Top 10 European Cloud Service Providers

Based on a transparent methodology, we ranked the top 10 European cloud service providers to help the enterprise with an unbiased view of the marketplace. The report analyzes the performance of four different VM sizes for each of the the top 10 European cloud service providers, and reports on the performance and stability results of CPU, memory, and block storage.

The results uncovered a 2.4x difference on VM performance alone (CPU and memory) and a 12.6x block storage performance difference between the first and tenth ranked IaaS service providers analyzed in the report. For cloud consumers, this disparity highlights the critical need to conduct performance testing on both providers and existing internal infrastructure prior to selecting a CSP. Failure to conduct this analysis amplifies any risk associated with overspending or application performance issues.

The following 10 IaaS providers were included in the 2017 Top 10 European Cloud Providers report:

• 1&1
• Amazon Web Services
• CenturyLink
• DigitalOcean
• Dimension Data
• Google Compute Engine
• IBM SoftLayer
• Microsoft Azure
• OVH
• Rackspace

Key Findings of the 2017 Top 10 European Cloud Service Providers

1. Looking solely at performance, virtual machines (VMs) differed by 2.4x across CSPs. For block storage IOPS, that difference spread by 12.6x across CSPs.1&1’s VMs demonstrated the best combination of high median performance and high stability with a performance index score of 97 with 3% variability.
2. AWS and Google Compute Engine showed the least vCPU & memory performance variability in the 24-hour testing period.
3. Dimension Data displayed the highest median performance with a score of 99 but also demonstrated high variability of 13%.
4. When looking at price-performance value, a difference of up to 5.6x emerged among the IaaS providers.OVH achieved the highest CloudSpecs? Score in the ranking for 2017, indicating the best price-performance value in the study. This is due to strong VM performance and the most inexpensive packaged pricing found in the study for the majority of VM sizes.
5. Other CSPs such as 1&1, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine and DigitalOcean rank in the top half of the Top 10 CSPs due to a combination of moderate performance and competitive monthly pricing.
6. For the price-performance of vCPU & memory, OVH maintained the highest CloudSpecs score.
7. Regarding block storage price-performance, Rackspace received the highest CloudSpecs Score.