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Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a European alternative for Amazon AWS?

If all you need is Compute, DNS and/or S3 then exoscale.ch is worth a look. I dare say they are the best cloud service Switzerland currently has to offer. cloudscale.ch is a competitor but they are a very young company.

If you want a straight AWS "cloud" replacement, there aren't many options. OVH and LeaseWeb are the most likely candidates but don't come close to the breadth of offerings.

There's a very large and competitive market for dedicated servers and colocation though and depending on your load, it might be worth a look at switching to dedicated or leased infrastructure.

Owning the hardware is the only way to truly control your destiny as far as I'm concerned.

Profitbricks. cloudscale.ch. If you want to go self-hosted, talk to fuzzy-logic.org.

Indeed, these providers offer "virtual servers" as well, but if look beyond that they play an entirely different game than AWS.

The only relevant competitors to AWS are Google and maybe MS Azure. Both also US companies.

No one else is anywhere near the level of scale and expertise AWS has.

One could always get a bit closer API-wise and go with a self-hosted Openstack cloud. It's a bit more involved than many folks care for, but if 'API-CRUDable VMs, networks, object storage, images' and similar are the goal, the market's pretty thin.

I would add Digital Ocean as a lower tier, they seem to have provisioning plugins for everything I use (mostly Vagrant) but I roll my own DNS and load balancing. Still US-based unfortunately.

I've heard good things about Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/

You get the benefits of strong German privacy laws, on top of the EU's data protection directive[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

heh, Hetzner literally asked for a scan of my passport when I wanted to get a VPS.

They require some form of government-issued ID so I provided them with a driving licence. I figured it wasn't a bad trade-off for a decent service. Germany seems to value data privacy much more than my own (Irish) government).

In the Netherlands, when businesses ask for such a thing, you are allowed to black out many non-required parts of the scan (this includes the photo), as well as paste a large watermark over the image. The watermark would contain the date and state the purpose of the scanned ID, to prevent re-use for anything else, if it were to be misplaced somehow.

I'm not sure how that works in Germany but I would sooner send a too-much-redacted scan and have them refuse and ask to see more of it, than send an actual complete scan of my ID to anyone but the government that issued it.

Not that governments are so good at not accidentally misplacing data. But it reduces the surface, at least.

Depends on what your requirements are but there are a number of Openstack Public Clouds - try http://www.datacentred.co.uk/

Aren't the data centers technically owned by Amazon Ireland for compliance (cough tax) reasons? Amazon clearly state that data never moves out of the region.

As long as Amazon has a US presence, it, and the data is hosts, is within legal reach of US judges and government.

This isn't yet decided. Microsoft and the DoJ are still arguing about this in the court system, which so far has ruled that the US government cannot compel Microsoft to release data it holds in Ireland. It's currently waiting for the DoJ to decide whether to take it to the Supreme Court: http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/01/micros...

Even if the DoJ did make it law, it would surely conflict with law that the Irish domiciled entity is subject to.

Penalties for the US-based domestic entity to compel compliance of the off-shore entity would fall onto the domestic entity. The off-shore entity ALSO has to comply with whatever local regulatory regime they fall under.

Unlinking the two companies completely might satisfy what you appear to be angling for, but it would be, in essence, a potential competitor to Amazon at that point.

That sounds very dangerous. What would happen if Amazon simply had a 99% share, but 1% was held by another purely Irish company. Amazon might elect the board and the subsidiary might 'lease' intellectual property and capital from the parent company, but I don't see how you could argue it is subject to US law in any way.

Not as far as I know.

Microsoft have gone as far with Azure in Germany to sign an agreement where T-Systems own the data and the systems and Microsoft are simply a contractor supplying a service to them.

http://news.microsoft.com/europe/2016/09/21/microsoft-azure-...

I have a good experience with cloudsigma.ch (but that only replaces the EC2 part, so it depends on what you need).

Depends on your requirements, but I dare to say there is none.

ovh.com

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