5 ms·

European Cloud Computing Platforms

147 points by doener 2y ago

mrtksn 2y ago
One thing about the EU based platforms is that they tend to have much more limited free tier, often there's none. IMHO the deep pockets of the US based tech is their primary competitive advantage. In other countries they seem to try to make a bit of money every month but in USA they tend to aim to make a lot of money at once down the road. I'm under the impression that when non-US services end up failing, US based ones end up enshitified. So the EU based stuff stays about the same for many years, the US based stuff starts as we are saving the world, democratizing the technology and doing all this for free(*) and then your bill jumps 100x or your experience goes 100x down.
- rmoriz 2y ago
  But e.g. Hetzner, OVH and Ionos are so cheap, you can easily keep a project alive for years until it gets traction or break even. Paying like 50€ a month is peanuts.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    On AWS or Google Cloud or Firebase you pay $0 a month until you start paying thousands of dollars per month. This makes the brands ubiquitous and developers knowledgeable of the platform. It's like having free MS Office subscription for free when in school, so everyone who graduates ends up knowing the MS tools and it's not feasible to switch to competitor.
    - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
      Shouldn't this be illegal? Price dumping in international trade is already illegal, like when China floods the market with electric cars and solar panels. And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP.
      - Nathanba 2y ago
        I guess nobody considers it price dumping because it's given away entirely for free. People only see it as price dumping when somebody offers something at a far lower price.. but nobody feels like complaining when somebody is so rich that they throw their money at you for free.
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        I don't know how this can be illegal, although I agree that the practice is pretty harmful in some ways. In the AI age for example, almost all platforms are giving it away for free now and costs huge amount of money for them. They are able to give it for free because their investors expect down the road to make much more money like they did in the Web age and then Apps age. Thanks to the investors of the time we had great run on the web and later in the apps. In one hand it means that sometime in the future if they corner the market and establish a monopoly the service will suffer, will be used for doing bad things or become very expensive, just what the web and apps has become. In the other hand this accelerates the technological advancements and deployment far beyond what would be possible in another business model.
      - dumbledoren 2y ago
        > And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP. Because eing a US vassal makes it difficult to sanction your overlord.
    - notpushkin 2y ago
      You can use cloud while you have free credits – just spend them on a beefy AWS Lightsail server or something like that. Then pack it up and move to a cheaper provider.
    - codingbot3000 2y ago
      If you look closer, you can see that the free tier is mostly covering SaaS in order to lock you into their APIs. The free tier for VMs isn't that generous. For a startup, locking into an API that is initially free can often break their neck in the long run. Because for a startup, switching providers is a big distraction. It's often better to run VMs or colocated servers on an OSS stack. I'd argue that OVH (European) is the cost leader for that in every market they are in.
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        I agree but the $0(*) people do win, they usually loose money for years and years and they are able to provide great service. Eventually they lock you down and start recouping their investments from you but they do make some things possible simply because it costs nothing to try and as a result a lot of great things are incepted on those platforms.
- pwnage_royale 2y ago
  Merrymake has a pretty nice free tier, with very few limitations, and it's definitely technologically advanced. And it being serverless, you'll only pay for as much as your code runs, if you wanna go paid tier. Full disclosure, I work there.
joshvm 2y ago
I would add CloudFerro, used by ESA and several other European satellite data providers. https://cloudferro.com/ https://cloudferro.com/ https://cloudferro.com/pricing/pricing-tables/waw3-1-cloud/virtual-machines-vm/ https://cloudferro.com/pricing/pricing-tables/waw3-1-cloud/v... Re the sibling comment they do offer trial credit, but I have explored the terms. I don't think there's a recurring free tier though.
sylware 2y ago
Well, I am self-hosted, and hackers using clouds for hacks/scans (and the so-called "scanners-for-your-own-security-we-swear-we-don't-sell-the-scan-data-to-the-bad-ppl") are really a pain. OVH is not safe (and their scanner/hacking bot onyphe is a pain). But lately the "top" is ucloud.cn and everything hosted on digital ocean. Actually very few front IPs from russia or iran. I wonder if there are EU clouds doing that properly, namely with its own internal "security" cleanup crew and getting rid of those hackers and scanners.
- spyke112 2y ago
  Well, I once got a notice from Hetzner, that I needed to either stop running or harden some random open service I wasn't aware of running on my dedi box (I may have forgotten to install a firewall...). If i recall correctly, they were bound by German law, to monitor their network for suspecious activity, and if the customers didn't comply, they could close down your box. Now, it was a while back, my memory is a bit fuzzy and I don't have the time to look through old emails. Consider this anecdata.
  - sylware 2y ago
    "Monitoring their network for suspicious activity" does not mean to scan ports. It means they have to monitor if one of their hosted "boxes" is actually generating nasty traffic. Once detected, they have to inform the owner of the "box" that they have been pown, well, careful if the owner of the "box" is actually the mob... And I can tell you, I get attacks/scans mostly from those "clouds", like I start to wonder if they are not "closing their eyes" on purpose because with their huge network resources it is wrecking "small hosting", or more "business" for them.
denniebee 2y ago
The tricky thing about these services is that they often cannot compete on price or on capability. The scale and mature feature sets of US based cloud providers outweigh the benefits of keeping it within European ownership for most commercial organizations. For Europe to truly compete, they shouldn't copy IaaS models, but come up with new innovative PaaS models in yet to develop markets, such as XR or internet-decentralization. Those markets provide a chance to go in front at an early stage and with enough dedication of both the EU government and the European business community, this can be a start to differentiate itself from the US and China.
- Tenoke 2y ago
  Hetzner has been the cheapest big option when you just want raw servers for at least a decade, and e.g. Scaleway is pretty similar in price to US based providers.
  - flessner 2y ago
    I have used both of them in the past, pricing is indeed very competitive - there are very few providers coming close to Hetzner pricing on dedicated servers. There's also OVH, they have plenty of global regions, but I haven't used them yet.
  - badestrand 2y ago
    Hetzner half-heartetly started to offer database hosting as well but they need a lot more services and present them on eye level with the servers. I a am huge Hetzner fan and waiting for years already for them to expand their offering.
    - dumbledoren 2y ago
      Huh? Database hosting? I dont see it anywhere in Hetzner offerings?
    - kakoni 2y ago
      I guess at this point you mean their recent object storage offering? https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/
staticelf 2y ago
Finally the people of the european nations have started to invest where they always should have invested, in their own infrastructure and companies.
- genewitch 2y ago
  Don't forget the 800 billion euros for defense!
  - wolvesechoes 2y ago
    Hard to forget something that didn't happen yet. We have declarations and decisions, commendable ones. But let's wait until such money is indeed spend on something.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      borrowed* to spend on something
      - wolvesechoes 2y ago
        All money is borrowed. All money is debt.
        genewitch 2y ago
        agreed.
pbowyer 2y ago
UpCloud are good, and I've used them for over 5 years. They aren't cheap compared to DigitalOcean/Linode (everything is extra €€€) but when I benchmarked the providers before picking them their CPU and disk IO was faster than the other cloud platforms. The internal network has been more reliable than every time I've used DigitalOcean's. All this is for London data centres. It'd be interesting to re-benchmark them against other providers.
pkstn 2y ago
UpCloud is really good!
throw0101b 2y ago
Don't forget about on-prem / private cloud: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CloudStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CloudStack * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_cloud_computing_infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_cloud_computing_infras...
- notpushkin 2y ago
  Also don’t forget you might be fine with just a VPS (or a few)!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
DaveMcMartin 2y ago
I use Contabo for my personal projects, not on the list, they are from Germany. My company uses OVH and I have also used UpCloud, it is pretty good.
drpossum 2y ago
I don't recommend IONOS as they require a phone call to cancel any services and their billing system was inconsistent with the documentation (at least when I tried it recently). Also this list not including Hetzner is deeply shameful.
- bertman 2y ago
  In the second paragraph, it says: >Hosters with a focus on virtual servers, are only listed in the category virtual private server (VPS) hosters. >https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-private-server-hosters https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... Hetzner is the very first entry in that category.
  - drpossum 2y ago
    I stand corrected. My complaints about IONOS still stand.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  I do recommend IONOS as they provide cheap powerful machines with unlimited traffic.
  - drpossum 2y ago
    lol if you believe the marketing gimmick of "unlimited traffic". Where do you think you are?
alanfranz 2y ago
Shameless plug (I’m an employee): If you need advanced services beyond vms/block storage/object storage from your cloud (i.e. databases, kafka, opensearch) also check out aiven.io . We support many EU cloud providers.
KronisLV 2y ago
There's also Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/about-us/ https://contabo.com/en/about-us/ They have mixed reputation in some cases, but honestly their pricing is great for side projects and such, maybe even running a small/medium business as long as it's within their ToS.
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  Contabo is garbage. They'll scam you with every trick in the book.
- jadtz 2y ago
  As far as I am aware Contabo has a pretty bad reputation and not a mixed reputation.
arend321 2y ago
I hope we're going to see a move to more cloud agnostic stacks. I'm currently running Patroni between Hetzner and Netcup, with an Amazon Lightsail VPS as a third etcd member. If Hetzner decides to flag my account, the hot standby on Netcup will take over (or the other way around, as I switch on a weekly basis). Still using Amazon with AWS SES and Route53 but these can be replaced by other parties if need be.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
check prices etc. for some of these here: https://cloudoptimizer.io/ https://cloudoptimizer.io/
KajMagnus 2y ago
Anyone has tried GleSYS? https://glesys.com https://glesys.com They're based out of Sweden, and offer bandwidth in Mbit/s, rather than GB/month (as per their pricing page, https://glesys.com/vps/pricing https://glesys.com/vps/pricing)
riezebos 2y ago
There's also Leafcloud, they put their servers in urban buildings and recycle the waste heat: https://leaf.cloud/ https://leaf.cloud/
pwnage_royale 2y ago
And here's another shameless plug: merrymake.eu. We're a Danish-based and -owned 3-year old cloud provider, and we can definitely compete with the big US clouds on technology and price. Merrymake is serverless, extremely fast (if not the fastest in EU), and infraless, meaning we hide away all the clutter, so devs can focus on their code instead. So it's not just a GDPR-compliant alternative, but a technological advancement to the US providers.

147 points by doener 2y ago

One thing about the EU based platforms is that they tend to have much more limited free tier, often there's none. IMHO the deep pockets of the US based tech is their primary competitive advantage. In other countries they seem to try to make a bit of money every month but in USA they tend to aim to make a lot of money at once down the road. I'm under the impression that when non-US services end up failing, US based ones end up enshitified. So the EU based stuff stays about the same for many years, the US based stuff starts as we are saving the world, democratizing the technology and doing all this for free(*) and then your bill jumps 100x or your experience goes 100x down.

rmoriz 2y ago
But e.g. Hetzner, OVH and Ionos are so cheap, you can easily keep a project alive for years until it gets traction or break even. Paying like 50€ a month is peanuts.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  On AWS or Google Cloud or Firebase you pay $0 a month until you start paying thousands of dollars per month. This makes the brands ubiquitous and developers knowledgeable of the platform. It's like having free MS Office subscription for free when in school, so everyone who graduates ends up knowing the MS tools and it's not feasible to switch to competitor.
  - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    Shouldn't this be illegal? Price dumping in international trade is already illegal, like when China floods the market with electric cars and solar panels. And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP.
    - Nathanba 2y ago
      I guess nobody considers it price dumping because it's given away entirely for free. People only see it as price dumping when somebody offers something at a far lower price.. but nobody feels like complaining when somebody is so rich that they throw their money at you for free.
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      I don't know how this can be illegal, although I agree that the practice is pretty harmful in some ways. In the AI age for example, almost all platforms are giving it away for free now and costs huge amount of money for them. They are able to give it for free because their investors expect down the road to make much more money like they did in the Web age and then Apps age. Thanks to the investors of the time we had great run on the web and later in the apps. In one hand it means that sometime in the future if they corner the market and establish a monopoly the service will suffer, will be used for doing bad things or become very expensive, just what the web and apps has become. In the other hand this accelerates the technological advancements and deployment far beyond what would be possible in another business model.
    - dumbledoren 2y ago
      > And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP. Because eing a US vassal makes it difficult to sanction your overlord.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    You can use cloud while you have free credits – just spend them on a beefy AWS Lightsail server or something like that. Then pack it up and move to a cheaper provider.
  - codingbot3000 2y ago
    If you look closer, you can see that the free tier is mostly covering SaaS in order to lock you into their APIs. The free tier for VMs isn't that generous. For a startup, locking into an API that is initially free can often break their neck in the long run. Because for a startup, switching providers is a big distraction. It's often better to run VMs or colocated servers on an OSS stack. I'd argue that OVH (European) is the cost leader for that in every market they are in.
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      I agree but the $0(*) people do win, they usually loose money for years and years and they are able to provide great service. Eventually they lock you down and start recouping their investments from you but they do make some things possible simply because it costs nothing to try and as a result a lot of great things are incepted on those platforms.
pwnage_royale 2y ago
Merrymake has a pretty nice free tier, with very few limitations, and it's definitely technologically advanced. And it being serverless, you'll only pay for as much as your code runs, if you wanna go paid tier. Full disclosure, I work there.

joshvm 2y ago

I would add CloudFerro, used by ESA and several other European satellite data providers. https://cloudferro.com/ https://cloudferro.com/ https://cloudferro.com/pricing/pricing-tables/waw3-1-cloud/virtual-machines-vm/ https://cloudferro.com/pricing/pricing-tables/waw3-1-cloud/v... Re the sibling comment they do offer trial credit, but I have explored the terms. I don't think there's a recurring free tier though.

sylware 2y ago

Well, I am self-hosted, and hackers using clouds for hacks/scans (and the so-called "scanners-for-your-own-security-we-swear-we-don't-sell-the-scan-data-to-the-bad-ppl") are really a pain. OVH is not safe (and their scanner/hacking bot onyphe is a pain). But lately the "top" is ucloud.cn and everything hosted on digital ocean. Actually very few front IPs from russia or iran. I wonder if there are EU clouds doing that properly, namely with its own internal "security" cleanup crew and getting rid of those hackers and scanners.

spyke112 2y ago
Well, I once got a notice from Hetzner, that I needed to either stop running or harden some random open service I wasn't aware of running on my dedi box (I may have forgotten to install a firewall...). If i recall correctly, they were bound by German law, to monitor their network for suspecious activity, and if the customers didn't comply, they could close down your box. Now, it was a while back, my memory is a bit fuzzy and I don't have the time to look through old emails. Consider this anecdata.
- sylware 2y ago
  "Monitoring their network for suspicious activity" does not mean to scan ports. It means they have to monitor if one of their hosted "boxes" is actually generating nasty traffic. Once detected, they have to inform the owner of the "box" that they have been pown, well, careful if the owner of the "box" is actually the mob... And I can tell you, I get attacks/scans mostly from those "clouds", like I start to wonder if they are not "closing their eyes" on purpose because with their huge network resources it is wrecking "small hosting", or more "business" for them.

denniebee 2y ago

The tricky thing about these services is that they often cannot compete on price or on capability. The scale and mature feature sets of US based cloud providers outweigh the benefits of keeping it within European ownership for most commercial organizations. For Europe to truly compete, they shouldn't copy IaaS models, but come up with new innovative PaaS models in yet to develop markets, such as XR or internet-decentralization. Those markets provide a chance to go in front at an early stage and with enough dedication of both the EU government and the European business community, this can be a start to differentiate itself from the US and China.

Tenoke 2y ago
Hetzner has been the cheapest big option when you just want raw servers for at least a decade, and e.g. Scaleway is pretty similar in price to US based providers.
- flessner 2y ago
  I have used both of them in the past, pricing is indeed very competitive - there are very few providers coming close to Hetzner pricing on dedicated servers. There's also OVH, they have plenty of global regions, but I haven't used them yet.
- badestrand 2y ago
  Hetzner half-heartetly started to offer database hosting as well but they need a lot more services and present them on eye level with the servers. I a am huge Hetzner fan and waiting for years already for them to expand their offering.
  - dumbledoren 2y ago
    Huh? Database hosting? I dont see it anywhere in Hetzner offerings?
  - kakoni 2y ago
    I guess at this point you mean their recent object storage offering? https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/

staticelf 2y ago

Finally the people of the european nations have started to invest where they always should have invested, in their own infrastructure and companies.

genewitch 2y ago
Don't forget the 800 billion euros for defense!
- wolvesechoes 2y ago
  Hard to forget something that didn't happen yet. We have declarations and decisions, commendable ones. But let's wait until such money is indeed spend on something.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    borrowed* to spend on something
    - wolvesechoes 2y ago
      All money is borrowed. All money is debt.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        agreed.

pbowyer 2y ago

UpCloud are good, and I've used them for over 5 years. They aren't cheap compared to DigitalOcean/Linode (everything is extra €€€) but when I benchmarked the providers before picking them their CPU and disk IO was faster than the other cloud platforms. The internal network has been more reliable than every time I've used DigitalOcean's. All this is for London data centres. It'd be interesting to re-benchmark them against other providers.

pkstn 2y ago

UpCloud is really good!

throw0101b 2y ago

Don't forget about on-prem / private cloud: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CloudStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CloudStack * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_cloud_computing_infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_cloud_computing_infras...

notpushkin 2y ago
Also don’t forget you might be fine with just a VPS (or a few)!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

DaveMcMartin 2y ago

I use Contabo for my personal projects, not on the list, they are from Germany. My company uses OVH and I have also used UpCloud, it is pretty good.

drpossum 2y ago

I don't recommend IONOS as they require a phone call to cancel any services and their billing system was inconsistent with the documentation (at least when I tried it recently). Also this list not including Hetzner is deeply shameful.

bertman 2y ago
In the second paragraph, it says: >Hosters with a focus on virtual servers, are only listed in the category virtual private server (VPS) hosters. >https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-private-server-hosters https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... Hetzner is the very first entry in that category.
- drpossum 2y ago
  I stand corrected. My complaints about IONOS still stand.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I do recommend IONOS as they provide cheap powerful machines with unlimited traffic.
- drpossum 2y ago
  lol if you believe the marketing gimmick of "unlimited traffic". Where do you think you are?

alanfranz 2y ago

Shameless plug (I’m an employee): If you need advanced services beyond vms/block storage/object storage from your cloud (i.e. databases, kafka, opensearch) also check out aiven.io . We support many EU cloud providers.

KronisLV 2y ago

There's also Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/about-us/ https://contabo.com/en/about-us/ They have mixed reputation in some cases, but honestly their pricing is great for side projects and such, maybe even running a small/medium business as long as it's within their ToS.

concerndc1tizen 2y ago
Contabo is garbage. They'll scam you with every trick in the book.
jadtz 2y ago
As far as I am aware Contabo has a pretty bad reputation and not a mixed reputation.

arend321 2y ago

I hope we're going to see a move to more cloud agnostic stacks. I'm currently running Patroni between Hetzner and Netcup, with an Amazon Lightsail VPS as a third etcd member. If Hetzner decides to flag my account, the hot standby on Netcup will take over (or the other way around, as I switch on a weekly basis). Still using Amazon with AWS SES and Route53 but these can be replaced by other parties if need be.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

check prices etc. for some of these here: https://cloudoptimizer.io/ https://cloudoptimizer.io/

KajMagnus 2y ago

Anyone has tried GleSYS? https://glesys.com https://glesys.com They're based out of Sweden, and offer bandwidth in Mbit/s, rather than GB/month (as per their pricing page, https://glesys.com/vps/pricing https://glesys.com/vps/pricing)

riezebos 2y ago

There's also Leafcloud, they put their servers in urban buildings and recycle the waste heat: https://leaf.cloud/ https://leaf.cloud/

pwnage_royale 2y ago

And here's another shameless plug: merrymake.eu. We're a Danish-based and -owned 3-year old cloud provider, and we can definitely compete with the big US clouds on technology and price. Merrymake is serverless, extremely fast (if not the fastest in EU), and infraless, meaning we hide away all the clutter, so devs can focus on their code instead. So it's not just a GDPR-compliant alternative, but a technological advancement to the US providers.