premium is the fair comparison: both include storage in the plan price, both are the production tier, both carry the vendor's top SLA.
| Shape | Raff General Purpose | UpCloud Premium |
|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 1 GB | $4.99 — 25 GB NVMe | €5 ≈ $5.80 — 25 GB MaxIOPS |
| 2 vCPU / 2 GB | $8.49 — 40 GB NVMe | €16 ≈ $18.55 — 50 GB MaxIOPS |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $13.99 — 80 GB NVMe | €26 ≈ $30.14 — 50 GB MaxIOPS |
| 2 vCPU / 8 GB | $27.99 — 160 GB NVMe | €38 ≈ $44.05 — 100 GB MaxIOPS |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $30.99 — 160 GB NVMe | €52 ≈ $60.28 — 100 GB MaxIOPS |
| 4 vCPU / 16 GB | $52.99 — 320 GB NVMe | €92 ≈ $106.66 — 150 GB MaxIOPS |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | $59.99 — 320 GB NVMe | €148 ≈ $171.58 — 200 GB MaxIOPS |
| 8 vCPU / 32 GB | $115.99 — 640 GB NVMe | €192 ≈ $222.59 — 200 GB MaxIOPS |
Raff General Purpose against UpCloud Premium — both shared vCPU with storage included. UpCloud prices read 2026-08-18, exclude local taxes, converted at €1 = $1.1593 (ECB, 2026-08-17).
Raff is 37% to 65% cheaper at every matched tier above the entry shape, and includes more storage at every one of them — 320 GB against 200 GB at 8 vCPU / 16 GB, 640 GB against 200 GB at 8 vCPU / 32 GB. Only the 1 vCPU / 1 GB entry is close, and Raff is still 14% lower there.
UpCloud's Starter line for reference
Starter is UpCloud's budget tier, and it is genuinely cheaper than Raff:
| Shape | Raff General Purpose | UpCloud Starter |
|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 1 GB | $4.99 — 25 GB | €3 ≈ $3.48 — 10 GB |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $13.99 — 80 GB | €12 ≈ $13.91 — 30 GB |
| 2 vCPU / 8 GB | $27.99 — 160 GB | €18 ≈ $20.87 — 40 GB |
| 4 vCPU / 16 GB | $52.99 — 320 GB | €28 ≈ $32.46 — 50 GB |
What Starter gives up is stated by UpCloud itself: previous-generation AMD CPUs, Standard SSD rather than MaxIOPS, a 99.99% SLA instead of 99.999%, and 250–500 Mbit/s rather than 1000 Mbps. Storage is three to six times smaller at every tier. If your workload fits that envelope, Starter is the cheaper buy and this page will not argue otherwise.
Cloud Native — compute and storage billed separately
Cloud Native decouples the two: compute from €12/month for 4 GB / 1 core, with storage added at €0.220/GB-month for MaxIOPS, €0.085 for Standard, or €0.056 for Archive. A 2-core, 4 GB Cloud Native server with 80 GB Standard storage works out at about €21.80 ≈ $25.27/month against Raff's $13.99 with 80 GB included.
The model is useful when storage and compute scale independently, or when a stopped server should stop billing — UpCloud does not charge for compute while a Cloud Native server is stopped, which Raff does not offer.
Bandwidth
Neither provider bills standard outbound transfer per gigabyte. Raff includes unmetered transfer on a 3 Gbps port. UpCloud includes transfer under a Fair Transfer Policy with zero-cost egress, at 250–500 Mbit/s on Starter and 1000 Mbps on Premium and Cloud Native. Raff's port is three times faster than UpCloud's fastest tier; UpCloud's policy is a fair-share model rather than a hard cap.
Automated backups
Raff includes a free backup and snapshot storage pool — 50 GB per account plus 10–15% of each VM's disk — with Daily and Weekly schedules you configure, retention from 1 to 365 days, and uncapped snapshots. Storage above the pool is $0.06/GB-month. UpCloud Simple Backups are priced by server plan or by storage size and retention schedule, so backup cost scales with what you keep rather than being bundled.
UpCloud VPS performance vs Raff
Methodology
Measured 30 March 2026 on Ubuntu 24.04, single-pass: Raff CPU-Optimized 2 vCPU / 4 GB in us-east against UpCloud Cloud Native 2 cores / 4 GB in Helsinki. Paid at standard rates by Raff Technologies, with no sponsorship or rebate from UpCloud. UpCloud publishes no dedicated-vCPU line, so no same-class pairing exists.
Results
| Benchmark | Raff | UpCloud | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 single-core | 2,266 | 1,627 | Raff 1.39x higher |
| Geekbench 6 multi-core | 4,057 | 2,944 | Raff 1.38x higher |
| sysbench CPU single-thread | 2,171 ops/s | 1,591 ops/s | Raff 1.36x higher |
| sysbench CPU multi-thread | 4,320 ops/s | 3,167 ops/s | Raff 1.36x higher |
| sysbench memory read | 17.79 GiB/s | 10.41 GiB/s | Raff 1.71x higher |
| sysbench memory write | 11.42 GiB/s | 4.70 GiB/s | Raff 2.43x higher |
| fio 64K read | 1,459.6 MB/s | 401.5 MB/s | Raff 3.64x higher |
| fio 64K write | 1,467.3 MB/s | 403.6 MB/s | Raff 3.64x higher |
| sysbench random read 4K | 52.31 MiB/s | 151.07 MiB/s | UpCloud 2.89x higher |
| sysbench random write 4K | 25.15 MiB/s | 42.55 MiB/s | UpCloud 1.69x higher |
| sysbench sequential read 128K | 1,730 MiB/s | 401.38 MiB/s | Raff 4.31x higher |
| sysbench sequential write 128K | 664.85 MiB/s | 398.93 MiB/s | Raff 1.67x higher |
| Best IPv4 download | 3,635 Mbps | 1,075 Mbps | Raff 3.38x higher |
| Best IPv4 upload | 9,574 Mbps | 6,154 Mbps | Raff 1.56x higher |
What the results tell us
Raff led CPU by roughly 1.36x to 1.39x on both Geekbench and sysbench, memory write by 2.43x, sequential and 64K disk throughput by 1.67x to 3.64x, and network by 1.56x to 3.38x.
UpCloud won small-block random I/O — 2.89x on 4K random read and 1.69x on 4K random write. That is the pattern databases and write-heavy queues care about most, and it comes from UpCloud's MaxIOPS storage, which is built for exactly that. If your bottleneck is small synchronous writes, UpCloud's storage is the stronger platform in this test.
Read it as a trade: Raff for CPU, memory, sequential throughput and egress; UpCloud for small-block random I/O.
UpCloud vs Raff: features and reliability
Compute
UpCloud offers three shared-vCPU lines from 1 to 80 cores and 1 GB to 512 GB RAM — a far wider ceiling than Raff's 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Raff offers General Purpose from $4.99/month and CPU-Optimized dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, on AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory, and resizes on demand: stop the VM, switch plan, restart, with the difference settled to the account balance and a resize API endpoint.
Networking
Raff includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, private networking, VPC, firewall controls and site-to-site VPN gateways. UpCloud includes 1000 Mbps on production tiers with zero-cost egress, software-defined private networks, load balancers, and managed NAT and VPN gateways.
Storage
Raff separates storage into VM disk, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month and object storage at $7/month for 100 GB with 1 TB of egress. UpCloud offers three block tiers — MaxIOPS at €0.220/GB-month with up to 100k IOPS, Standard at €0.085, Archive at €0.056 — plus managed NFS file storage, which Raff does not offer. UpCloud's storage catalog is the more configurable of the two; Raff's is the simpler.
Support and reliability
Raff provides 24/7 human support through live chat, with a first response typically under 10 minutes. No bots triaging you first, and no support tier to buy: a single $4.99 VM reaches the same engineers as a hundred production machines.
On published commitments, UpCloud advertises 99.999% monthly uptime on Premium and Cloud Native; Raff commits to 99.90% monthly, contractual with service credits, measured from a public status page. Both figures are credit thresholds rather than measured availability, and neither vendor's number is evidence of what your workload will actually see. What is clearly in UpCloud's favour is footprint: 15 data centers against Raff's single us-east region.
Platform
Both sell the layers around the VM, which makes this a rare like-for-like platform comparison.
| Product | Raff | UpCloud |
|---|---|---|
| Managed PostgreSQL / MySQL | from $7.99/mo | from €9/mo ≈ $10.43 |
| Managed Valkey / Redis-compatible | from $7.99/mo | from €8/mo ≈ $9.27 |
| Managed Kubernetes control plane | free | free (dev) · €60/mo production |
| Object storage | $7/mo — 100 GB + 1 TB egress | available |
| Block storage | $0.08/GiB-mo | €0.085 Standard ≈ $0.099 · €0.220 MaxIOPS |
| Functions / serverless | free tier, 100,000 GB-s | not offered |
| PaaS / app deployment | Raff Apps from $3/mo | not offered |
| ClickHouse, Kafka | from $7.99/mo | not offered |
| OpenSearch | not offered | from €100/mo |
| Managed NFS file storage | not offered | available |
| GPU servers | not offered | NVIDIA L4 – B200 |
| Private cloud | not offered | from €3,190/mo |
Raff is cheaper on the products both sell and adds Functions, Apps, ClickHouse and Kafka. UpCloud adds OpenSearch, NFS, GPU and Private Cloud, and its Kubernetes production tier costs €60/month where Raff's control plane is free at every size.
When you should choose UpCloud over Raff
- Users outside North America — 15 data centers across four continents against Raff's single us-east region
- Small-block random I/O workloads — MaxIOPS measured 2.89x higher on 4K random read in paid head-to-head testing
- GPU, search or shared-filesystem workloads — NVIDIA L4 through B200, managed OpenSearch and managed NFS, none of which Raff sells
- Budget servers where specs can slip — the Starter line undercuts Raff at every tier if previous-generation CPUs and smaller disks are acceptable
- Very large single servers — up to 80 cores and 512 GB RAM against Raff's 16 vCPU and 32 GB
When you should choose Raff over UpCloud
- Production VMs at lower cost — 37% to 65% cheaper than UpCloud Premium at every matched tier, with more storage included at each (VPS for application hosting)
- CPU and memory-bound services — 1.36x to 1.39x faster CPU and 2.43x faster memory write in paid head-to-head testing
- Egress-heavy applications — a 3 Gbps unmetered port against 1000 Mbps, and 3.38x measured download throughput
- Database-backed products — managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month against €9/month, on the same account over private networking (VPS for databases)
- Kubernetes at production scale — a free control plane at every cluster size, against €60/month for UpCloud's production tier
- Serverless and app deployment — Functions with a free monthly tier and Raff Apps from $3/month, neither of which UpCloud offers
Migrating from UpCloud to Raff
- Check your region requirement first — Raff serves us-east only. If your users are in Europe or Asia, this migration adds latency that no other difference offsets.
- Right-size on utilisation — UpCloud shapes run wider than Raff's ceiling of 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Measure what the workload actually uses before assuming a match exists.
- Test disk-bound paths explicitly — UpCloud MaxIOPS measured faster on small-block random I/O. If your application is bound by small synchronous writes, benchmark it on Raff before committing.
- Move data in order — files with rsync or SCP, then database dumps into managed Postgres or MySQL, then static assets to object storage. Keep the UpCloud server running throughout.
- Cut over and verify billing — lower DNS TTL beforehand, switch, then confirm your UpCloud resources are deleted rather than stopped, since block storage bills whether or not a server runs.
About UpCloud
UpCloud is a Finnish cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2011 and headquartered in Helsinki, offering cloud servers, managed databases, managed Kubernetes, object and file storage, GPU servers and private cloud from 15 data centers across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. See UpCloud pricing for current plans and terms.
Conclusion: UpCloud or Raff?
The comparison resolves across four axes:
- Price — Raff wins on the production tier, 37% to 65% below UpCloud Premium with more storage included; UpCloud's Starter line is cheaper than both
- Performance — split: Raff leads CPU, memory, sequential disk and network; UpCloud leads small-block random I/O by 2.89x
- Reach — UpCloud wins, 15 data centers across four continents against Raff's single us-east region
- Platform — Raff is cheaper on the products both sell and adds Functions, Apps, ClickHouse and Kafka; UpCloud adds OpenSearch, NFS, GPU and Private Cloud
If you need multiple regions, GPU or shared filesystems, choose UpCloud. If your users are in North America and you want production VMs and managed databases at materially lower cost, choose Raff.
Raff runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers and is rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot, with a 99.9% uptime SLA in writing.