Ask HN: Recommendations for a non-US cloud option | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommendations for a non-US cloud option

10 pointsadriand3 comments

I'm Canadian and with the recent trade war the US has launched against us, many Canadians, myself included, are concerned about data sovereignty and the risk of Trump cutting off access to American cloud computing, or acting in some other way to hinder dependence on US cloud providers.

I currently manage web apps for two clients, one is hosted on AWS (approx $1500 USD/month) and the other on Digital Ocean (approx $500 USD/month). I am investigating feasibility of migrating the app that is on DO elsewhere, and I also have a third web app I need to deploy this year, for which I am also seeking an alternative (the AWS app is for a US client so I am hopeful that even if things get crazy, that one will be safe).

The DO app and this third web app have fairly simple requirements: compute, Postgres, load balancer, Redis, object storage. I am not keen on DevOps and strongly prefer as much as possible to be managed by the cloud provider, i.e. managed Postgres (similar to RDS), managed object storage (similar to S3), etc. I have started looking at various European options: Scaleway (the Reddit chatter is both light and somewhat concerning), Hetzner Cloud (no managed Postgres option), OVHCloud (seems strongly Europe-focused). Essentially, I'd love to hear if anyone has a recommendation for a non-US alternative. DO is really quite perfect in terms of the mix of reliability, simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Is there anything out there that is similar? A solution that is essentially engineered for experienced web developers / software engineers, as opposed to requiring hands-on expertise with k8s etc.?

(It seems insane that I might end up hosting apps which only serve N. American users in Europe or even Asia for all I know...but that is the world we live in. Hopefully the latency will be manageable!)

I have been on a similar journey. It's been a trying endeavour but my spirits are buoyed knowing now that I am not alone.

One I found last week, FullHost, is Victoria-based with multiple datacentres in Canada and the US. I'm not sure if they support everything you're looking for.

https://www.fullhost.com/cloud-paas/

I gave OVH a try a couple weeks ago. It's difficult to explain what the user experience is like. It's like a byzantine interpretation of what cloud computing is all about. Beyond that I tried both their VPSs and the Cloud instances. The VPSs are very well priced but there's no private network so each instance is on its own. I read (but didn't verify myself) that the firewall rules only apply to inbound connections so any other VPS can connect to any port on any other VPS (of any customer). It seemed plausible. So I got a refund on those and tried the Cloud Instances. I could get any to boot up. Just a long delay and a few minutes later an error message and a failed state.

So I've been working with DigitalOcean this past week. Literally 20 minutes ago figured out that my app's verification emails stop sending b/c they now block all SMTP ports. Incoming I can understand to prevent people running their own mail servers, but it seems to also apply to connecting to remote SMTP servers. Wild. I opened a ticket and I'm hoping I just missed something.

https://docs.digitalocean.com/support/why-is-smtp-blocked/

Anyway, that's what brought me to HN today. Overall, I'm just really surprised their aren't cloud hosting options in Canada right now. There used to be a few but at least two of them were acquired and absorbed.

Fellow Canadian here. The company I work for uses Canadian Web Hosting (https://canadianwebhosting.com/). The name isn't very original but the name tells you what you're looking for.

They're pretty good to work with at the enterprise level. I tried them for a cheap personal project, and they were average. At the enterprise level you get good support, and they offer both dedicated and virtual servers. Our company has both server types with them, and they'll handle as much or as little of the devops as you'd like.

Have you seen: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/aws-amazon-w...

And also, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud might be a bandaid fix, but it's still related to the American business.

As for latency, surely you can use a CDN where appropriate to provide edge nodes in Canada? Maybe exclude America?

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