from Hacker News

European Cloud, Global Reach

by Sami_Lehtinen on 3/24/25, 8:49 AM with 157 comments

  • by sschueller on 3/24/25, 9:05 AM

    > At UpCloud, we are committed to complying with European data protection laws and compliance with ISO 27001. This international standard not only signifies our dedication to maintaining a high level of information security but also ensures that we adhere to recognized best practices in managing and safeguarding your data.

    If you want to be Europe only that includes not terminating your SSL at a US CDN provider like Cloudflare...

    I just hit "Gateway time-out Error code 504" from Cloudflare trying to open https://upcloud.com/pricing

  • by scandox on 3/24/25, 10:08 AM

    There's a lot of negativity and nit picking here. Upcloud are OK, Hetzner are better in my opinion for a lot of things.

    Nothing is perfect and European providers need to start somewhere. We all know there are tradeoffs and limitations but there's no need for a pile on.

  • by rustc on 3/24/25, 9:18 AM

    This is a strange page: https://upcloud.com/products/zero-cost-egress

    There's "zero cost egress" mentioned all over the page but the limits on https://upcloud.com/fair-transfer-policy are comparable to other hosts like DigitalOcean: the cheapest 7 EUR VPS has a limit of 1TB of bandwidth. (For comparison, Hetzner offers 20TB on their EU VPS for under $5.)

    > Say goodbye to unpredictable egress costs and hello to our zero egress fee initiative. Unlike other cloud providers, we don’t charge for outbound traffic (‘egress’). This gives you the freedom to distribute your content and scale your business without the constant worry of unexpected bills.

    This has to be a joke.

  • by bittermandel on 3/24/25, 11:31 AM

    I didn't expect the comments in here to be so negative.

    It's a decent service in itself and a good alternative to many other traditional VM-based hosting companies, which Europe is absolutely full of. They are not really competing with the hyperscalers, nor even Digital Ocean in my opinion, but rather providers that likely sell pre-committed OpenStack clusters and such.

    I don't believe they are fully clear of American-owned companies in their entire dependency chain, nor do I believe that it's possible to do that today. Companies like Equinix provide a damn good solution for homogenized infrastructure that is invaluable for cloud providers.

  • by esher on 3/24/25, 9:12 AM

    Happy to see UpCloud on HN. We are trying to consider them for a long time, just haven't found the time. https://blog.fortrabbit.com/infra-research-2024

    There is also https://european-alternatives.eu/

  • by hap_stark on 3/24/25, 10:32 AM

    UpCloud works well enough. In our experience, the available features work very reliably (for half a decade now). There are a few rough edges here and there during configuration. On the other hand, some things went smoother and faster than on one of the big hyperscalers. Simplicity can be a feature in itself...

    One thing not mentioned yet: We had very good experience multiple times with technical support, being available 24/7, doing proper hand-offs and getting back to us if an issue wasn't resolved, and being technically knowledgeable.

    And there are always humans on the other side which can be talked to. (Looking at you, MS for org validation for trusted signing ...)

  • by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 3/24/25, 9:17 AM

    Upcloud: 48 cores €1364/month

    Hetzner Dedi Cloud: 48 cores €288.49/month

  • by cheeseface on 3/24/25, 10:18 AM

    Haven’t used Upcloud for any larger workloads, but had a customer VPS there for multiple years. Worked well and the UI for managing servers was great.

  • by rglullis on 3/24/25, 10:17 AM

    Apologies in advance for the thread hijacking, but I wonder if there would be enough interest in a turn-key solution for a fully suite of open source SaaS alternatives, hosted in a European cloud (Hetzner and/or OVH).

    The idea would be to take any existing commonly used service at a startup and set up the FOSS equivalent, unify them with SSO via OIDC and charge by the a flat rate based on the amount of resources.

    I've already built something similar for social media platforms, so I think I would just have to expand my catalog to do it.

  • by cpach on 3/24/25, 12:02 PM

    Amusing to see all the comments complaining there is no 100% European tech stach covering everything from servers, CPUs, motherboards to laptops and office/word processing suites.

    That is true, but none of those are 100% from US (or China) either.

    It’s almost as if our global economy is a complex beast with lots of interdepencies…

    My advice: Go read the seminal “I, Pencil” essay from the 50s. Now do the same exercise witha computer system that involves both hardware and software.

  • by ArtTimeInvestor on 3/24/25, 10:02 AM

    I restrict my usage of infrastructure providers to publicly listed companies. The transparency is just so much better. You can get a lot of info on how they run their business and where they are going.

    For now, that limits my choices in Europe to IONOS and OVH.

    OVH's interface is pretty chaotic. But the services themselves seem reliable so far. IONOS seems pretty solid in all aspects, but a bit cheesy in their constant battle to upsell you more services.

  • by o_m on 3/24/25, 9:47 AM

    What they don't mention is that some of their data centers are delivered by Equinix, an American company, so it doesn't matter that it is in Finland (same with Sweden and Poland). It is inherently insecure if you are trying to get away from USA.

    https://upcloud.com/data-centers

  • by ksec on 3/24/25, 2:07 PM

    Interesting to see on Front page I tried submitting UpCloud to HN so many times I gave up on it.

    One of the best part of UpCloud is their flexible plan. You could have something like 64 Core and 8 or 16 GB Memory with very little storage and the whole thing is charged by the hour. You can have a 64 Core server that is under $700 USD a month. If you only care about CPU core that is reaching dedicated server pricing without long term commitments while having the flexibility.

    Edit: I cant remember if they are real CPU core or vCPU as one 1 thread. Some vendor in the past few years started to use vCPU as single Core only. Some dont.

  • by mischa108 on 3/24/25, 10:46 AM

    What difference does it make if 99% of your devices are still running on Microsoft Windows?

    I'm a European DevOps engineer who specializes in Microsoft Azure, and I'd like to switch to European alternatives. But I struggle to see how we can ever become independent of Microsoft of all devices are still running Windows and 365 / Office.

  • by egorfine on 3/24/25, 11:05 AM

    > Go Beyond Compliance

    So, even more KYC? Blood sample is required, as well as at least three independent proofs of residence and subscription available only for select cities in the EU?

    If we want to compete with the US, we have to fix the main problem with european services: relax regulations, not tighten.

  • by matsemann on 3/24/25, 10:23 AM

    With the staff of PCLOB getting dismantled, it's been brought up if the US even fulfill their part of the agreement and thus using US cloud based stuff might soon be illegal in the EU.

  • by Yeul on 3/24/25, 10:47 AM

    The Chinese set up their own intranet because history taught them the lesson to never trust a white man.

    For Europe 100 years of globalisation cannot be undone so easily.

  • by prometheon1 on 3/25/25, 7:46 AM

    In case anyone else has trouble finding info on RBAC, roles, users, IAM: this is called "subaccounts"

  • by bittermandel on 3/24/25, 12:02 PM

    Odd, why was this post removed from the front page? There's older and less active posts there.

  • by voytec on 3/24/25, 9:56 AM

    Blabbering about GDPR, they're serving spyware from googletagmanager.com without consent.

  • by ksec on 3/24/25, 1:39 PM

    Can someone ELI5 what is Cloud Native ?

  • by confiq on 3/24/25, 9:13 AM

    they have terraform [provider](https://search.opentofu.org/provider/upcloudltd/upcloud/late...), that is great!

    This is how they compare with AWS: https://upcloud.com/competitors-and-alternatives/aws

  • by silexia on 3/24/25, 7:54 PM

    The EU has censorship laws that will control what you can publish.

  • by piokoch on 3/24/25, 9:28 AM

    This is missing the point. Everything they offer is storage, VPS, Load balancer, one managed key-value store and two managed databases. For the price a little higher than, say, Digital Ocean. But where is managed cache, message broker, e-mail service. It is not enough to be European, they need to offer something competitive.

    I guess they can win some clients, given current hostility of Europe against Trump, but what if in two years Trump will be off the news, people would not care anymore about being anti_USA or what if in 4 year Dems will figure out why they lost in 2024 and find someone less lame, who will win election, whom Europe will like again?

  • by bjarneh on 3/24/25, 9:35 AM

    > (GDPR) is the best-known European standard. After all, it’s hard to miss the opportunity to reject cookies on European websites. But there’s far more to data security.

    We should not be bragging about that "security", those cookie pop-ups are just a pointless annoyance. At least I guess we can all agree that there is far more to data security :-)

  • by Imustaskforhelp on 3/24/25, 9:28 AM

    Love the fact that hacker news comments are absolutely pulling up on this website.

    They are blatantly lying in many of their offerings ( zero cost egress see the rustc comment) and so much more.

    Wha? Why are you lying. Why are you being deceptive.

    How can I trust a company which is this level of deceptive.

  • by usr1106 on 3/24/25, 10:18 AM

    Available since 2011 at least. Not sure whether that would qualify for a [2011] in the submission.

  • by amne on 3/24/25, 9:14 AM

    I don't get how you can advertise Kubernetes from 0 euro / month and then you have to choose a node that costs 3 euro / month.

    I have no idea if it's cheap or not but how is this kind of advertising legal?

  • by aborsy on 3/24/25, 9:20 AM

    The only reason you may use these EU version of services is that you are in Europe.

    Otherwise EU is worse in terms of privacy. UK (while not officially in Europe) goes even beyond, requiring backdooor to iCloud and non-eu providers.