22
votes
Cloud hosting in EU
Hi!
I've decided to move some of my selfhosted things from on-prem (at home ;)) to the cloud, and at the same time I'd like to try and run this in EU, or at least europe. I'd like to get started fairly quickly as this was prompted by one of my home servers halfway dying on me.
The features I'm most interested in are approximately:
- Virtual machines.
- Storage. Cheap long term for backups (similar to S3 Glacier).
- Managed DB, most likely postgresql.
- Serverless jobs (similar to AWS lambda).
- IaaS (I've got a bit of experience with terraform, but it doesn't have to be that).
- Builtin monitoring.
- Git hosting, it's likely that I'll just go with github/gitlab here, but if there's a nice alternative I'm up for it.
- Automated sending of email. I'm using AWS SES atm, and I'm very happy with it.
Some other things:
- I intend to run a combination of services written by others, e.g. nextcloud and software I've written myself.
- I'll most likely be running linux only, but I prefer to select my own flavour where it makes sense.
- I much prefer managing permissions and users in gcp than in aws as I find aws way too complicated for my needs while gcp mostly just makes sense.
- I'd prefer a platform that's being developed and improving over time with big potential for the future.
- This is a hobby project, and some of these requirements may seem a bit contradictory or non-optimal, but that's ok.
- I have some experience running kubernetes (self-hosted), and I'm not a huge fan of the complexity and yaml files, at the same time OpenStack is getting kinda old, and I don't know if I think it's a platform for the future. But from what I see most of the options seems to be built on top of one of those.
- Cheaper is of course better, I don't have a company-sized budget, this is all coming out of my "hobby pocket".
- I live in Sweden, so datacenters geographically close is a plus.
Right now I'm looking at European alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Scaleway is looking the most promising, but I'm really skimming the top when it comes to info atm.
Hope that makes sense =) I'm interested in all kinds of feedback.
I've been happy with Hetzner. It's cheap and reliable and though they have fewer offerings than AWS, it seems like their infrastructure is pretty good.
I have a virtual Linux host (think EC2) that costs me around €7/mo. I run a single (unreliable) k3s control plane on it, then host https://quotable.raybetter.com/ on it. I run postgres inside the kuberenetes cluster.
Everything from the node creation up to the installation and configuration of k3s is done with a terraform script, then I use Helm to deploy the application.
I actually just do my backups to S3, but I think hetzner now has an object store service that is compatible.
For things like lambda and SES, I'd recommend just sticking with AWS. I've had success with Resend, but it's really just an API wrapper around SES. If you want a full email provider, MxRoute is very good, and they use Hetzner servers.
I don't use it anymore (just no longer needed it for my use case), but I've never had a problem with Hetzner myself. Was a good experience. +1
To be fair I don't think anyone else has as many offerings as AWS, so that's a given. I'll take a closer look at Hetzner, right now it's between them and Scaleway. Based on the replies here I get the impression that Hetzner is more reliable and cheaper, while Scaleway has a broader set of services.
Codeberg is based in Germany and pretty neat. It is based on Forgejo which you can also self host if you want.
Thanks for the tip, that looks like it might be something for me.
if you haven't already, you might as well claim your free service from Oracle [guide] -- you get 200gb storage, 24gb ram, and 4 cores, I think. I run two -- a small one and a big one. If you give them a credit card, its still free, but you dont have to worry about regional availability.
One note: once you pick your region, you're locked in for life and they're really good about preventing people from having multiple accounts.
Oracle is a US based company. Depending on the reasons for OP to want it to be based in Europe that might not cut it. Simply due to the fact that the CLOUD act is a thing.
I figured they just wanted something close to home :)
It's more philosophical than practical. The CLOUD act is one part, then it's that I don't trust Trump to not do something idiotic like cutting off american cloud in some ways to put political pressure on some group/country or applying tariffs. And just supporting something a tad closer to home is nice as well. Thanks for the recommendation though =)
For what it's worth, I had a dedibox server for several years and while I was with them the bandwidth slowly morphed into the most oversold unusable piece of garbage, especially for users connecting from central europe. They weren't providing anywhere near the bandwidth I contracted, and I eventually noticed there was absolutely no mention of said contracted limit anywhere in their user area, messages, etc.
Hetzner also had poor connectivity when I used them but I believe they have improved since. I'm not sure about the nitty gritty of cloud offering comparisons though.
Hmm.. that doesn't sound great. Were you using the paris, amsterdam or warzawa datacenter?
I'm almost certain it was the Paris datacenter.
I've had experience with many ISPs in North America and Europe over the years and in general I'd say French locations have had poor, or at least dishonestly marketed/allocated, connectivity (don't even want to talk about OVH...) The Netherlands on the other hand is usually pretty good in that regard, so the same company might provide better service if they have a datacenter there.
Thanks!
I can’t speak for the cost side of the equation and I only do about half the things you listed in your requirements, but I’ve been using OVH Cloud for the past few years and they’ve been good to me.
I don’t recommend Gandi. They were great but turned into just another company after their relatively recent acquisition. (The “no bullshit” ethos is long gone.)
I've been quite satisfied (not 100%, but quite) with relatively cheap VPS's from Contabo. You can get quite nice boxes with large RAM for a price that shouldn't ruin you. Install Debian, docker and perhaps some docker app manager (I'm using caprover, which also handles reverse proxy, subdomains and TLS) and you can self host many apps on a single box, such as Nextcloud or Gitea.
Storage is harder, I'm using american company in the end - Backblaze. I'm encrypting all my backups before transfer, but that only protects from part of the risks.
For self-written software, caprover supports docker based auto-deploy from git repository, similar to Heroku or perhaps github/gitlab. It's very solid, only overhead is you have to wrap your app in docker image.