cloudscale.ch

cloudscale.ch is a Zurich-based infrastructure provider selling virtual servers, GPU-equipped compute instances, block and object storage, and load balancers from two Swiss locations. A customer picks an OS image and gets root access to the machine from there. The knowledge base entry on its Swiss location states that the server hardware is owned by cloudscale.ch and managed by its own engineers, standing in colocation halls run by other operators rather than on capacity rented from another cloud.

Compute, storage and network resources are priced and billed separately, metered to the second, with a customer charged for whatever is provisioned regardless of whether it is currently running. A public REST API backs an official command-line tool and SDKs, an official Terraform provider and Ansible collection, and Kubernetes clusters can provision the platform’s block storage and load balancers directly through official plugins.

Worth knowing

Usage is drawn from a prepaid account balance rather than invoiced afterward; purchased credit is not refundable, so the balance has to be topped up ahead of use and kept there. The published rate card quotes each compute flavor per 24 hours rather than the per-hour or per-month figure most other clouds lead with, which makes a quick side-by-side comparison need an extra conversion step.