CreateOS Sandbox vs IONOS Cloud
Choose IONOS Cloud when you want long-running servers from a European provider with per-site certifications and cheap vCPU pricing. Choose CreateOS Sandbox when the job is running agent or untrusted code in short-lived machines you create, pause, fork and destroy from code. CreateOS sandboxes have no session cap but top out at 8 vCPU / 16 GB, so large always-on servers belong on IONOS.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. IONOS Cloud pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
IONOS Cloud
- Compute
- $0.0130 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- See below
vCPU servers cost $0.013 per vCPU-hour plus $0.0022 per GB-hour of RAM, and dedicated cores $0.045 to $0.056 per core-hour, billed per minute, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where IONOS Cloud has the edge.
Memory and CPU state survive a pause, so an agent can stop mid-task and continue later; the IONOS pages checked show volume snapshots only.
New sandboxes can be forked from a paused one, carrying its saved state, rather than rebuilt from a volume snapshot or image.
Outbound rules by hostname or wildcard, applied live without a restart and enforced outside the VM.
An opt-in HTTPS URL with managed certificates, so a preview server is reachable without setting up a public IP and NIC firewall rules.
Where IONOS Cloud is strong
Cheap vCPU servers at $0.013 per vCPU-hour with the first 2 TB of egress free, from a European provider that documents per-site certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 Type II for Frankfurt 1.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Your agent starts a machine per task and tears it down minutes later
- You need to pause an environment with its memory and resume it the next day
- You want an image with coding-agent CLIs and Docker preinstalled
Pick IONOS Cloud if
- You need always-on VMs with up to 62 dedicated cores or 230 GB of RAM
- Your buyers ask for data centers in specific EU cities such as Frankfurt or Berlin
- You want dedicated cores on named AMD EPYC or Intel CPU generations
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.
| Dimension | CreateOS Sandbox | IONOS Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Full VM (hypervisor not published) |
| Create and destroy by API | Yes: REST API, CLI, SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), and an MCP server with create, exec and destroy tools | Yes: REST Cloud API, SDKs, ionosctl CLI and Terraform provider; MCP not published |
| Memory snapshot (pause and resume) | Yes: pause saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing while paused, memory and storage still bill | Not found in the pages checked; block storage persists while stopped and volume snapshots exist |
| Fork | Yes: fork a paused sandbox into new, independent sandboxes | No live fork published; new servers from volume snapshots or images |
| Outbound network controls | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Not published |
| Billing granularity | Per second while running, no minimums: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour, $0.01159025 per GiB-hour | Per minute for most resources (IONOS FAQ); prices listed per hour |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise (8 / 8 Pro, 4 / 4 Beginner, 1 / 1 Free) | Up to 62 dedicated cores or 60 vCPUs; up to 230 GB RAM per server |
| GPU | No GPU shapes | Yes, GPU servers listed; specs and prices not on the compute price page |
Common Questions
Is IONOS Cloud a good fit for running AI agent code?
It works if you are happy to build the sandbox layer yourself. IONOS sells general VMs with an API, but the pages checked show no memory snapshot, fork or published concurrency limits. CreateOS Sandbox provides pause, fork and egress rules as API calls on Firecracker micro-VMs, billed per second.
Which is cheaper per vCPU-hour, IONOS Cloud or CreateOS Sandbox?
IONOS vCPU servers are cheaper per unit at $0.013 per vCPU-hour, against $0.03616363 on CreateOS. IONOS bills per minute; CreateOS bills per second while running and stops vCPU billing during a pause. For a server that runs all month, IONOS costs less.
Does CreateOS have EU hosting and certifications like IONOS Cloud?
CreateOS runs sandboxes in two regions, eu and us, chosen at create time. CreateOS is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with reports available under NDA. IONOS lists more European sites, including Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and Logroño, with per-site certifications in its service catalog.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.