There’s https://upcloud.com/ from Finland. They offer basic virtual machines at OK prices with some pretty fast disks.

Hetzner and OVH do cloud offerings, though they are more experienced in real hardware and shared hosting than actual cloud. The prices are competitive with AWS IMO.

For Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

What I like most about their service is the intuitive user interface and API. However, the downside is probably that they offer little more than virtual machines and storage. But for my projects, those things are completely sufficient and I am very happy with their service.

I worked with AWS too but always hated it, because it takes so long to learn how they are doing things. Not because I am unfamiliar with the concepts, but because they seem to do things unnecessarily complicate (UX wise). Sometimes I ended up using CLI tools for AWS because they were more accessible and haunted by fewer bugs than their GUI.

Personally, I prefer to build my stuff on top of baremetal. It costs more in personal/sysadmin time but you own the end result and it's less easily shut down by an overzealous AI at AWS HQ deciding you're a risk or competitor.

That plus OVH and Hetzner aren't US corporations, my money and trust stay in Europe where they belong.

Yes but sadly very expensive when compared to Linode or Digital Ocean.

I'm not sure I understand the claim that we are "very expensive" :)

Linode 4Gb -> 30$/month Exoscale Medium (4Gb) -> 34$/month.

However exoscale is ISO certified, will handle european VAT, and let you scale storage independently. We also don't overcommit our servers so you actually get what you pay for.

Sure, if you need an absolute minimum cost VM in an non-enterprise setting, you'll find cheaper at American companies. Nobody will dispute that :)

Disclaimer: SSWE at exoscale.

No need to leave EU for the absolute minimum cost, with Hetzner nearby and others.

That's somewhat true, I should have s/American/other/

Exoscale has the best support and privacy of any of the cloud providers. They also offer more enterprise features like prepaid accounts (with proper invoices!) that Linode doesn't offer.

We've used their services happily and would recommend them to others.

We have been caught in the middle of a big screw-up Exoscale did - they managed to rebuild a RAID array wrong, and lost all data of one of our boxes. This said, they have been very open and quick to respond and explaned what happened in great detail, so we will keep on using their services.

If you want bang for your buck, Contabo (Germany) might be for you. If you want reliable service, Leaseweb is based in the EU (Netherlands). There's also OVH (French) which provides decent service with their cheaper subsidiary Kimsufi (super cheap, older model dedicated servers).

As for companies which I don't know much about quality wise, there's Strato (German I believe), CloudVPS (Netherlands), Hetzner (Germany) and Upcloud (Finland).

I only know about North Western European hosting providers, but I assume there's loads more across the continent.

ByteMark over in the UK but given Brexit I'm not sure a mainland company would want to use a company here.

Might be cost effective if the pound takes another beating though.

Given the point of Brexit seems to be “sovereignty” which in turn seems to mean “no foreign courts ever not even for trade deals”, I think that even a 10:1 devaluation of GBP vs. EUR wouldn’t make a post-Brexit UK appealing for hosting EU-27 services. And even my worst-case estimates are not yet beyond 1.3:1 devaluation.

Transfers of personal data to non-EU countries are specifically regulated by Chapter 5 of GDPR. After Brexit, Britain is "foreign" as far as the EU is concerned.

It's also worth noting that a lot of Brexiters consider closer political ties and a strong trade deal with the US as an essential element of their ideal Brexit scenario, by weakening Britain's ties to (and dependency on) the EU. In a no deal/hard Brexit scenario, Britain may lack the negotiating leverage to assert any meaningful kind of sovereignty. Many pro-Brexit campaigners have described Britain as being trapped in vassalage to the EU, but a chaotic Brexit could make Britain just as dependent on the US, with everything that implies politically.

Agreed and that's a terrible outcome as far as I'm concerned.

Politically I'm far more in favour of the EU than the US, the idea that we move further towards the US is horrifying.

If that happens I'm out the door.

Same.

A free trade agreement with the US will mean watering down (or 'harmonising' as the spin doctors like to put it) UK regulations to match the US.

I'm using https://www.tilaa.com/en which is based in the Netherlands.

exoscale.com is based in Switzerland, and offers zones in several European jurisdictions as well.

Disclaimer: I work for exoscale.

What is stopping you to provide more managed services? A lot of smaller businesses don't run on Kubernetes. So compute power is not enough for them. They need managed services.

What kind of managed service do you have in mind?

We plan to offer some managed services, but I can't hint at an ETA for that (I don't know myself).

I think we need to communicate more around our roadmap in general.

Scaleway and Hetzner come to mind, although I have no idea how good they are.

I use Scaleway to host a personal Nextcloud [1] instance. I haven't had any issues with them thus far and their instances are pretty darn cheap.

[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/

I don't use Hetzner personally, but they've been in business for a long time and have only heard good things about them. They're cost competitive too.

If you’re asking for a cloud provider that is compliant with data protection laws, Azure is at the moment your best bet. I believe they have some deal with T-Mobile so that the legal entity that does the exploitation of the data centers is a European company, and the data is out of reach from any US subpoena or similar.

If you’re looking for something more simple, as others mentioned, OVH and Hetzner are OK, although competing on price mostly. If you’re looking for a bit more quality, I can recommend Leaseweb.

Microsoft has already scrapped the trustee model in Germany again: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-is-discontinuing-the-germa...