The analysts at Cloud Spectator have been assessing the best cloud vendors in Europe for price and performance, with French hosting provider OVH replacing 1&1 at the top of the rankings.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Cloud Spectator’s shtick. The company analyses vCPU, memory, and block storage performance, and puts it alongside pricing to give an overall verdict. As a rule, the hypervendors – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM – often struggle.

In this analysis, with OVH given the benchmark default total of 100 out of 100, IBM SoftLayer finished dead last on 18, with AWS (23) and Azure (29) faring little better. Google, with a score of 61, was the best performing of the major vendors, although in fourth place overall, behind Rackspace.

Testing on the cloud providers – which also numbered DigitalOcean, CenturyLink and Dimension Data – took place in February and March, with more than one million data points collected. While 1&1, previously the leader in such tests, demonstrated the best combination of performance and high stability, OVH took the overall crown due to ‘strong VM performance and the most inexpensive packaged pricing found in the study for the majority of VM sizes’.

Previous research in February, which focused on the US infrastructure as a service space, warned enterprises were at risk of ‘significant’ overspend on cloud services. As with the European perspective, Google performed better than AWS, Azure and SoftLayer, but scoring only 48 with 1&1 as the leader.

“When making cloud purchase decisions, performance is a critical yet often overlooked component of the cloud, but can have a substantial impact on annual operating costs,” said Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator. “We have found no correlation between price and performance across the 10 providers included in this report.

“It is apparent that with the public cloud, you don’t always get what you pay for.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).