That "Estonian" provider isn't really Estonian. It's an Estonian company probably by an e-resident. Its address is using a known "rent a legit-looking maibox" service.
If you’re looking for an EU cloud company it might be because you don’t want another jurisdiction to have control/leverage over your stuff.
A company which has done only paperwork in Estonia presumably doesn’t have a data centre located there, which means that the physical hardware and the people who run it are in a different jurisdiction, subject to another set of laws which you might not be okay with if you knew what they were.
I used to work for UpCloud, and we used them a lot in the early days of Tangled. We're now migrating all our stuff away from them due to terrible support. We were under a severe DDoS last week and UpCloud didn't bother informing us that they've apparently gone ahead and nullrouted our boxes—which is rather critical information when you're actively trying to deploy ratelimiting/migrate services elsewhere. Only found out when we asked their support if they'd killed our network.
Wish I had something better to say other than it's a decent product as far as cloud VMs go. I did enjoy my time working there.
The CPU displayed in lscpu and the like should be taken with a grain of salt. To be able to move a VM from one host to another, the CPU need to match. So, it is possible to be on a host with a more recent CPU, but masquerading as an older one. You don't get the latest feature, so it matters, but you get the latest perf.
When I was at Exoscale, we were doing that. Our first Skylake were running as Haswell until we had enough of them to let them be Skylake. This still required to migrate the Haswell VM to Haswell hosts and leave room for new VM on the Skylake hosts.
OVH does this on their low-end VPS offerings, they pretend it’s Haswell. But AFAIK they use quite recent machines under the hood. But on their cheapest offers, each “vCPU” you get is actually a fraction of an actual CPU so it is quite slow in anyway. But it’s cheap!
Surprised the author didn't try Netcup. With Hetzner's recent price increases it doesn't make much sense anymore to use Hetzner in my opinion, as the price to value/performance ratio makes a lot less sense.
Netcup on the other hand still has a decent ratio, provided you can stomach the somewhat dated UIs (though the VPS UI is a lot better now), and the pricing for their root servers is surprisingly competitive.
I rented some servers from Netcup. They achieve those low prices by putting as much VMs on servers as possible, so with bad luck your VM will have very poor performance.
This is true for basically any shared VPS offering, but at least with Netcup you can work around that with their affordable root servers. Hetzner also has dedicated VPS' but they are stupidly expensive.
My thoughts exactly. Netcup gives 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM, and IIRC 30GB of SSD storage for about 2€ post taxes (less if you live in a serious country, where VAT isn't 27%).
That, for something like a website or miniproject is very generous imo. And while, as you said, their UI is severely dated, it's totally functional and gets out of your way after the initial setup.
It's a really interesting article but also really sad… Anyway, I think some other providers are missing, like Infomaniak (Swiss) and other local providers in each EU country.
Exascale and not Infomaniak ? I'm considering switching some of my toy projects to them from DigitalOcean to Infomaniak; their price seems more favorable if you need a super cheap server (also: home team support, etc). And they're not unknown players either, since they have a major French TV as their client, some state services, a major Swiss retailer, etc.
Interesting read, but it seems some providers were dismissed too quickly, which does impact the conclusion and how meaningful it is.
For example, it would be nice to know how Scaleway and OVH actually compare with the others, since they are the big names in the list apart from Hetzner and UpCloud.
I recently got a server from OVH and it took about an hour to be provisioned. Doesn't matter for my use case, but not exactly inspiring either. I can only imagine that new customers get rate-limited to help prevent abuse. I can't really consider this a strike against them: Hetzner is certainly on the receiving end of plenty of nastiness that results in inconvenient policies, and I doubt OVH is any different. But it does feel weirdly old-fashioned.
I would consider this a VPS/dedicated server comparison. Cloud to me implies a lot more (managed services like RDS/SES/FaaS that replace system administration with scaleable API driven provisioning, and tight interconnection between them). The European providers are basically just EC2/Lightsail and maybe S3.
Server prices got really wild, Hetzner has a server bourse with refurbished bare metal servers, and they are now more expensive than their regular ones. Also OVH had cheap refurbished servers, but they start now at 60 Euro/Month.
For multiple years I was happy with OVH for their affordable domains and VPS solutions that didn't cause any visible problems. I'm pretty sure I was overbuying for the sake of not having to worry. But since a year or so support is pretty bad. It seems like quality of UI weakened (I was allowed to make order which turned out to be invalid), quality of responses worsened (some of comments seemed to have overly verbose and clanky feel without addressing core issues), and time to response got terrible - nowadays it's almost always a week for anything (even order related issue waited 5 days...), and if issue is deemed to be miscategorized (ticketing system is awful), then without creating another issue (that may end up being closed as duplicate anyway) you may not get any response. I'm feeling bad for still recommending OVH to others last year. Will have to start looking for alternatives before it will be too late.
I use UpCloud as a reverse proxy for my server at home, and something missing here about the network use policy is that the quota is pooled across your account, which means if you have two VMs, one quiet and one network heavy, you'll probably still not exceed it.
(And yes, they pander. For a while they had a promo-code called YURI50, which asked you to make yuri when redeemed.)
plaes | 22 hours ago
That "Estonian" provider isn't really Estonian. It's an Estonian company probably by an e-resident. Its address is using a known "rent a legit-looking maibox" service.
sammko | 9 hours ago
What qualifies something (a company) as Estonian, then? Do the staff have to reside in Estonia? Does it have to be founded by an Estonian citizen?
Certainly sounds Estonian to me based on what you said. It is bound by Estonian legislation.
Semanticist | 7 hours ago
If you’re looking for an EU cloud company it might be because you don’t want another jurisdiction to have control/leverage over your stuff.
A company which has done only paperwork in Estonia presumably doesn’t have a data centre located there, which means that the physical hardware and the people who run it are in a different jurisdiction, subject to another set of laws which you might not be okay with if you knew what they were.
icy | 23 hours ago
I used to work for UpCloud, and we used them a lot in the early days of Tangled. We're now migrating all our stuff away from them due to terrible support. We were under a severe DDoS last week and UpCloud didn't bother informing us that they've apparently gone ahead and nullrouted our boxes—which is rather critical information when you're actively trying to deploy ratelimiting/migrate services elsewhere. Only found out when we asked their support if they'd killed our network.
Wish I had something better to say other than it's a decent product as far as cloud VMs go. I did enjoy my time working there.
bugsmith | 23 hours ago
Migrating to where?
icy | 22 hours ago
We're moving a majority of our stuff to Hetzner bare metal + VPS.
vbernat | 21 hours ago
The CPU displayed in
lscpuand the like should be taken with a grain of salt. To be able to move a VM from one host to another, the CPU need to match. So, it is possible to be on a host with a more recent CPU, but masquerading as an older one. You don't get the latest feature, so it matters, but you get the latest perf.When I was at Exoscale, we were doing that. Our first Skylake were running as Haswell until we had enough of them to let them be Skylake. This still required to migrate the Haswell VM to Haswell hosts and leave room for new VM on the Skylake hosts.
motet-a | 17 hours ago
OVH does this on their low-end VPS offerings, they pretend it’s Haswell. But AFAIK they use quite recent machines under the hood. But on their cheapest offers, each “vCPU” you get is actually a fraction of an actual CPU so it is quite slow in anyway. But it’s cheap!
yorickpeterse | a day ago
Surprised the author didn't try Netcup. With Hetzner's recent price increases it doesn't make much sense anymore to use Hetzner in my opinion, as the price to value/performance ratio makes a lot less sense.
Netcup on the other hand still has a decent ratio, provided you can stomach the somewhat dated UIs (though the VPS UI is a lot better now), and the pricing for their root servers is surprisingly competitive.
drrobotic | 22 hours ago
I rented some servers from Netcup. They achieve those low prices by putting as much VMs on servers as possible, so with bad luck your VM will have very poor performance.
yorickpeterse | 22 hours ago
This is true for basically any shared VPS offering, but at least with Netcup you can work around that with their affordable root servers. Hetzner also has dedicated VPS' but they are stupidly expensive.
drrobotic | 22 hours ago
Their "root servers" which are vps with dedicated cpu cores and ram can help yes, but if other VMs have heavy fs load you will have no fun.
nemin | 22 hours ago
My thoughts exactly. Netcup gives 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM, and IIRC 30GB of SSD storage for about 2€ post taxes (less if you live in a serious country, where VAT isn't 27%).
That, for something like a website or miniproject is very generous imo. And while, as you said, their UI is severely dated, it's totally functional and gets out of your way after the initial setup.
ema-pe | a day ago
It's a really interesting article but also really sad… Anyway, I think some other providers are missing, like Infomaniak (Swiss) and other local providers in each EU country.
aarroyoc | 22 hours ago
Absolutely, IONOS is one of the biggest in EU and it's missing. And there are some local Spanish ones missing too.
intelfx | 22 hours ago
I understand that the article is already written, but I'd have loved it if the author had also included the IPv6 situation in the comparison.
sjamaan | 22 hours ago
I think it's the hourly billing that severely restricted OP's options. Most VPS providers in the EU have monthly billing.
But fair is fair, that's what's needed to truly compete with the American options.
PetitPrince | 21 hours ago
Exascale and not Infomaniak ? I'm considering switching some of my toy projects to them from DigitalOcean to Infomaniak; their price seems more favorable if you need a super cheap server (also: home team support, etc). And they're not unknown players either, since they have a major French TV as their client, some state services, a major Swiss retailer, etc.
dethos | 23 hours ago
Interesting read, but it seems some providers were dismissed too quickly, which does impact the conclusion and how meaningful it is.
For example, it would be nice to know how Scaleway and OVH actually compare with the others, since they are the big names in the list apart from Hetzner and UpCloud.
icefox | 19 hours ago
I recently got a server from OVH and it took about an hour to be provisioned. Doesn't matter for my use case, but not exactly inspiring either. I can only imagine that new customers get rate-limited to help prevent abuse. I can't really consider this a strike against them: Hetzner is certainly on the receiving end of plenty of nastiness that results in inconvenient policies, and I doubt OVH is any different. But it does feel weirdly old-fashioned.
calvin | 18 hours ago
I would consider this a VPS/dedicated server comparison. Cloud to me implies a lot more (managed services like RDS/SES/FaaS that replace system administration with scaleable API driven provisioning, and tight interconnection between them). The European providers are basically just EC2/Lightsail and maybe S3.
fs111 | 3 hours ago
Scaleway has more of those high level cloud services though
drrobotic | 22 hours ago
Server prices got really wild, Hetzner has a server bourse with refurbished bare metal servers, and they are now more expensive than their regular ones. Also OVH had cheap refurbished servers, but they start now at 60 Euro/Month.
przemoc | 19 hours ago
For multiple years I was happy with OVH for their affordable domains and VPS solutions that didn't cause any visible problems. I'm pretty sure I was overbuying for the sake of not having to worry. But since a year or so support is pretty bad. It seems like quality of UI weakened (I was allowed to make order which turned out to be invalid), quality of responses worsened (some of comments seemed to have overly verbose and clanky feel without addressing core issues), and time to response got terrible - nowadays it's almost always a week for anything (even order related issue waited 5 days...), and if issue is deemed to be miscategorized (ticketing system is awful), then without creating another issue (that may end up being closed as duplicate anyway) you may not get any response. I'm feeling bad for still recommending OVH to others last year. Will have to start looking for alternatives before it will be too late.
DustyFuzzy | 23 hours ago
I use UpCloud as a reverse proxy for my server at home, and something missing here about the network use policy is that the quota is pooled across your account, which means if you have two VMs, one quiet and one network heavy, you'll probably still not exceed it.
(And yes, they pander. For a while they had a promo-code called YURI50, which asked you to make yuri when redeemed.)
ruuda | 18 hours ago
I have good experience with Cherry Servers, based in Lithuania with presence in several countries.