How we decide what's true

Geographic scope

The directory includes the 27 current EU member states and the 35 sovereign states in the UN M49 Americas region. Dependencies and overseas territories are not silently treated as sovereign countries.

An offer belongs to a country only when a provider source or public API identifies an orderable compute region physically located there. A sales office, CDN point of presence, edge cache, reseller availability, or the ability of residents to buy a remote VM is insufficient.

Provider and product inclusion

Included products are self-service or contract-orderable virtual machines with administrator/root-level guest control. Classic VPS, cloud compute, and virtual machine products qualify.

Shared web hosting, managed hosting with no guest control, containers with no VM boundary, dedicated bare metal, free trials with no paid continuation, and discontinued plans do not.

Evidence hierarchy

Product, region, price, resource, support, and feature claims prefer first-party sources in this order: public API, product documentation, pricing page, legal or company page, then an archived first-party announcement.

Customer opinion must come from independent review platforms or clearly identified public customer discussions. Search snippets alone are never evidence — each URL must be directly inspectable, and the fields it supports are recorded.

Discovery protocol & stopping rule

Provider discovery is separately auditable. For every country we record the search languages, local-language and English queries, independent directories checked, passes completed, and the consecutive passes that found no new candidates.

A country is complete only after every candidate is resolved and two consecutive documented passes produce no new candidates. A country with no qualifying provider is only marked as such after the same protocol — an empty first search is never proof that no provider exists.

Price normalization & value

The exchange-rate table stores units of each currency per EUR. Given a monthly price p in currency C with rate rC:

monthly EUR      = p / rC
monthly USD      = monthly EUR × rUSD
cores per EUR    = vCPU / monthly EUR
RAM GiB per EUR  = RAM GiB / monthly EUR
storage per EUR  = storage GB / monthly EUR

Each price is labelled fixed monthly, monthly cap, term commitment, or hourly estimate, and given a comparison rank so an estimate never competes as if it were a flat fee.

Missing and negative facts

"not_found" means research did not find evidence strong enough to make a claim. It never means "no".

"not_applicable" is reserved for an explicit negative or inapplicability. An empty search result is never promoted to "not_applicable".

Ranking & customer perception

Default machine ranking uses price comparison class, then monthly EUR price, then provider name. This keeps an uncapped hourly estimate from silently outranking a fixed fee or a cap.

The directory does not claim a universal “best” provider. Every sortable metric is exposed so you can order by what matters to you.

Freshness

Every output carries a snapshot date; this edition reflects data captured on 2026-07-15. Each plan and review observation also carries its own checked-at date.

Pricing and review scores are volatile. A future refresh updates observations and reruns build and validation before publication.

The overall customer score

sum(platform rating × review count) / sum(review count)

This favors larger samples but does not correct for platform demographics, selection effects, duplicate reviewers, or rating methodology. Platform-level figures always stay visible.