CloudSigma in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

In Europe, a developer can open a CloudSigma account today in two places: Geneva, with the Swiss company CLOUDSIGMA AG, and Dublin, with the Irish partner ServeCentric. Frankfurt and Düsseldorf still run, but their own public status endpoints say they are closed to new sign-ups. CloudSigma, based in Zug, now uses its website to sell a white-label cloud platform to telcos and hosting companies.

In Geneva you get plain KVM servers sized to the GHz and the GiB under a Swiss contract, cheap if you prepay a month: our starter workload costs EUR 34.19 on a one-month subscription. Without that commitment it costs EUR 151.71, because pay-as-you-go prices sat 3 to 5.5 times above the subscription. There is no managed database, load balancer or availability zone, support ticketing has been down since 28 September 2026, and the data processing agreements still cite the EU-US Privacy Shield.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against CloudSigma's documentation, legal terms, public price and status endpoints, status history, the Swiss commercial register and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

What is sold differs by location.

Missing against AWS and Azure: managed databases of any engine, a managed load balancer, object storage outside Düsseldorf, file storage, a container registry, serverless, queues, DNS, CDN, WAF, key management (VMs get a virtual TPM) and monitoring beyond usage reports and audit logs. What CloudSigma replaces is EC2, EBS and a VPC, priced resource by resource.

The API is CloudSigma's own, one endpoint per location, with no OpenAPI specification or official CLI, and it authenticates with the account email and password. The Terraform provider's latest release is 2.9.0 of 28 July 2024, and it can create only servers, drives, snapshots, SSH keys and tags, so a static IP or a VLAN cannot be bought from Terraform. The Python and Go SDKs had commits pushed in October 2026. In its favour, each location publishes its prices, free tier, sign-up status and feature switches through public endpoints, with no login.

What it costs

The website has published no price list since its 2026 rebuild, but each location's API publishes its own, and the figures below come from there: EUR list prices, VAT excluded, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, 730 hours a month.

Two prices for everything. Each resource has a subscription price, prepaid for 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, and a pay-as-you-go "burst" price that moves through levels 0 to 20 "calculated every 5 minutes based on the usage of the cloud". On 16 October 2026 Geneva's CPU sat at level 12 (4.0 times the subscription price), RAM at 18 (5.5 times) and traffic at 20, the maximum. An archived Zurich price list of August 2024 shows CPU 11, RAM 18 and traffic 20, so the high levels look persistent, on one data point.

We count a vCPU as one core at 2.0 GHz (at 3.0 GHz the CPU lines are 1.5 times higher) and deduct Geneva's free tier: 1 GiB of RAM, 50 GiB of SSD, 50 GiB of NVMe and 5 TiB of outbound traffic a month.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for workload A in Frankfurt, object storage included. Without it, CloudSigma on a one-month subscription costs about 30% of the AWS price; pay as you go, about 35% more.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with a standby, 1 TB of object storage with requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

Four of workload B's line items have no CloudSigma equivalent in Geneva. AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 and Azure EUR 1,091.88 for the whole of workload B; CloudSigma's totals cover less, and you would add your own load balancers and PostgreSQL pair.

Frankfurt, for existing customers only, had lower burst levels on the day: workload A EUR 103.17 pay as you go or EUR 31.40 on subscription, workload B EUR 1,075.37 or EUR 315.62.

Egress and IPv4. Beyond the free 5 TiB, a GiB costs EUR 0.0399 on subscription or EUR 0.2193 at burst level 20, so 1 TB above the allowance is EUR 204.24 pay as you go. A static IPv4 costs EUR 3.988 per 30 days on subscription, or 11.964 at burst.

Billing. Credit is prepaid, by card or bank transfer (Dublin takes cards only), in a currency chosen once at signup. CloudSigma may suspend service when the balance covers "less than 24 hours usage", and after five working days at zero may terminate and "immediately delete all data".

GPUs. The A100 80 GB costs EUR 997 on subscription or EUR 1,994 at burst in Geneva. The API labels the unit "unit/hour" with a 30-day multiplier, so we read it as per 30 days: about EUR 1.38 and EUR 2.77 per GPU-hour. No H100, H200, B200 or L4 appears in any of the 14 locations.

Price changes. Geneva's subscription prices of October 2026 equal Zurich's of August 2024, line for line in CHF; we found no increase.

Reliability

No zones. Every European location reports host_availability_zones: false. "Availability Grouping and Avoid" keeps servers or drives on separate infrastructure inside one facility, not in a second building. High availability means a second location, which is a second account and contract, and with no managed database there is no standby to place.

The SLA. Each location serves its own SLA; Geneva's is dated 1 January 2019, and the text is the same in substance everywhere.

• "100% availability of virtual servers in any given calendar month" (hardware and hypervisor only) and "100% network availability".
• The credit is "50 times the fees" for unavailability "lasting more than 15 minutes", counted from your report or CloudSigma's monitoring, whichever is earlier. A 30-minute VM outage earns 25 hours of that VM's fees.
• Credits are capped at 100% of the previous 30 days' fees, go against future service, never cash, and are "the sole and exclusive remedy".
• You claim by email "within 30 calendar days of the incident". CloudSigma is "the sole arbiter regarding the award of credit".
• Excluded: "failures, acts or omissions of our upstream providers", denial-of-service attacks and "Law enforcement activity".
• No SLA covers storage availability, the API, object storage or Kubernetes.

The Terms limit liability to "the amount paid by you to us during the immediately preceding month", and say CloudSigma "shall not be responsible for any back up, recovery". AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones and 99.5% for a single instance; Azure to 99.99% across zones.

Status page and incidents. status.cloudsigma.com has a page per location; Geneva's lists 37 incidents back to April 2019. Post-mortems go by email to affected clients and are not published.

Failures have crossed locations. The September 2026 outage hit two clouds at once, and on 31 January 2024 Zurich, Geneva and Frankfurt were all unreachable from 13:42 to 18:05, blamed on "a large scale issue affecting the services of multiple ISPs along the backbone exchange". Every location's webapp sits behind Cloudflare, and the support system is shared: a second location is not fully independent.

Support

No support plan is published, free or paid. The Terms promise "reasonable endeavours to respond to all requests", with no response targets. Hours are not published. Dublin is supported by ServeCentric and Düsseldorf by enthus.

The channels are webapp tickets, live chat and email to support@cloudsigma.com. Since 28 September 2026 tickets "can't be opened from the WebApp" and customers are told to email; chat failed from 28 to 30 September and again on 15 October, and ticketing was still being worked on at the last update that day.

AWS and Azure both sell paid tiers with response targets, from USD 29 a month on AWS Business Support+ and USD 100 on Azure Standard. CloudSigma sells none.

Getting an account

Each location's public cloud_status says whether it takes new customers. On 16 October 2026:

In Geneva an account takes an email address and a confirmation link, or GitHub, Google or Keycloak sign-in; the webapp's "free seven day trial" is switched off in all four European locations.

The Terms let CloudSigma "verify your identity at any time", including "an original or certified copy of photographic ID" and proof of address; it may also suspend an account "affiliated with a person or legal entity" whose account was terminated, and "change the API or suspend provision of the API at any time without notice".

Default quotas are not public. Workload B's servers can be bought on day one if the quota allows three of 8 GHz and 16 GiB, which we could not confirm; nothing else in workload B exists to provision.

Compliance and data protection

We found no certificate document for CloudSigma itself anywhere public.

DPA. Each location has its own: Geneva's is dated 1 January 2019, Frankfurt's 23 May 2018. For transfers outside the EEA both rely on adequacy, "legally recognised safeguards, such as the EU-US Privacy Shield", or Standard Contractual Clauses of "Decision 2010/87EU". The CJEU invalidated Privacy Shield in July 2020 and the 2010 clauses were replaced in 2021; the documents were not updated.

Sub-processors. No list is published, only one "upon request". Cloudflare, which fronts every location's webapp and API, therefore appears on none.

Data location. No DPA clause commits to a country; the commitment is structural, since each location is a separate cloud and contract.

Who controls it

CLOUDSIGMA AG (UID CHE-115.204.434) and CLOUDSIGMA Holding AG are both seated in Zug. How much of CLOUDSIGMA AG the holding owns today is not in the public extract, and a Swiss AG keeps no public shareholder register, so the owners are not published.

Two capital increases converted claims into holding shares: USD 6,506,224.71 on 20 October 2022 and CHF 800,000 on 4 December 2025. Who held those claims is not published. The only outside investment on record is a 2011 angel round from Anthony Foy and Phil Collerton, former Interxion executives. We found no non-European parent or shareholder; none can be ruled out.

The register names Brad Anthony Foy (British) president of the board and co-founder Robert Jenkin (British) vice-president; the website calls Jenkin chairman. Engineering is reported to sit in Sofia, Bulgaria, a fact we saw only in a business directory snippet.

Geneva's contract is under Swiss law, but its documents disagree on the court: Zug in the Geneva terms of January 2023, Zurich in the website Terms of 1 July 2026, which now return HTTP 410.

Whose infrastructure. The platform is CloudSigma's own, on KVM.

• Geneva: CloudSigma's own network, in Safe Host SH2 according to a 2022 listing.
• Frankfurt: CloudSigma's address space, in Equinix FR6 according to the same listing. Its terms name CLOUDSIGMA Germany GmbH, which a register summary shows passing to enthus GmbH in 2025 and merged into it on 15 October 2025. Who operates Frankfurt today is not settled by any published document.
• Düsseldorf: enthus's cloud on CloudSigma software, in an enthus data centre. enthus says "Ihr einziger Vertragspartner ist die enthus GmbH" (your only contracting party is enthus GmbH) and does not name CloudSigma.
• Dublin: ServeCentric's data centre in Blanchardstown, under Irish terms dated 2018.

Leaving

A 10 TB export from Geneva costs about EUR 920 in one month at burst prices, or nothing spread over two. Drives download as raw images, and plain KVM servers carry nothing proprietary. The lock-in is contractual:

• Subscriptions are prepaid for 1 to 12 months, and on termination "your Credit Balance ... will not be refunded", except when CloudSigma changes the terms and you leave.
• Termination takes 30 days' notice, and "a reasonable opportunity to migrate your environment out" applies only if nothing is overdue.
• We found no switching terms under the EU Data Act, which has applied since 12 September 2025.

Locations also disappear: the Zurich hostname now serves the Geneva cloud, and London, Boden in Sweden and Cardiff, opened in August 2023, are gone, with no closure notice we could find.

What users report

We found no independent user report about CloudSigma from the last 24 months: the newest Hacker News comment that mentions it is from January 2021 (25823429), and what turns up for 2025 and 2026 is review-site content and outage aggregators, which we do not count as evidence.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

CloudSigma suits a team that wants plain KVM servers sized exactly, in Switzerland, under a Swiss contract, that runs its own databases and load balancing and will prepay monthly subscriptions. It also suits a hosting company shopping for a white-label cloud platform, which is what CloudSigma now sells.

Look elsewhere if you need managed services, high availability inside a region, a self-service account in Germany, published compliance evidence, support with response targets or infrastructure-as-code that covers networking, or if you would run on pay-as-you-go prices, which undo the one clear price advantage.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Price lists: Geneva, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf
• Free tier, sign-up status and features: Geneva cloud_status, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Dublin
• Pricing page
• Zurich price list, Wayback 25 August 2024
• AWS and Azure figures: the series' AWS and Azure baseline, from the AWS and Azure price APIs at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Terms of Service, last updated 1 July 2026, Wayback 24 August 2026 (the live page returns HTTP 410)
• Geneva: terms, SLA, DPA
• Frankfurt: terms, SLA, DPA
• Düsseldorf: terms, SLA; Dublin: terms
• legal-germany page, Wayback 3 February 2023

Documentation

• API documentation: general notes and authentication, billing, capabilities, networking, availability groups, accounts, release notes
• Locations API
• Terraform registry, cloudsigma/cloudsigma, Terraform provider on GitHub, CloudSigma on GitHub
• Virtual Router, 15 October 2026, GPU-as-a-Service, 16 August 2023

Status and incidents

• Status page and its incidents API; Geneva incidents, Frankfurt incidents
• Incidents: 7 September 2026, 8 September 2026, chat and ticketing, from 28 September 2026, Geneva drives, July 2025, Cloudflare, 18 November 2025, Frankfurt hosts, 2 June 2026, Geneva, 31 January 2024

Compliance

• Certifications
• Cloud locations, Wayback 10 March 2022

Company and ownership

• Swiss commercial register: CLOUDSIGMA AG, CLOUDSIGMA Holding AG
• About, Business model
• enthus cloud
• North Data, CLOUDSIGMA Germany GmbH (register summary)
• startupticker.ch, 21 December 2011
• D&B, CloudSigma Research Ltd EOOD
• Cardiff location announcement, 17 August 2023

User reports

• Hacker News: 25823429 (January 2021, the newest comment that mentions CloudSigma)