European Cloud Computing Platforms
european-alternatives.eu
european-alternatives.eu
All this is for London data centres. It'd be interesting to re-benchmark them against other providers.
There's also OVH, they have plenty of global regions, but I haven't used them yet.
I a am huge Hetzner fan and waiting for years already for them to expand their offering.
That's what companies thought about manufacturing in China. But that was before they found out the costs of corruption and loss of trade secrets. If you're a fantastically succesfuly European company, what's to stop Trump (or any future president) just deciding you're too big and need to be sold to "an american investor"?
It is high time for companies and banks to invest only where democracy thrives because when you invest where it doesn't, your investment simply ends up being controlled by gangsters. This might benefit you for a while. But eventually, it won't.
Companies and banks aren't interested in investing where the people have power. They want to invest where the companies and banks themselves have power.
So long as the companies and banks can influence the gangsters, they don't care.
There are powerful executives who thought they could influence the Russian gangsters. And they could. Until they couldn't. If they were lucky, they're still around to tell the tale but many are not.
Oppressed people do not make good consumers. Even Machiavelli realised that.
I mean, it isn't. It's a constitutional republic, but answer the question.
so what i am asking is, even if you take democracy to mean whatever you think it means, is the US not a democracy? It is really hard to see what your point was, because i asked if they thought the US was not a democracy, and here you are saying it is, so what are you trying to say? you agree with me, the US is a democracy, right?
In your previous post you said that the US is not a democracy, but a constitutional republic. Now you say that the US has a representative democracy, but operates as a constitutional republic, so I'm not sure what you mean anymore? You seem to agree that a constitutional republic can also be a democracy.
To answer your question, I agree with you the US is a democracy. The parent comment did not say that the US is not a democracy, it said that "companies and banks should invest only where democracy thrives". I take that to mean that this user believes that democracy is not currently thriving in the US, which I would agree with.
and yet, no explanation as to why. The people voted, the government abides.
do you ever get the idea that you tilt at windmills?
also is the DPRK or the DRC "Democratic"? It's in the name, so therefore they are democracies!
the US is a representative democracy, as far as "democratic" goes. a true democracy would be a 1:1 voter:vote, but that's untenable. most people interpret democracy to mean that the people have a say in government, but in the US, it's the constitution that limits the government and certifies our rights to complain at the government. That's why the US is a Constitutional Republic.
The implication of the person i was replying to was that the US is not a democracy, and i wanted to see what the reasoning was there. As i said, it isn't, but i am unsure if any country is an actual democracy. So it's a way to mess with the framing of an argument.
I wanted to know why that person implied the US wasn't. that's all.
btw, the word "democratic" and the like is loaded. Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The difference is, in the US, we at least pretend there's a chance for either party to get elected. And sometimes, we wistfully think that a third party candidate can moonshot, but that's not the way our system works. I have at least one friends that are political scientists, and their theses had to do with different forms of voting and the pros/cons of that, and how we could herald different systems into the united states.
so to directly answer your question: "no"
Most commercial organizations are not "internet" companies. They can run their business on a single VPS. Even e-commerce sites with several million euro turnover can run their Magento instance on a single VPS. Or industries manufacturing things can still run their inventory software or ERP stuff on some cheap VPS.
The overwhelming majority of commercial organizations don't even have a registered domain. They pass well under our radars because they'd never hire any of us for help.
Last one who asked me, a fertility clinic, wanted a blog, so I registered a domain for them, set up Google services (back then it was free for their org size - something like 5 people), Wordpress, their payment accounts, and that was it. Apart from e-mail and shared documents, they had zero cloud presence. If they wanted to self-host their blog (something I would discourage) they'd need nothing more than a single tiny instance behind Cloudflare.
https://cloudferro.com/pricing/pricing-tables/waw3-1-cloud/v...
Re the sibling comment they do offer trial credit, but I have explored the terms. I don't think there's a recurring free tier though.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_CloudStack
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_cloud_computing_infras...
Also this list not including Hetzner is deeply shameful.
>Hosters with a focus on virtual servers, are only listed in the category virtual private server (VPS) hosters.
>https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat...
Hetzner is the very first entry in that category.
I wonder if there are EU clouds doing that properly, namely with its own internal "security" cleanup crew and getting rid of those hackers and scanners.
It means they have to monitor if one of their hosted "boxes" is actually generating nasty traffic. Once detected, they have to inform the owner of the "box" that they have been pown, well, careful if the owner of the "box" is actually the mob...
And I can tell you, I get attacks/scans mostly from those "clouds", like I start to wonder if they are not "closing their eyes" on purpose because with their huge network resources it is wrecking "small hosting", or more "business" for them.
IMHO the deep pockets of the US based tech is their primary competitive advantage. In other countries they seem to try to make a bit of money every month but in USA they tend to aim to make a lot of money at once down the road. I'm under the impression that when non-US services end up failing, US based ones end up enshitified.
So the EU based stuff stays about the same for many years, the US based stuff starts as we are saving the world, democratizing the technology and doing all this for free(*) and then your bill jumps 100x or your experience goes 100x down.
Price dumping in international trade is already illegal, like when China floods the market with electric cars and solar panels.
And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP.
In the AI age for example, almost all platforms are giving it away for free now and costs huge amount of money for them.
They are able to give it for free because their investors expect down the road to make much more money like they did in the Web age and then Apps age. Thanks to the investors of the time we had great run on the web and later in the apps.
In one hand it means that sometime in the future if they corner the market and establish a monopoly the service will suffer, will be used for doing bad things or become very expensive, just what the web and apps has become.
In the other hand this accelerates the technological advancements and deployment far beyond what would be possible in another business model.
Because eing a US vassal makes it difficult to sanction your overlord.
For a startup, locking into an API that is initially free can often break their neck in the long run. Because for a startup, switching providers is a big distraction. It's often better to run VMs or colocated servers on an OSS stack.
I'd argue that OVH (European) is the cost leader for that in every market they are in.
Eventually they lock you down and start recouping their investments from you but they do make some things possible simply because it costs nothing to try and as a result a lot of great things are incepted on those platforms.
Full disclosure, I work there.
They're based out of Sweden, and offer bandwidth in Mbit/s, rather than GB/month (as per their pricing page, https://glesys.com/vps/pricing)
They have mixed reputation in some cases, but honestly their pricing is great for side projects and such, maybe even running a small/medium business as long as it's within their ToS.
My company uses OVH and I have also used UpCloud, it is pretty good.
We're a Danish-based and -owned 3-year old cloud provider, and we can definitely compete with the big US clouds on technology and price. Merrymake is serverless, extremely fast (if not the fastest in EU), and infraless, meaning we hide away all the clutter, so devs can focus on their code instead. So it's not just a GDPR-compliant alternative, but a technological advancement to the US providers.