
Ask HN: European Linode / DigitalOcean alternatives - junto
Title says it all. I&#x27;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?
======
kfullert
Bytemark ([http://www.bytemark.co.uk/](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](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...](http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/04/04/a-major-
infrastructure-donation-to-the-debian-project)

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](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

------
rockyj
[http://www.hetzner.de/](http://www.hetzner.de/) quite solid and have great
prices too.

~~~
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.

------
tr0ss
[http://edis.at](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.

------
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/](https://www.ovh.co.uk/vps/)

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

~~~
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.

------
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](https://www.gandi.net)

~~~
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.)

------
bbayer
I can suggest Hetzner. Their plans are the best in terms of performance/price
ratio.

------
pyritschard
[http://www.exoscale.ch](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).

------
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.

------
pathy
[https://cloudroyale.se/](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.

------
omd
We switched from Linode to [http://www.cloudvps.com](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.

------
sdoering
I would recommend [http://uberspace.de/](http://uberspace.de/) with their (non
root) VPS/shared hosts. Shell-access, Ruby, Python, Perl, node, etc, etc all
major DB_Systems, 10gig space, traffic, I believe unlimited. Nerds themselves,
that do not wanna have a lot of your data to begin with.

And you pay, what the service is worth to you (minimum 1 € per month).

I switched there some time ago and am totally happy since. Great guys, great
service, great philosophy behind the product (and, as the normally do server
hosting for smaller companies, financially secured by themselves).

EDIT: By the way: you can try them for one month, just using a untaken
uberspace-name without anything else (not even an email-address necessary):

[https://uberspace.de/register](https://uberspace.de/register)

~~~
junto
That is crazy / cool. You pay them what you feel like. Interesting biz model.

~~~
kimlelly
This usually means, the pricing won't last very long.

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kubaz
Oktawave ([http://www.oktawave.com/](http://www.oktawave.com/)) - based in
Poland, very fast hardware. e24cloud
([http://www.e24cloud.com/](http://www.e24cloud.com/)) - from Poland too,
second availability zone soon.

------
muyuu
Reposting from some hellbanned chap:

\-----

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

\-----

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

------
buro9
[http://www.brightbox.co.uk](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/](http://www.jump.net.uk/) which is about as close to
[http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html](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/](http://www.cloudsigma.com/) and
[http://www.prometeus.net/sito/](http://www.prometeus.net/sito/)

------
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.

------
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/](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

------
teekert
[https://www.transip.nl/vps/](https://www.transip.nl/vps/) (starts from 10
euro, first month 5)

And my Raspberry Pi is (for free) in a rack with these guys:
[https://www.pcextreme.nl/aurora/](https://www.pcextreme.nl/aurora/) (starts
from 5 euro)

------
zeitg3ist
FlareVM is pretty good: [http://www.flarevm.com/](http://www.flarevm.com/)

------
lbrent
[http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-
Server/](http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/)

Unfortunately their website seems to be only available in German. I run
several services on their VPS and root servers and have not experienced a
major problem yet.

~~~
kimlelly
Plus, they're owned by the UK group, so...

------
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.

------
casual_slacker
[http://prq.se/?intl=1](http://prq.se/?intl=1) is a hosting and colocation
company in Sweden with strong free-speech values. They're also against the
data retention policies that are being implemented in other EU countries.

~~~
zmb_
You should be aware of this when considering Sweden for hosting:
[http://wikileaks.org/wiki/New_Swedish_law_draft_for_centrali...](http://wikileaks.org/wiki/New_Swedish_law_draft_for_centralized_internet_and_telephony_interception,_Dec_2009)

------
cig
I've setup a personal server on moln.is recently (2 months) - 18 euro / month
for 1GB RAM, 1 core, 50GB disk space, 1GB traffic with 1 GB NIC.

They seem to value privacy. I am not too happy with the SLA but then I had no
issues so far - satisfied with the service so far.

------
czottmann
I can recommend [https://www.jiffybox.de/](https://www.jiffybox.de/) —
Germany-based, part of Domainfactory, a German company.

The VPS prices are rather good, and I'm happy with the performance and
reliability so far.

------
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.

------
altharaz
I used to work with a very little company built with passion.
[http://www.harmony-hosting.com/](http://www.harmony-hosting.com/) Their
support is amazing, and will help you in French or English.

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

------
clneagu
Inexpensive VPS on Hetzner infrastructure
[https://enablevps.com/](https://enablevps.com/)

8€ / 1G RAM machine & access to all host cores.

KSplice on the host so no need to reboot.

Minimal but decent features.

------
gales
Serverlove ([http://www.serverlove.com/](http://www.serverlove.com/)) are
based in the UK, and offer a comprehensive API, plus CLI tool.

------
alexrbarlow
[http://brightbox.com/](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.

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ksec
DediServe are good. But still dont match those two in terms of pricing.

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glazskunrukitis
LeaseWeb is quite good, except for their recent MegaUpload fiasco.

------
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.

~~~
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

~~~
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?

