Ask five cloud providers for a quote and you'll get five different answers, three of which change again once you add data transfer, support tiers, and "additional resource usage." That's the real reason cloud cost optimization has become a permanent line item on the CTO agenda in 2026, rather than a one-off cleanup project: most pricing pages are built to be compared after signup, not before.
This guide takes the opposite approach. Instead of another generic list of "10 tips to cut your cloud bill," we're publishing actual, current prices for cloud instances, dedicated servers, colocation and GPU hosting — the way infrastructure pricing should be published everywhere. All figures below are EWADC's live rates for infrastructure hosted in Warsaw, Poland, so you can benchmark your own invoice against them in the next five minutes.
Where Cloud Budgets Actually Leak
Before comparing prices, it helps to know what's actually driving them up. Three patterns show up in almost every infrastructure cost audit:
Data transfer (egress) fees. Many cloud platforms bill per gigabyte for traffic leaving their network. For APIs, media delivery, backups, and multi-region replication, egress can become one of the largest — and least predictable — line items on the invoice, since it scales with usage rather than a fixed plan.
Over-provisioned compute. Servers get sized for peak load "just in case" and then run at that size 24/7, even when real utilization sits well below it. Without easy resizing, that gap between provisioned and used capacity is pure waste every month.
Opaque, tiered pricing. Region-based rate differences, reserved-instance discounts requiring long lock-in, and pricing calculators that need a spreadsheet to interpret all push companies to over-budget "just in case" — which is itself a hidden cost.
What Transparent Cloud Pricing Actually Looks Like
"Transparent pricing" is a phrase every provider uses. Here's what it looks like when the numbers are actually public — EWADC's current Enterprise Cloud configuration, hosted on AMD EPYC processors with NVMe storage in Warsaw, starts at €50/month (VAT included) and scales up from there:
- Compute: AMD EPYC, starting from 2 vCPU
- Memory: ECC RAM, from 8 GB up to 2 TB
- Storage: 500 GB SSD up to 16 TB NVMe
- Network: 1 Gbps port with unlimited traffic — no egress billing
- Public IPv4: 1 address included, scalable up to a /24 network
- DDoS protection: Standard L3/L4 included; Advanced L3–L7 available from +€100/month
No calculator required — configure an instance directly and the monthly price updates as you build it. Unlimited traffic on every plan means the single biggest source of billing surprises simply doesn't apply.
Dedicated Servers: Bare Metal Pricing Without the Guesswork
For workloads where noisy neighbors, virtualization overhead, or compliance requirements rule out shared cloud infrastructure, bare metal is still the more cost-predictable option — provided the pricing is actually fixed. EWADC's current dedicated server lineup comes with unmetered network and zero setup fees on every tier:
- 16 Cores — €200/month. 2× Intel Xeon E5-2667 v4 (16 cores total), 64 GB DDR4 RAM, 1 TB NVMe storage, 1 Gbps unmetered network.
- 36 Cores — €400/month. 2× Intel Xeon Gold 6254 (36 cores total), 128 GB DDR4 RAM, 2 TB NVMe storage, 1 Gbps unmetered network.
- 64 Cores — €700/month. AMD EPYC 7713 (64 cores), 256 GB DDR4 RAM, 2 TB NVMe storage, 2 Gbps unmetered network.
Every plan includes full root access, independent remote iLO management (so you can reboot or reinstall even if the OS is unresponsive), and a monthly allotment of remote-hands support. There's no setup fee on any tier — a cost hyperscale bare-metal offerings frequently bury in the fine print. See full dedicated server specs →
Colocation: When Owning the Hardware Is Cheaper Long-Term
If you already own — or plan to buy — your own servers, colocation converts what would be a capital expense into a predictable monthly operating cost, without giving up control of the hardware itself.
- 1–2U — from €200/month. A minimum-start entry point for small deployments.
- 21U (half rack) — from €499/month. Suited to growing infrastructure.
- 42U (full rack) — from €899/month. Built for high-density, full-scale deployments.
Power is billed transparently at €0.4/kWh — you pay for exactly what you use, not a flat estimate. Network starts at 100 Mbps included, with 1 Gbps (€200/month) and 10 Gbps (€900/month) upgrades available, plus a full BGP session and IPv4/IPv6 addressing included at every tier. Deployment is completed within 72 hours, with remote-hands support and 24/7 physical security on-site. EWADC's colocation infrastructure is engineered for 99.98% uptime, backed by redundant power, cooling and connectivity. Explore colocation options →
GPU Infrastructure for AI Without Shared-Tenancy Compromises
AI training and inference budgets are notoriously hard to forecast on shared cloud GPU instances, where availability and pricing can shift week to week. EWADC runs dedicated NVIDIA GPU infrastructure — including L40S systems and compact Grace Blackwell (DGX Spark) appliances — as isolated, single-tenant hardware with up to 100 GbE networking and private VLANs.
Three deployment models are available depending on how much of the stack you want to manage yourself:
- Dedicated Bare Metal — full administrative access to your own GPU system
- Managed GPU Environment — OS, drivers and AI stack (CUDA, Docker, PyTorch, vLLM, Ollama) pre-configured
- Custom AI Infrastructure — multi-GPU, private-network builds for larger training or inference workloads
Because GPU availability shifts with demand, current systems and configurations are published directly in the Client Panel — worth checking even if you're only benchmarking cost against a hyperscaler's on-demand GPU pricing.
The Part Most Pricing Pages Skip: Where and How It's Actually Hosted
A low sticker price doesn't mean much if the infrastructure behind it is unreliable or sitting outside the legal jurisdiction your business needs. Two things worth checking with any provider before you commit:
Data residency. EWADC's facilities are located in Warsaw, Poland — inside the EU — so workloads for European customers stay within GDPR jurisdiction by default. That removes a recurring question from procurement and compliance reviews, and it keeps latency low for users across Central and Eastern Europe.
Density and cooling. EWADC's newer infrastructure uses direct liquid cooling — chilled water removing heat directly from CPUs and GPUs — which handles high-density AI and HPC workloads far more efficiently than traditional air cooling, while extending hardware lifespan and reducing energy waste. That matters more every year as GPU power draw keeps climbing.
Support that's actually staffed. Every EWADC service ties into a 24/7 monitored infrastructure with priority-based incident handling and an average first response time of roughly 21 minutes. Downtime and slow incident resolution are a cost too — just one that doesn't show up on the invoice.
A 4-Step Cost Audit You Can Run This Week
- Split your last three invoices into compute vs. data-transfer cost. If egress is above 10–15% of the total, that's a direct signal you're paying for a pricing model, not for capacity.
- Check 30-day utilization on your largest instances. Anything consistently under 40% is a resizing — or a dedicated-server — candidate.
- Confirm where your data actually lives against where your compliance requirements say it should. Misalignment here is a legal risk, not just a cost one.
- Request a fixed quote for your real workload, not the list price. A provider that can turn that around quickly — and put it in writing — is telling you something about how they operate.
FAQ: Cloud and Infrastructure Costs in 2026
How much does a dedicated server cost in Poland? At EWADC, dedicated bare metal servers in Warsaw start at €200/month for a 16-core Intel Xeon configuration with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB NVMe storage, with no setup fee and unmetered network included.
Does EWADC charge for data transfer or egress? No. Cloud instances include unlimited traffic on a 1 Gbps port as standard, and dedicated servers include unmetered network — there's no per-gigabyte egress billing on either.
Is EWADC's infrastructure GDPR compliant? EWADC's data centers are located in Warsaw, Poland, within the EU, so data stored and processed there stays within EU jurisdiction by default — a common requirement for GDPR compliance reviews.
What's the difference between colocation and a dedicated server? With a dedicated server, EWADC owns and maintains the hardware and you rent it. With colocation, you own the hardware and rent rack space, power and connectivity — usually the more cost-effective option long-term if you already own equipment or plan to buy your own.
How is colocation power billed? Transparently, at €0.4/kWh — you pay for actual consumption rather than a flat estimate baked into the rack price.
Final Thoughts
The providers making the strongest case on cost in 2026 aren't necessarily the cheapest on paper — they're the ones whose pricing you can actually verify before you sign anything. Unlimited traffic instead of metered egress, fixed monthly rates instead of usage-based surprises, and EU-based data residency by default all add up to a lower total cost of ownership, even when the headline number looks similar to a hyperscaler's entry tier.
If you're evaluating where to run production workloads, dedicated hardware, colocation or GPU infrastructure in Europe, configure a cloud instance to see live pricing, or talk to an EWADC engineer for a fixed quote built around your actual workload.