I don't think describing Hetzner as IaaS is very accurate. They do offer that as well, but also dedicated servers, VPS and more.
Personally I use Hetzner exclusively for their cheap and unmetered dedicated servers, as I don't like paying per GB used or similar, I want one static cost per month regardless of anything.
In fact, when I think about it, most other Hetzner users I've met have similar objectives and I don't think I've met anyone around me in real-life that was using the IaaS part of Hetzner.
Yes, they are infrastructure but not Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). IaaS is typically referring to the sort of services you don't really care about the underlying hardware at all, nor the OS.
So while you can build your own IaaS by using dokku, Kubernetes or whatever on top of dedicated servers, dedicated servers (or VPS) by themselves aren't part of IaaS.
> Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software.
Thanks for asking! The infrastructure is actually the less interesting part for us, since our platform is written to be completely portable. The USP is the platform itself, that means the managed aspect. You can run your workload on our platform without having to worry too much about servers or infrastructure. Deployment can be done either through Git Integrations or our 1 click deployment option for popular open source services. You can scale your application up and down in seconds and additionally we try to offer every important component as an all in one solution inhouse. Think managed dbs, transactional emails, etc., those are all products we offer today.
We actually started out in 2019 by colocating our own network/server equipment in a colo facility in Frankfurt (InterXion). We are bootstrapped and since our USP is the software, not the infrastructure, we decided to partner with a reliable infrastructure company that is available globally, flexible enough and for data privacy reasons is an EU based company (there are not many!) so we could roll out our platform faster. Since we still own our own IP space and are a RIPE member, we can migrate to our own infrastructure down the road.
In this business the focus shouldn't be to own the whole "supply chain", but to deliver a reliable solution to customers. Everyone is a reseller of someone.
Nodion -> Leaseweb. Leaseweb -> Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain -> electricity companies, dark fiber, etc.
Heroku/Vercel -> AWS. AWS also uses colo facilities like Equinix, InterXion, NTT or e-shelter in Frankfurt.
I quite like the low-end offering, €5 can get you a managed ValKey, a managed Postgres and a 512MB RAM Linux VM. In most other PaaS offerings you start at $10 just for a managed database.
If you don't mind answering, how do you handle those low-memory databases? For i.e. DS-G2-256MB, you get a 256MB VM with a dedicated Postgres installation, or you get an user/db in a shared Postgres server?
Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.
This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.
I think the "joke" is if the US government orders a company to hand over that data, the fact that the servers are physically in the EU won't stop anything
It's one thing if they require the copy of data, and another thing if the President wakes up in a bad mood and orders deleting all the data. Imagine if the whole computing infrastructure for power plants, public transportation, banks, payment systems, large companies gets deleted in a minute.
You should not host the critical data on other country's servers.
You obviously haven't heard of the cloud act, which american cloud providers must follow. Microsoft will do as they are told by Trump - "turn off access to the ICC's criminal prosecutor for Gaza" - "yes boss".
Sovereign cloud might theoretically mean sovereign control over data.
Does absolutely jack shit about the blocs trade deficit in the cloud services space though. Hundreds of billions of euros being sent abroad every year.
Without some kind of collective trade policy [1] sovereign cloud initiatives will continue to be a waste of time for everyone involved (including engineers). Also if you see the phrase Gaia-X ... run.
Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.
Yes, we are very much of the opinion that we are a cloud provider. While historically we have been known for our dedicated servers, our Cloud continues to steadily grow in terms of feature set, users, infrastructure, and much more. We even updated our cloud offer today. --Katie, Hetzner
They have load balancers, and while they don't have an auto scale feature they do have APIs for starting instances and configuring the load balancer. So it's not that difficult to build your own auto scaling
As compared to a "traditional" offering where there's only a manual order form and getting a new server might take hours, making auto-scaling unfeasible
They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.
I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.
Cloud services like AWS offer VPSes (Lightsail) so the boundary is very blurry. In any case Hertzner offers load balances, firewalls, private networks, which is fairly cloudy stuff.
They’re building out more cloud capability but not anywhere near the level that AWS and the rest have.
AWS has way more managed business logic. Directory services, authentication, serverless PaaS, virtual workstations, data lakes, code deployment, the list goes on and on.
Load balancers and firewalls are extremely basic in comparison.
Offering compute, storage, databases, containers, you name it. And having personal experience with these guys I can tell you they are awesome. Want to host your stuff specifically in a CO2 neutral DC? They can do that too.
Missing Datacrunch [1], Finland-based GPU cluster provider. Also, funnily enough, the european.cloud website seems to be experiencing a hug of death and barely loads at the moment, with frequent server-side failures. Gotta find a better cloud hosting, perhaps.
I am the owner of the site and I would like to thank you all for the discussion and the feedback. Some points I was aware, e.g. Hetzner not in yet, others I had not thought of (e.g. not immediatly visible that it's a private project). I will try to incorporate as much of the feedback as I can.
Basically everyone with even a CDN endpoint on the US is under Cloud Act. Hetzner, OVH, etc. Maybe only Scaleway that I couldn’t find any mentions of an US PoP.
If I need to chose a datacenter in Europe, does anyone know which country has the most lenient speech laws for user-generated content? It doesn't need to be within the EU, just on the continent.
They're the same for the majority of people in Europe. We use EU and Europe synonymously very often. The UK doesn't even allow end-to-end encryption any longer and has some Draconian surveillance laws. I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant so it's better to list them separately.
It is true because a cryptosystem is by definition not end-to-end encrypted if a third party can read the plaintext, and that's exactly what UK law mandates.
> "I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.
That's not the stance of legal scholars and judges in the EU, for the same reasons as there are doubts that US companies can be GDPR compliant. Let's just say that the alleged GDPR compliance hasn't been tested in court yet and is a legal gamble. Whether a EU company is willing to take that gamble or not depends on many factors and is up to them, of course.
I'm aware. I think the EU have being trying to co-opt the word european which is absolutely insane. You will see it frequently from EU politicians "Europe will back ukraine with X". Putin and erm I imagine 3/4s of Russias population lives in Europe.
Who cares what you think is insane. That's the way people think and talk in Europe, and it makes sense. Maybe in the UK people think of Russia when someone talks about Europe but certainly no one does that in the EU. In this case, it makes a lot of sense not to include the UK (or Russia) because people looking for alternatives to US cloud providers for legal reasons are going to have the same or even more concerns about the UK (viz., Russia).
It's ok for you all to believe european === EU, but that is a EU only view (and factually incorrect). Also OK for you to buy stuff only from within the EU, I can understand why you'd want to do that, but obviously people outside the EU will be surprised to see you defining europe as the EU.
I doubt they will be surprised. Bear in mind that many people in Europe who live outside the EU want to be part of the EU. Polls show that quite consistently for the UK, too. (Though, to be fair, you could easily ask the poll question in a way that would give the opposite majority.)
Speaking as one, they usually are. I mean polling is mostly BS, all the polling said the that UK was staying in the EU even as the voting opened - look how that turned out. Actually the polls were about the same (~65%) as the polls in say france today which say 68% in favour of EU membership - so could I say france wants to leave the EU? All total rubbish.
Bunny.net is also missing. They're not just a CDN, they also provide S3 storage, magic containers (edge computing), and other services. I use them in combination with Hetzner and so far I'm very happy with them.
There is also https://www.hetzner.com/ (IaaS), https://www.leaseweb.com/en/ (IaaS) and https://www.nodion.com/en/ (PaaS).
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Nodion.
I don't think describing Hetzner as IaaS is very accurate. They do offer that as well, but also dedicated servers, VPS and more.
Personally I use Hetzner exclusively for their cheap and unmetered dedicated servers, as I don't like paying per GB used or similar, I want one static cost per month regardless of anything.
In fact, when I think about it, most other Hetzner users I've met have similar objectives and I don't think I've met anyone around me in real-life that was using the IaaS part of Hetzner.
How would you classify VPS and dedicated servers though? Aren't those considered infra?
Yes, they are infrastructure but not Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). IaaS is typically referring to the sort of services you don't really care about the underlying hardware at all, nor the OS.
So while you can build your own IaaS by using dokku, Kubernetes or whatever on top of dedicated servers, dedicated servers (or VPS) by themselves aren't part of IaaS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service
> Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software.
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
That's literally openstack, which is basically the definition of IaaS
Haven’t heard of Nodion before. What is your main selling point? What does it do different from just reselling Leaseweb?
Thanks for asking! The infrastructure is actually the less interesting part for us, since our platform is written to be completely portable. The USP is the platform itself, that means the managed aspect. You can run your workload on our platform without having to worry too much about servers or infrastructure. Deployment can be done either through Git Integrations or our 1 click deployment option for popular open source services. You can scale your application up and down in seconds and additionally we try to offer every important component as an all in one solution inhouse. Think managed dbs, transactional emails, etc., those are all products we offer today.
We actually started out in 2019 by colocating our own network/server equipment in a colo facility in Frankfurt (InterXion). We are bootstrapped and since our USP is the software, not the infrastructure, we decided to partner with a reliable infrastructure company that is available globally, flexible enough and for data privacy reasons is an EU based company (there are not many!) so we could roll out our platform faster. Since we still own our own IP space and are a RIPE member, we can migrate to our own infrastructure down the road.
In this business the focus shouldn't be to own the whole "supply chain", but to deliver a reliable solution to customers. Everyone is a reseller of someone.
Nodion -> Leaseweb. Leaseweb -> Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain -> electricity companies, dark fiber, etc.
Heroku/Vercel -> AWS. AWS also uses colo facilities like Equinix, InterXion, NTT or e-shelter in Frankfurt.
Thank you, I'll give it a try!
I quite like the low-end offering, €5 can get you a managed ValKey, a managed Postgres and a 512MB RAM Linux VM. In most other PaaS offerings you start at $10 just for a managed database.
If you don't mind answering, how do you handle those low-memory databases? For i.e. DS-G2-256MB, you get a 256MB VM with a dedicated Postgres installation, or you get an user/db in a shared Postgres server?
On which infrastructure does Nodion run? You have and manage your own racks?
They rely on Leaseweb: https://www.nodion.com/en/docs/regions/
Could you give us free coupons for Nodion? LOL
Also: https://european-alternatives.eu/
This is my go-to site!
Have a hard time take this serious without hetzner
Also "sovereign US cloud" is a bad joke
Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.
This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.
I think the "joke" is if the US government orders a company to hand over that data, the fact that the servers are physically in the EU won't stop anything
This is addressed on the very page though:
> A sovereign US cloud does not address or mitigate the strategic reliance of European businesses and governments on US-based cloud providers.
> Some commentators are therefore calling those attempts “Sovereign-Cloud-Washing” or “EUWashing”.
It's one thing if they require the copy of data, and another thing if the President wakes up in a bad mood and orders deleting all the data. Imagine if the whole computing infrastructure for power plants, public transportation, banks, payment systems, large companies gets deleted in a minute.
You should not host the critical data on other country's servers.
That’s not the goal, it’s about regulatory compliance.
why it should happen?
Intelligence.
You obviously haven't heard of the cloud act, which american cloud providers must follow. Microsoft will do as they are told by Trump - "turn off access to the ICC's criminal prosecutor for Gaza" - "yes boss".
Sovereign cloud might theoretically mean sovereign control over data.
Does absolutely jack shit about the blocs trade deficit in the cloud services space though. Hundreds of billions of euros being sent abroad every year.
Without some kind of collective trade policy [1] sovereign cloud initiatives will continue to be a waste of time for everyone involved (including engineers). Also if you see the phrase Gaia-X ... run.
1. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-europe...
They don't have any cloud or abstraction. You basically rent bare metal servers.
Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.
Hetzner is of the opinion that they have a cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Whether it has enough features to satisfy your needs is another question, but it is more than just bare metal or vps
Yes, we are very much of the opinion that we are a cloud provider. While historically we have been known for our dedicated servers, our Cloud continues to steadily grow in terms of feature set, users, infrastructure, and much more. We even updated our cloud offer today. --Katie, Hetzner
I mean basic features like auto scale and create new resources.
The most basic thing with a load balancer and scale instances behind that.
They don't have any of that.
They have load balancers, and while they don't have an auto scale feature they do have APIs for starting instances and configuring the load balancer. So it's not that difficult to build your own auto scaling
As compared to a "traditional" offering where there's only a manual order form and getting a new server might take hours, making auto-scaling unfeasible
Autoscaling based on CPU usage has been the most basic thing in the last 15 years. Are you really asking people to build that?
They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.
I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.
Since "cloud" just means someone else's computer, I don't see how it doesn't qualify.
Hetzner doesn’t really have abstracted cloud services, they’re basically just bare metal servers or VPS.
They are on the way, they introduced s3, and now better dns Management
There is still a lot missing, and tbh the s3 did not work great when I tested it.
Cloud services like AWS offer VPSes (Lightsail) so the boundary is very blurry. In any case Hertzner offers load balances, firewalls, private networks, which is fairly cloudy stuff.
They’re building out more cloud capability but not anywhere near the level that AWS and the rest have.
AWS has way more managed business logic. Directory services, authentication, serverless PaaS, virtual workstations, data lakes, code deployment, the list goes on and on.
Load balancers and firewalls are extremely basic in comparison.
A VPS is still "cloud" though, isn't it?
It's missing out on small, yet good and reliable providers.
Some examples:
Tilaa (NL) - https://www.tilaa.com/en/
Offering compute, storage, databases, containers, you name it. And having personal experience with these guys I can tell you they are awesome. Want to host your stuff specifically in a CO2 neutral DC? They can do that too.
Leafcloud (NL) - https://leaf.cloud/
Green OpenStack based cloud provider
Stuxhost (NL/DE) - https://stuxhost.com
Focused on managed NextCloud hosting, managed webhosting and VPN
And there are hundreds more, actually.
For a second I thought it was an official page. Seems it is a personal initiative.
It is a personal page, see the About page: https://european.cloud/about/
I agree with you that this distinction could be made more prominently.
Missing Datacrunch [1], Finland-based GPU cluster provider. Also, funnily enough, the european.cloud website seems to be experiencing a hug of death and barely loads at the moment, with frequent server-side failures. Gotta find a better cloud hosting, perhaps.
1. https://datacrunch.io/
I am the owner of the site and I would like to thank you all for the discussion and the feedback. Some points I was aware, e.g. Hetzner not in yet, others I had not thought of (e.g. not immediatly visible that it's a private project). I will try to incorporate as much of the feedback as I can.
Thank you all!
What about https://www.koyeb.com/ ? It's based in Paris, FR
It would be awesome to have this list vetted for the CLOUD Act. IIRC only Scaleway is “safe” from it, given they don’t have any PoP in the USA.
Surprised to not see Ubicloud in there, which provides cloud services on top of various (including European) infra providers.
https://www.ubicloud.com/
Not a European company are they though. Worst of both worlds as they come under US and EU regulation.
They're under the CLOUD Act, i.e. quite toxic.
Basically everyone with even a CDN endpoint on the US is under Cloud Act. Hetzner, OVH, etc. Maybe only Scaleway that I couldn’t find any mentions of an US PoP.
US Cloud act says they need to provide US govt with access to your data even if the DC is outside the US
If I need to chose a datacenter in Europe, does anyone know which country has the most lenient speech laws for user-generated content? It doesn't need to be within the EU, just on the continent.
Highly recommend - https://www.brightbox.com/ for European / UK hosting
https://www.netcup.com/en is missing.
Biggest one, Hetzner, missing?
OVH is far bigger than Hetzner.
Hmm, possibly in the enterprise sector, I think Hetzner has more clients, but OVH has the bigger clients.
I've been quite happy with scaleway. I wish it had hetzner prices though
This is missing Outscale, a French one.
civo.com ... i guess that's Europe but not EU. (they're UK based)
It's missing Evroc, from Sweden.
AFAIK they haven’t launched yet.
They have launched. But their firts data center will not be built until next year. They are running on CoLos currently.
Their website has basically nothing. Is it under a different brand, or just not generally available yet?
I get so (unreasonably?) annoyed with people saying "European" and meaning "EU"; they're not the same thing. Stop it!
You're missing all the providers based in the UK who frankly provide at least as many good options as the whole of the EU combined.
Hosting your data in the UK may not make much of a difference: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...
Here European clearly means "outside of the legal reach of the USA".
They're the same for the majority of people in Europe. We use EU and Europe synonymously very often. The UK doesn't even allow end-to-end encryption any longer and has some Draconian surveillance laws. I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant so it's better to list them separately.
"The UK doesn't even allow end-to-end encryption" thats 100% not true, just completely false.
"has some Draconian surveillance laws", sure and what EU countries don't - you must be joking?
"I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.
It is true because a cryptosystem is by definition not end-to-end encrypted if a third party can read the plaintext, and that's exactly what UK law mandates.
> "I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.
That's not the stance of legal scholars and judges in the EU, for the same reasons as there are doubts that US companies can be GDPR compliant. Let's just say that the alleged GDPR compliance hasn't been tested in court yet and is a legal gamble. Whether a EU company is willing to take that gamble or not depends on many factors and is up to them, of course.
I'm aware. I think the EU have being trying to co-opt the word european which is absolutely insane. You will see it frequently from EU politicians "Europe will back ukraine with X". Putin and erm I imagine 3/4s of Russias population lives in Europe.
Who cares what you think is insane. That's the way people think and talk in Europe, and it makes sense. Maybe in the UK people think of Russia when someone talks about Europe but certainly no one does that in the EU. In this case, it makes a lot of sense not to include the UK (or Russia) because people looking for alternatives to US cloud providers for legal reasons are going to have the same or even more concerns about the UK (viz., Russia).
It's ok for you all to believe european === EU, but that is a EU only view (and factually incorrect). Also OK for you to buy stuff only from within the EU, I can understand why you'd want to do that, but obviously people outside the EU will be surprised to see you defining europe as the EU.
I doubt they will be surprised. Bear in mind that many people in Europe who live outside the EU want to be part of the EU. Polls show that quite consistently for the UK, too. (Though, to be fair, you could easily ask the poll question in a way that would give the opposite majority.)
Speaking as one, they usually are. I mean polling is mostly BS, all the polling said the that UK was staying in the EU even as the voting opened - look how that turned out. Actually the polls were about the same (~65%) as the polls in say france today which say 68% in favour of EU membership - so could I say france wants to leave the EU? All total rubbish.
Bunny.net is also missing. They're not just a CDN, they also provide S3 storage, magic containers (edge computing), and other services. I use them in combination with Hetzner and so far I'm very happy with them.
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... and at a service level that makes Google look like a spa.
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