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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

There are many EU-native cloud alternatives.

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...

Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.

Hetzner isn’t really a full-service cloud provider. They provide machines and storage for rent. It’s the first rung on the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they’ve got a long way to go.

What is missing from here that prevents you from calling it full-service?

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Spend some time comparing with AWS, GCP, Azure, or even Oracle Cloud or Alibaba Cloud, and it should be pretty clear.

Complexity does not equal completeness.

That’s a cute pithy statement, but it’s not particularly relevant.

For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services. Some would consider those to be table stakes to run their application. Does it add complexity? Potentially. But we accept some additional complexity if it yields incremental value.

If you don’t value the additional functionality cloud providers offer, that’s fine. But lots of people do.

Certainly, unnecessary complexity should be avoided. But it’s a bit naive to associate comprehensiveness with complexity. They’re not entirely identical.

> For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services.

I am totally OK setting up my own database software on Hetzner. I understand that some people are used to "cloud" spoon-feeding them what they need and even what they really don't, but I perceive this as a nuisance.

What you call “spoon feeding” is what another calls “value adding.” Additional security, automated failover, automated backups, and automated version upgrades are key features, and a lot of people value them. It often means their customers don’t have to hire expensive domain experts (or can hire fewer of them) and can instead focus their resources on more direct value creation.

They launched S3 Storage a few weeks ago so I guess they are on their way.

Like, of those, which provide managed services like storage (blob and smb), ampq message queue, databases in a fairly cohesive way and easily accessible from C#?

I just checked a handful but didn't see any.

Most of them are horrible.

I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it sometimes, but it's pretty bad.

It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone will now.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

https://github.com/dream-num/univer

https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite

https://github.com/firebase/firepad

https://github.com/prosemirror

https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online

https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc

https://github.com/gobby/gobby

Can't comment on the other options, but a tool that requires proprietary Google Cloud Firebase is not a great option for ditching Google.

Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.

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