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Ask HN: European Linode / DigitalOcean alternatives

38 points by junto ↗ HN
Title says it all. I'm looking for European (non-US servers and non-US corporation) alternatives for VPS servers. Can anyone recommend some? Anyone with personal experiences, or any companies out there offering this?

66 comments

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kfullert
Bytemark (http://www.bytemark.co.uk/) offer "legacy" VPS and dedicated servers (been a customer for 10 years now) and they also have a new Cloud offering called BigV (http://bigv.io) which I've started using for stuff - great company, great service, they've recently donated a 16-blade, 57Tb server to the Debian project as well (including hosting) - http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/04/04/a-major-infrastructure...

They really are the mutts-nuts!

tdobson
Tim from Bytemark here - if you've got any questions or anything - feel free to ask them here - or email 'support at bigv.io' and put it to my attention.

With regards to privacy from warrants etc, we're currently considering a warrant canary - https://twitter.com/matthewbloch/status/348354514081951744

jamiecurle
Wow, I've been an on and off customer for six years - your cloud offering looks immense.
tdobson
Thanks! Well, do give us a shout if there's ever anything we can help with (or even more crucially, anything we can improve on, or start doing that we're not doing!)

Have a great day!

-Tim

thenomad
Bytemark are superb. I've been using them for a decade also. Their new Cloud offering is bloody good, fairly cheap, and remarkably fast for a cloud service.

Plus, they've got their Symbiosis Linux distro, which makes setting up servers considerably easier (although you can also use Debian, Ubuntu, etc), they actively work to support the Open Source community, and generally they kick ass.

stevekemp
Always nice to see another fan, and a local one at that!
thenomad
Hugh (Strange Company Hugh) here :)
rockyj
http://www.hetzner.de/ quite solid and have great prices too.
szajbus
We always go with Hetzner for european based hosting. It is Germany-based.

Never had any problems during our partnership with them, which we started 4 years ago.

sanityinc
strato.de are very good too, and have very similar offerings to hetzner: I've been using them myself for years. However, they require payment by German domestic bank transfer, and the contracts are a little harder to terminate. I'd try hetzner the next time.
junto
I'm in Germany. Bank transfer isn't a problem. I'll check them out.
e12e
I can second Hetzner - although I've only used them for dedicated servers, and only very little.
grexi
And they offer credit card payment, too.
tbh
Hetzner is good, the hardware is (mostly) good, the provisioning is fast, the support responses are fast but they follow scripts very closely. The biggest problem is that their network is terrible. We typically lose contact (50% packet loss, 100ms latency) with a machine for 5-10 minutes every day. Different (groups of) machines, different times of the day and night. Every time, Hetzner claim it was an "attack".

I haven't measured it, but they're probably within the 99% availability (allows for 1.68 hours/week downtime) they advertise for any one machine.

Maybe my expectations are too high. :)

WildUtah
East Asian alternatives would be helpful to some of us, too, if any commenters want to mention those. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, or anyplace else that has reliable connections would be excellent.
tr0ss
http://edis.at has some great european options, and they are based in Austria it seems. I have been using them before, only for a little while but they do have some cheap options. I have not done any benchmark so I cannot say anything about the performance. Worth looking at though!
oddsignals
We've been using their VPSes for a couple of months and are happy with them so far, even if the management interface is a bit clunky. They also have a good selection of data centers if location/latency is important.
alexrbarlow
http://brightbox.com/ is quite good. Based in England as par as I know..
tehwalrus
I have found the experience of using brightbox quite good, but it is much more expensive than other services.

The smallest, cheapest, single VPS system that I had running came out at about £26 per month. And that's with almost no bandwidth - which is pay as you go (typically I used 2p per month). They split this cost up, so you get billed separately for an IP address (which you can share between boxes via a load balancer), bandwidth, actual number of box-hours, etc, and then tack VAT on at the end.

It's a great service, I just ended up paying much more than I expected because of the way they structure their billing/price plans.

tezza
¿ Do you know that Linode has London based servers ?

I rent some of their London servers happily

( aside from cancelling my credit card the other day due to a breach, no-one's perfect )

Edit: I see you're concerned about data-privacy... so latency is not your issue

--

In that case I also use:

* Hetzner.de

and in the past I have used

* FlexiScale ( based uin Reading, UK )

This is more akin to Amazon EC2

http://www.flexiscale.com/products/flexiscale/pricing/

kfullert
DigitalOcean also have servers in Amsterdam, but they don't fit the OP requirement as they're run by a US-owned corp
glazskunrukitis
LeaseWeb is quite good, except for their recent MegaUpload fiasco.
edp
I use Gandi[1], they have both IaaS and PaaS offers. They are based in France with a datacenter near Paris. They have a very good support team and I'm happy with the service so far.

[1]: https://www.gandi.net

WildUtah
Gandi is no longer a European company. Around 2010 they opened new offices in the USA and should be expected to act as a US company.
TheHippo
Gandi runs on OVH.

There are been rumors that they might became an settle over to the states, but to the current day the are located in France (and I doubt this will change).

I can really recommend them, if you are looking for some "cloudy" servers (dynamic resources, etc.)

pyritschard
http://www.exoscale.ch has a very similar approach to digital ocean: very quick provisionning, extensive API and automation tool support
pyritschard
I should mention that exoscale is based in Switzerland and thus PRISM/ACTA free and is an IAAS provider (as opposed to a VPS provider).
retrack
Antoine from exoscale. We have a "regional" approach to cloud computing, with 3 positions: datacenters, operations and company status/funding all exclusively from Switzerland. It is written in our Terms.
pathy
https://cloudroyale.se/ recently launched, I haven't used them but their offering seems pretty good and they are part of FS Data which is well established hosting provider in Sweden.

That said, Swedish hosting is pretty expensive compared to others.

I currently use Leaseweb for my own servers, but other alternatives are OVH, Hetzner among others.

arjitc
GMOCloud (Japanese company) Japan location based KVM http://vps.gmocloud.com/ and CrownCloud (Australian company) Frankfurt location based KVM/OpenVZ
omd
We switched from Linode to http://www.cloudvps.com last year because they are in my home town here in The Netherlands and the prices are almost half of Linode's. We have some high traffic websites running with them and have had no problems so far.
tehwalrus
I've been with IOVPS after RapidSwitch sold their VPS business to them. I have one trivially underused server, so I can't speak for performance.

They can't handle recurring billing automatically (you have to log in every month and pay - which leads to late charges if you forget) and they are much more expensive than Digital Ocean.

I've tried BrightBox too. Someone else has already mentioned them, and I left a big reply there - basically, very good if you need to jump from 1 to 15 servers automatically to host your massive app, but very expensive in any other case.

I'll be switching to Digital Ocean with their Amsterdam data centre when droplet deployment is back up - it's just so much cheaper than anything else I've seen, and perfectly matched to my requirements (if anything, generous - $5/mo compared to £18, or £26 with BrightBox, for a tiny 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD Linux box.)

junto
A pity that Digital Ocean is a US corp. It means that they can be subpoenaed. Their pricing is awesome. Corporate location is bad.
tehwalrus
for my purposes, this isn't a priority. If I do get around to setting up my own mailserver, then I'll care (although I'll probably just use an old box sat in my living room, or a raspberry pi - I don't get that much mail.)
vayan
OVH - https://www.ovh.co.uk/vps/

£5.99/mo - 1 core - 512Mo - 25Go - 100Mbps/1To

Hansi
Seconded, I've used their dedicated server options for a while, great value for money.
wzdd
I switched to OVH last month. They are not as good as Linode: my VPS was rebooted recently, and I've had to make a couple of changes to the default configuration to deal with some weirdnesses (screen and tmux would exit immediately, for example). However, so far, it has been good enough.
daveid
I'm using VPS.net for a few years now, I think they are great and they have a good and quick support team. They're a British company as far as I know but they have data centers everywhere, and you can choose where to host your VPS.
muyuu
Reposting from some hellbanned chap:

-----

GMOCloud (Japanese company) Japan location based KVM http://vps.gmocloud.com/ and CrownCloud (Australian company) Frankfurt location based KVM/OpenVZ

-----

Non-EU is probably even better if privacy is your concern.

pavs
If you are concerned about privacy, I would also be wary about having servers on some EU countries and check on their relationship with USA in data sharing.
kimlelly
I suggest Switzerland. It's not part of the EU (therefor not subject to EU laws), it's politically neutral (it never goes to war), it's one of the best examples of healthy democratic systems and it values privacy very much.
kimlelly
The only downside is:

Prices are currently still higher (which screams for new competition, in case anyone from Switzerland is listening...)

hellerbarde
Do you have a proposed provider? because i find it a bit hard to find one that doesn't host their servers in the Hetzner Datacenter in Germany. EDIT: word
kimlelly
If you know who is just "reselling", it would be cool to get the names so they can be outed and avoided. (Sorry, no, I currently don't know that market well, yet.)
kfullert
I used to work for a business ISP (PSINet) who had a DC near the foot of Mt Geneva in Switzerland - not sure what happened to it after things wound down?
bbayer
I can suggest Hetzner. Their plans are the best in terms of performance/price ratio.
buro9
http://www.brightbox.co.uk

I asked them about their policies regarding plans to expand to the US or hold any US interests, and also specifically asked about a mention in their policy documents on defamatory content (as I deal with user generated content) and received this good response:

    we're based in the UK, both co-founders are UK residents and we have no plans to
    become a US company. All our datacentres are in the UK, and expansion plans are
    for the EU only.

    We believe strongly in data protection and obey all the relevant laws. I agree
    that ISPs really *should* be considered "mere conduits" but unfortunately there
    is legal precedent that means we can be held responsible for defamatory content
    if we're notified and do nothing about it.

    Usually, solicitors for the allegedly defamed contacts both us and our customer.
    If our customer is unresponsive or uncooperative and the alleged defamation
    continues, then we get held responsible.

    So our AUP considers defamation abuse to enable us to take action to protect
    ourselves if we have to. The only other option available to us would be to have
    customers indemnify us against any legal action (most likely in the form of
    a large deposit :).

    But we're not interested in suspending accounts or servers any time a
    solicitor writes to us. If you deal with the reports in a timely fashion (usually
    within 48 hours) then you shouldn't expect any problems.

    And for what it's worth, we've never actually had to suspend anyone for this
    (though we've come close enough to feel the need to put it in our AUP).
I also plan to utilise Jump Networks: http://www.jump.net.uk/ which is about as close to http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html as you're going to find in London. Remember... if you're going CoLo it's all about power consumption.

Finally, other sites I checked out included http://www.cloudsigma.com/ and http://www.prometeus.net/sito/

lemming
Assuming you're doing this for privacy reasons, some information about the various jurisdictions involved would be really interesting too if people know the answers. My understanding is that Sweden and the UK are out due to traffic monitoring, that may also apply to other EU states.