How many regions really matter: Contabo has 9, Azure claims over 60

Contabo published on 28 July a comparison between hyperscalers and mid-tier VPS providers on the number of regions available worldwide. When choosing where to deploy a workload, most decision-makers look at the geographical distribution of their users before considering a provider's total number of locations.

The blog breaks this down into two tiers. Among hyperscalers, Microsoft Azure claims over 60 announced regions, followed by Oracle Cloud with over 50, Google Cloud with over 40, and AWS with over 35. These are numbers declared by vendors rather than measured in the lab, and the blog notes that they increase constantly and should be taken as approximations.

Among mid-tier VPS providers, the ranking shifts: Vultr and OVHcloud operate over 30 locations, Linode/Akamai Cloud has over 25, DigitalOcean around 15. Contabo stops at 9 regions, but with a specific composition: US East in New York, US Central in St. Louis and US West in Seattle, the EU Hub at the Franco-German border, Singapore, Japan (Tokyo), Australia and India, plus the United Kingdom in Portsmouth.

Same hardware, unlimited traffic

The blog's main argument is infrastructure uniformity: identical hardware specifications, the same network architecture and the same operational processes are replicated across all regions, with unlimited traffic included in every plan and no egress billing. This is a concrete difference from hyperscalers, where outbound traffic costs per gigabyte and can inflate your monthly bill when workloads shift significant amounts of data outbound.

Data centre is not the same as edge PoP

The comparison also clarifies a distinction that often causes confusion in pricing lists: a data centre region is where your VPS or database actually runs, whereas an edge presence point is lighter CDN infrastructure that caches static content near users without executing the application. Hyperscalers and CDN providers often claim hundreds of PoPs, a number that answers a different question from counting compute regions. Contabo, like most VPS providers, operates data centre regions and not a separate edge network: for edge caching, the blog recommends pairing a CDN like Cloudflare with your VPS rather than expecting a hosting provider's region count to cover that requirement.

When evaluating where to run a workload, you should start with a real map of your user base and measure actual latency to candidate regions before looking at a provider's total declared locations.