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

Leaseweb is a privately held Dutch hosting company that sells dedicated servers, colocation and VMware private cloud, and next to them two public clouds. Its strengths are bare metal in volume and cheap traffic: after a free terabyte, egress costs EUR 2.20 per TB, and our production workload costs EUR 328.23 a month in Frankfurt, without the managed database Leaseweb does not sell; AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 with one. The weak points are a thin catalogue, zones in Amsterdam only, a business-only signup behind a KYC check, and contract terms that index prices every year and leave five days to claim an SLA credit.

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 Leaseweb's documentation, contracts, price data and status page, the GLEIF register, press reports and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

Which Leaseweb cloud you get depends on the region. Amsterdam (eu-west-3) runs the newer platform: OpenStack, two availability zones, dedicated-vCPU instances, the standard OpenStack API and Savings Plans. Frankfurt (eu-central-1), London (eu-west-2) and the regions in the US, Canada, Singapore, Japan and Australia run the older one: Apache CloudStack on KVM, no zones, shared vCPUs only and Leaseweb's own API. Managed Kubernetes, by our reading of its documentation, runs on CloudStack everywhere, Amsterdam included. We priced both.

At a glance

What you can build

Status is general availability unless noted. "Older" means the CloudStack platform, "Amsterdam" the OpenStack one.

Missing outright: managed databases of every kind, a container registry, functions and serverless containers, queues, a KMS or secrets manager, a log service and AI model APIs. In Amsterdam, GPU instances, autoscaling and private networking are "coming soon". Managed Kubernetes has no private networking yet, a 1 Gbps outbound cap per cluster shared by all nodes, no ReadWriteMany volumes, no volume encryption at rest and known UDP problems. Object Storage documents no list of the S3 operations it supports.

The tooling follows the split. api.leaseweb.com covers servers, DNS and the older cloud (publicCloud/v1); Amsterdam is driven through the OpenStack API. The Terraform provider is community tier (v1.31.1, 4 June 2026) and covers servers, DNS and the older platform, but not Kubernetes, Object Storage or Amsterdam, where standard OpenStack tooling should work, though Leaseweb does not document it. We found no Python SDK, Pulumi provider or Ansible collection.

What it costs

Leaseweb list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from the data behind its price pages, at hourly rates and 730 hours a month. We priced Frankfurt, nearest to the AWS and Azure baseline, and Amsterdam, the only region with zones and dedicated vCPUs.

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.

Frankfurt's compute-optimised tab shows only the old C3 family (Sandy Bridge), so no current 4 GiB type has a price there; we used the 8 GiB M6A.LARGE. Older types cut the totals to EUR 37.13 in Frankfurt (M3.LARGE) and EUR 37.85 in Amsterdam (C5.LARGE). AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same; on AWS the 1 TB of egress alone is USD 81.00 of a USD 125.95 bill.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

Dedicated vCPUs are not sold in Frankfurt. AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, each with a highly available PostgreSQL. Take AWS's database out (USD 320.13 with storage) and AWS still comes to about EUR 797, roughly 2.4 times Leaseweb's Frankfurt total and twice its Amsterdam dedicated one. The VMs make the largest part of that gap, then egress: AWS bills the 2 TB at USD 171.00, Leaseweb at EUR 2.20. The control plane is free here and USD 73.00 on EKS.

Running PostgreSQL yourself takes your own failover and two more servers: at the database size here (2 vCPU, 8 GiB), two M6A.LARGE add about EUR 83 a month in Frankfurt, plus storage.

In Amsterdam, the load balancer's public IP and router are our reading of the network documentation (the router has no listed price), and the load balancer reaches only its own zone, so spanning both zones takes a second one, another EUR 14.02. Worker nodes are not included, as everywhere in this series. With 1-month Savings Plans, Amsterdam's totals are EUR 285.78 and EUR 363.81.

Egress and IPv4. Cloud egress beyond the free terabyte is EUR 2.20 per TB up to 10 TB, falling in steps to EUR 1.00 above 100 TB. The free terabyte is shared by every instance under one contract, so a second server does not bring a second one. Object Storage costs EUR 0.01733 per GB-month and its egress EUR 0.0022 per GB. AWS charges EUR 80.30 per TB of egress and Azure EUR 77.62 beyond their free 100 GB. Dedicated servers include a traffic pack (30 TB on those we checked) that counts both directions. An Amsterdam IPv4 address is EUR 3.00 a month; older-platform instances include one, and "You cannot obtain additional IPv4 addresses yet".

Billing. In Amsterdam, resources are billed hourly, in arrears, "from the moment of creation until they are destroyed", stopped or not. Savings Plans of 1 to 36 months start at 10% below the hourly rate, with more off on longer terms (up to 25%); they cannot be resized and exclude load balancers. On the older platform a monthly instance is cheaper than an hourly one (EUR 74.92 against 83.22 for an M6A.XLARGE). Contracts renew automatically, with one month's notice for terms of six months or longer. Each country entity invoices separately, card payments to the Dutch entity carry a surcharge of up to 3.95%, and Leaseweb may ask for prepayment or a deposit at any time. A EUR 200 trial credit covers the older platform only. We found no budget alert or spending cap.

GPUs. The only GPU instance is the NVIDIA L4, on the older platform in Frankfurt, London, the US and Canada: EUR 0.3857 an hour for one, against EUR 0.90 for AWS's L4 in Frankfurt. Amsterdam has GPUs only in dedicated servers on monthly contracts, from a T4 at EUR 210.50 to an L40S from 897.34 (GPU count not stated) and an RTX 6000 at 1,108.39. There is no H100, H200 or B200. Customers in US export-control Country Groups D:1, D:4, D:5 and E, China and the UAE among them, may not use "regulated GPUs", the L4 and L40S included.

Bare metal. An HPE DL20 G10 with an 8-core Xeon E-2388G, 64 GB of RAM, 2 x 480 GB SSD and 30 TB of traffic lists at EUR 118.37 a month in Amsterdam, delivered in "5 days"; its product record shows a promotional EUR 82.98 against 118.55. NVMe upgrades could not be priced.

Price changes.

We found no general list-price increase from 2024 to 2026, but we did not check archived price pages.

Reliability

What a zone is. Only Amsterdam has zones, eu-west-3-az1 and eu-west-3-az2, which a feature table also calls AMS-01 and AMS-02. The Services Specifications define a zone as "a distinct, physically isolated data-center location that possesses its own independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure", and count locations that share any of those as one. That each zone is the Amsterdam data centre of the same name is our inference. Frankfurt and London have no zones: when a host fails, an instance on central storage restarts on another node.

No database to fail over. With no managed database, the standby, its placement and its failover are yours to build. Object Storage spreads objects "across three or more zones" by contract in every region, Frankfurt and London included, where the compute platform has none; where those zones are is not stated. The Kubernetes control plane runs three etcd members on separate hypervisors.

The SLAs (Dutch entity, version of 1 September 2026):

• You claim "within five days" of the event, in the portal, with exact dates and times. Credits apply only to running instances, only above EUR 1, never in cash.
• The knowledge base puts cloud instances on the Volume network, which earns no network, packet-loss or latency credits.
• Excluded: maintenance announced 72 hours ahead, "DDoS attacks by third parties", hacks, "any interaction between the Service... and any other software, hardware or third party service", faults Leaseweb cannot reproduce, and any period you are behind on payment. Standard DDoS protection null-routes an attacked IP above 5 Gbps.
• "Service Credits shall constitute Customer's sole and exclusive legal remedy."

On paper that beats AWS, which commits to 99.99% only across two or more zones and 99.5% for one instance; but AWS takes claims until the end of the second billing cycle and Azure within 60 days, against five days here.

Status page and incidents. leasewebstatus.com has a customer login, and its public API returned no reports of any type on 16 October 2026, so there is no history to read. The StatusGator mirror shows the latest five incidents, all on the control plane:

None states a cause. Older than our 24-month window: in August 2023 a security breach in "certain areas of our cloud environments" took the Customer Portal down and caused "downtime for a small number of cloud customers", according to BleepingComputer. We found no region-wide outage in Amsterdam or Frankfurt since October 2024, but with no public history that proves little.

Support

For public cloud and Kubernetes, "Leaseweb's Basic Service Level Agreement is provided at no additional charge", and we found no price for a paid level on cloud instances. On dedicated servers, Basic covers hardware and the network; work inside the operating system is Advanced Support, EUR 59 to 99 an hour, at Leaseweb's discretion and "during Business Hours and on the next business day". A missed target earns 2% of the service-level fee per full hour late, and nothing on Basic.

Engineers are "on duty 24 hours per day, every day of the year", by ticket, email, live chat or phone, and the contract promises support in English. Abuse reports go only through a Compliance ticket, answered "typically within 48 hours". Even Basic has a target, which AWS Basic (no technical cases) and Azure Basic lack; a one-hour target costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend on AWS Business Support+ and USD 100 a month on Azure Standard. We found too few independent reports to judge support quality.

Getting an account

Leaseweb sells only to businesses: a customer is "any business entity or an internet professional (therefore not including any private individual ... considered a consumer under applicable law)". Every order goes through a KYC check, for which the terms allow a "maximum of five (5) Business Days" before the order is confirmed; the knowledge base estimates "approximately 1 to 3 business days" before a new Kubernetes customer reaches the portal. The older public cloud adds a phone check with a EUR 1.00 fee. Leaseweb may reject an order "upon Leaseweb's sole discretion at reasonable grounds", and new web customers may be asked to prepay. Sales to Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea and six other countries or territories are barred.

Quotas. In Amsterdam each project starts with 64 vCPU, 128 GB of RAM and 512 GB of volumes, up to three projects per account. On the older platform a new customer "can launch up to 2 instances", 10 after two months and 20 after four, and load balancer instances count. Managed Kubernetes allows 10 worker nodes per cluster by default.

Workload B on day one. In Amsterdam, yes, once KYC is through: it fits the default quota, and no instance-count limit is documented there. In Frankfurt, no: three VMs and an HAProxy instance make four against a limit of two. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

Abuse handling. Leaseweb calls itself "an unmanaged hosting provider": once an abuse notice's deadline passes, the service may be interrupted "without further warning" by suspension, an IP null route or a switch port block.

Compliance and data protection

There is no separate data processing agreement: the processor terms are clause 8 of the Sales Terms. Leaseweb "may engage Affiliates, that are based solely within the EEA, and also other third parties" as sub-processors, tells customers of intended changes with time to object, and sends the list for the services ordered on request; we found no public list. The Dutch entity stores and processes customer data "exclusively within the Netherlands" (clause 8.3; the German terms say the same of Germany), and does not transfer it or access it from abroad unless the law requires it, you authorise it in writing or you initiate it yourself. Transfers outside the EEA need GDPR safeguards.

Who controls it

You contract with the Leaseweb entity of the "Sales Organization Country" you pick at checkout: Leaseweb Netherlands B.V. under Dutch law and the Amsterdam courts, Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH in Frankfurt, or the companies in the UK, US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan and Canada, each a separate account with its own contract and invoices. We could not establish whether a German contract can use Amsterdam cloud resources.

In the GLEIF register, the ultimate parent of LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V. is Ocom B.V., Amsterdam; the direct parent has no LEI. Ocom reports that no parent consolidates it, which fits ownership by individuals or a non-consolidating holding but names no owner. Its shareholders are not published; the paid documents that might name them were not opened. The press names co-founder Con Zwinkels as Ocom's CEO: in March 2025 Svenja de Vos and Lex Boost became co-CEOs of Leaseweb Global, and Zwinkels and Pieter Dijkhuis moved to Ocom. Telecompaper reports Ocom's 2025 revenue as EUR 239 million, "flat", for a group that also owns Evoswitch. We found no sale, outside investor or change of control from 2024 to 2026, and no non-European parent: the US, Canadian and Asia-Pacific companies are sister sales entities.

The cloud runs on Leaseweb's own deployments of Apache CloudStack and OpenStack; the private cloud is VMware, under Broadcom's partner programme at its Pinnacle level. The data centres carry Leaseweb's names (AMS-01, FRA-01, LON-01 and others); we did not establish whether it owns or rents the buildings.

Leaving

The contract builds in the EU Data Act: a Switching Request opens a transitional period of up to 30 days and an optional data retrieval period of at least 30 days, and Leaseweb "does not apply any Switching Charges" beyond its normal fees and any early termination fees, except for largely custom-built services. Moving 10 TB out of Object Storage costs EUR 22.00.

The Amsterdam cloud speaks the OpenStack API, Object Storage is S3-compatible, and Managed Kubernetes is built on the upstream CloudStack cloud controller, CSI driver and Cluster API provider. Lock-in sits in the older platform's own publicCloud/v1 API and the Terraform provider that wraps it; in the Kubernetes CSI driver (ReadWriteOnce only, no encryption at rest); and in the contracts. Savings Plans "cannot be upgraded or downgraded", a cancelled plan runs to its earliest end date, and contracts renew automatically. Custom images can be made from Amsterdam instances, but we found no documented way to export an image or volume to a file.

Deleting your portal user removes "all customer accounts connected to it", irreversibly, but contracts still end only by cancellation.

What users report

We read Hacker News comments mentioning Leaseweb since October 2023 and the opening posts of Reddit threads from Reddit's search. Review sites do not count as evidence here.

Individuals are refused. Users report that "leaseweb doesn't sell services to individuals" (r/VPS, May 2025), that "they seem to have stopped serving non-business customers" (44377981, June 2025), and that a representative said "they don't do individual accounts any more" (44967134, August 2025). One was refunded after giving no company name (r/VPS, July 2026), and another went looking for a provider that would "accept individual sign up" (r/VPS, November 2025). The terms confirm it.

Low prices for VPS and bare metal. Users report Leaseweb "cheaper than Hetzner ... if you don't need managed k8s" (47123888, February 2026) and "quite cheap these days" (44377981, June 2025), with VPS prices that "seem quite competitive" (r/VPS, March 2026). An older comment disagrees: "not as good a deal recently ... and can cost more for transfer" (38007198, October 2023).

Reports of evening packet loss at Leaseweb's edge. Players of games hosted at Leaseweb in Frankfurt and Amsterdam report ping spikes and packet loss at busy hours from some consumer networks: Telekom in Hungary (June 2025) and Austria (August 2026), Vodafone in Germany (January 2026), "45-50% packet loss at a Leaseweb router in Amsterdam" (April 2026) and "congestion between Arelion and Leaseweb in Frankfurt" (October 2026). These are gamers' traceroutes, not measurements by Leaseweb customers, and several put the fault at the handover to the other network. They matter for latency-sensitive consumer services, not for traffic between servers.

Administration is split by country. One user calls the administrative side "a nightmare (need a new account for each country)" (42751830, January 2025); the separate accounts and invoices per entity confirm it.

Bare metal under other platforms. Ubicloud gets "bare metal instances from providers like Hetzner or Leaseweb" (41062522, July 2024), and Nodion's founder names Leaseweb beneath his platform (45606010, 45605439, October 2025).

We found too few reports on support quality to say anything, and none on account suspensions in the last 24 months.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Leaseweb suits businesses that want European-owned bare metal or VMware private cloud with a modest cloud layer beside it, services that send a lot of traffic out, and teams that run their own databases and Kubernetes add-ons, ideally in Amsterdam, where the zones and dedicated vCPUs are.

Look elsewhere if you are an individual or a team without a company; if you need managed databases, serverless or queues; if you need zone redundancy outside Amsterdam, or H100-class GPUs; if you want a mature Terraform path for the new cloud; or if you need a public incident history to audit before you commit.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Public cloud pricing, Amsterdam and older platform
• Object Storage price data and product record
• Managed Kubernetes price data
• Dedicated server DL20 G10 product record
• Knowledge base: Savings Plans, billing of the new public cloud, payments, sales contracts, credit trials, network metering and billing
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Sales Terms and Conditions, Leaseweb Netherlands B.V., 1 August 2026
• Policies, 1 August 2026
• Service Level Agreement, 1 September 2026
• Services Specifications, 1 September 2026
• Knowledge base: SLA for Managed Kubernetes, support service levels

Documentation

• Public cloud platform comparison, new public cloud overview, older public cloud overview
• Load balancer, new platform, projects and quotas, OpenStack CLI, instance launch limit
• Kubernetes overview, ordering a cluster, limits and known issues
• Object Storage overview and S3 compatibility
• DDoS IP Protection, handling abuse notifications, contacting customer care, onboarding, dedicated server ordering API, deleting your account
• KYC page
• API reference, Terraform provider and its repository, Leaseweb on GitHub, CNCF landscape

Status and incidents

• Status page and the StatusGator mirror
• BleepingComputer, "Leaseweb is restoring critical systems after security breach", 25 August 2023

Compliance

• Security certifications
• PCI DSS certificate, valid to 26 May 2025

Company and ownership

• GLEIF: LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V., ultimate parent, Ocom B.V. and its parent reporting exception, LeaseWeb Deutschland GmbH
• ITPro, "Leaseweb Global names new co-CEOs", 7 March 2025
• Telecompaper, Ocom's 2025 results, 20 August 2026
• Techzine, Leaseweb takes over ITQ's VCSP customers, July 2026, and CRN Asia, VCSP Pinnacle, 2026

User reports

• Hacker News: 38007198 (October 2023), 41062522 (July 2024), 42751830 (January 2025), 44377981 (June 2025), 44967134 (August 2025), 45605439 and 45606010 (October 2025), 47123888 (February 2026)
• Reddit, r/VPS: May 2025, November 2025, March 2026, July 2026
• Reddit, network reports: r/HuntShowdown, June 2025, r/de_EDV, January 2026, r/Warthunder, April 2026, r/HuntShowdown, August 2026, r/HuntShowdown, October 2026