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Comment by denniebee | Hacker News Reader

The tricky thing about these services is that they often cannot compete on price or on capability. The scale and mature feature sets of US based cloud providers outweigh the benefits of keeping it within European ownership for most commercial organizations. For Europe to truly compete, they shouldn't copy IaaS models, but come up with new innovative PaaS models in yet to develop markets, such as XR or internet-decentralization. Those markets provide a chance to go in front at an early stage and with enough dedication of both the EU government and the European business community, this can be a start to differentiate itself from the US and China.

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Hetzner has been the cheapest big option when you just want raw servers for at least a decade, and e.g. Scaleway is pretty similar in price to US based providers.

I have used both of them in the past, pricing is indeed very competitive - there are very few providers coming close to Hetzner pricing on dedicated servers.

There's also OVH, they have plenty of global regions, but I haven't used them yet.

Hetzner half-heartetly started to offer database hosting as well but they need a lot more services and present them on eye level with the servers.

I a am huge Hetzner fan and waiting for years already for them to expand their offering.

Huh? Database hosting? I dont see it anywhere in Hetzner offerings?

I guess at this point you mean their recent object storage offering? https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/

UpCloud also seems quite cheap - 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM, 10GB disk for €3/month and €4.5 for 20GB disk.

> The scale and mature feature sets of US based cloud providers outweigh the benefits of keeping it within European ownership for most commercial organizations.

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.

Do you think the United States isn't a democracy?

I mean, it isn't. It's a constitutional republic, but answer the question.

This is like saying that a hamster isn't a mammal because it's a rodent.

a true democracy would be a 1:1 vote, each person gets 1 vote, and that is what matters for everything. we have a representative democracy, but our country operates as a constitutional republic. words have meanings.

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?

Yes, words have meanings. What you call "true democracy" is what is usually referred to as direct democracy. You seem to be implying that a representative democracy is not a democracy. It is, it's just a different form than direct democracy.

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.

> 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!

I don't know what you guys mean by "constitutional republic", but in the rest of the world "republic" just means "not a monarchy".

if you don't know what words mean, then why bother responding?

Because I expect someone to explain what is the actual difference.

well, lemme try again.

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 US isn't democratically governed, it's an oligarchy that's dressed up as a democracy. It has some essential ingredients of a representative democracy like holding elections to give the system an aura of legitimacy, but the entire back-end of this "democratic process" is quite obviously rotten due to decades of corruption. Most of that could probably be attributed back to the involvement of big money interests in politics.

the founding fathers complained about lobbying but saw no way around it, maybe even said something like "necessary evil" or whatever was in fashion.

Do you think Russia is one?

On paper they are also a constitutional republic. the democracy is limited by fraud and state control of media?

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"

Democracy is the rule of the people.

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.

> 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.

"for most commercial organizations"

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.

> for most commercial organizations

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.

Scaleway is pretty competitive.

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