Pricing drivers, comparisons and 2026 rules

Start here if a hosting quote or a cloud invoice looks like a wall of line items. These guides break the price into its parts: the type of hosting you buy (shared, VPS, dedicated, public cloud or managed cloud), the compute you rent (vCPU and RAM), the storage tier you choose, the data you send out of the provider's network (egress), and the smaller items that add up, such as public IP addresses, snapshots and load balancers.

The category also covers the rules that change what you actually pay or where your data may go. Sales tax on cloud services depends on your province and on whether the supplier is a regular GST/HST registrant or a non-resident using the simplified regime. Many providers bill in US dollars, so the exchange rate and your card's conversion fee move the Canadian-dollar cost every month. And if you hold personal information, PIPEDA, Quebec's Law 25 and, for public bodies, provincial public-sector laws shape where it can be stored.

All prices in these guides are illustrative and labelled as such. Rates and rules were checked against official sources in October 2026; each guide lists where to confirm them. Read the pillar overview first, then the guide that matches your question.