Title says it all. I'm looking for European (non-US servers and non-US corporation) alternatives for VPS servers. Can anyone recommend some? Anyone with personal experiences, or any companies out there offering this?
Bytemark (http://www.bytemark.co.uk/) offer "legacy" VPS and dedicated servers (been a customer for 10 years now) and they also have a new Cloud offering called BigV (http://bigv.io) which I've started using for stuff - great company, great service, they've recently donated a 16-blade, 57Tb server to the Debian project as well (including hosting) - http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/04/04/a-major-infrastructure...
Tim from Bytemark here - if you've got any questions or anything - feel free to ask them here - or email 'support at bigv.io' and put it to my attention.
Thanks! Well, do give us a shout if there's ever anything we can help with (or even more crucially, anything we can improve on, or start doing that we're not doing!)
Bytemark are superb. I've been using them for a decade also. Their new Cloud offering is bloody good, fairly cheap, and remarkably fast for a cloud service.
Plus, they've got their Symbiosis Linux distro, which makes setting up servers considerably easier (although you can also use Debian, Ubuntu, etc), they actively work to support the Open Source community, and generally they kick ass.
Hetzner is good, the hardware is (mostly) good, the provisioning is fast, the support responses are fast but they follow scripts very closely. The biggest problem is that their network is terrible. We typically lose contact (50% packet loss, 100ms latency) with a machine for 5-10 minutes every day. Different (groups of) machines, different times of the day and night. Every time, Hetzner claim it was an "attack".
I haven't measured it, but they're probably within the 99% availability (allows for 1.68 hours/week downtime) they advertise for any one machine.
strato.de are very good too, and have very similar offerings to hetzner: I've been using them myself for years. However, they require payment by German domestic bank transfer, and the contracts are a little harder to terminate. I'd try hetzner the next time.
http://edis.at has some great european options, and they are based in Austria it seems. I have been using them before, only for a little while but they do have some cheap options. I have not done any benchmark so I cannot say anything about the performance. Worth looking at though!
We've been using their VPSes for a couple of months and are happy with them so far, even if the management interface is a bit clunky. They also have a good selection of data centers if location/latency is important.
I've been with IOVPS after RapidSwitch sold their VPS business to them. I have one trivially underused server, so I can't speak for performance.
They can't handle recurring billing automatically (you have to log in every month and pay - which leads to late charges if you forget) and they are much more expensive than Digital Ocean.
I've tried BrightBox too. Someone else has already mentioned them, and I left a big reply there - basically, very good if you need to jump from 1 to 15 servers automatically to host your massive app, but very expensive in any other case.
I'll be switching to Digital Ocean with their Amsterdam data centre when droplet deployment is back up - it's just so much cheaper than anything else I've seen, and perfectly matched to my requirements (if anything, generous - $5/mo compared to £18, or £26 with BrightBox, for a tiny 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD Linux box.)
for my purposes, this isn't a priority. If I do get around to setting up my own mailserver, then I'll care (although I'll probably just use an old box sat in my living room, or a raspberry pi - I don't get that much mail.)
I switched to OVH last month. They are not as good as Linode: my VPS was rebooted recently, and I've had to make a couple of changes to the default configuration to deal with some weirdnesses (screen and tmux would exit immediately, for example). However, so far, it has been good enough.
I use Gandi[1], they have both IaaS and PaaS offers. They are based in France with a datacenter near Paris. They have a very good support team and I'm happy with the service so far.
There are been rumors that they might became an settle over to the states, but to the current day the are located in France (and I doubt this will change).
I can really recommend them, if you are looking for some "cloudy" servers (dynamic resources, etc.)
Antoine from exoscale. We have a "regional" approach to cloud computing, with 3 positions: datacenters, operations and company status/funding all exclusively from Switzerland. It is written in our Terms.
East Asian alternatives would be helpful to some of us, too, if any commenters want to mention those. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, or anyplace else that has reliable connections would be excellent.
https://cloudroyale.se/ recently launched, I haven't used them but their offering seems pretty good and they are part of FS Data which is well established hosting provider in Sweden.
That said, Swedish hosting is pretty expensive compared to others.
I currently use Leaseweb for my own servers, but other alternatives are OVH, Hetzner among others.
We switched from Linode to http://www.cloudvps.com last year because they are in my home town here in The Netherlands and the prices are almost half of Linode's. We have some high traffic websites running with them and have had no problems so far.
I would recommend http://uberspace.de/ with their (non root) VPS/shared hosts. Shell-access, Ruby, Python, Perl, node, etc, etc all major DB_Systems, 10gig space, traffic, I believe unlimited. Nerds themselves, that do not wanna have a lot of your data to begin with.
And you pay, what the service is worth to you (minimum 1 € per month).
I switched there some time ago and am totally happy since. Great guys, great service, great philosophy behind the product (and, as the normally do server hosting for smaller companies, financially secured by themselves).
EDIT: By the way: you can try them for one month, just using a untaken uberspace-name without anything else (not even an email-address necessary):
I asked them about their policies regarding plans to expand to the US or hold any US interests, and also specifically asked about a mention in their policy documents on defamatory content (as I deal with user generated content) and received this good response:
we're based in the UK, both co-founders are UK residents and we have no plans to
become a US company. All our datacentres are in the UK, and expansion plans are
for the EU only.
We believe strongly in data protection and obey all the relevant laws. I agree
that ISPs really *should* be considered "mere conduits" but unfortunately there
is legal precedent that means we can be held responsible for defamatory content
if we're notified and do nothing about it.
Usually, solicitors for the allegedly defamed contacts both us and our customer.
If our customer is unresponsive or uncooperative and the alleged defamation
continues, then we get held responsible.
So our AUP considers defamation abuse to enable us to take action to protect
ourselves if we have to. The only other option available to us would be to have
customers indemnify us against any legal action (most likely in the form of
a large deposit :).
But we're not interested in suspending accounts or servers any time a
solicitor writes to us. If you deal with the reports in a timely fashion (usually
within 48 hours) then you shouldn't expect any problems.
And for what it's worth, we've never actually had to suspend anyone for this
(though we've come close enough to feel the need to put it in our AUP).
If you are concerned about privacy, I would also be wary about having servers on some EU countries and check on their relationship with USA in data sharing.
Unfortunately their website seems to be only available in German. I run several services on their VPS and root servers and have not experienced a major problem yet.
Assuming you're doing this for privacy reasons, some information about the various jurisdictions involved would be really interesting too if people know the answers. My understanding is that Sweden and the UK are out due to traffic monitoring, that may also apply to other EU states.
http://prq.se/?intl=1 is a hosting and colocation company in Sweden with strong free-speech values. They're also against the data retention policies that are being implemented in other EU countries.
I'm using VPS.net for a few years now, I think they are great and they have a good and quick support team. They're a British company as far as I know but they have data centers everywhere, and you can choose where to host your VPS.
I used to work with a very little company built with passion.
http://www.harmony-hosting.com/
Their support is amazing, and will help you in French or English.
I have found the experience of using brightbox quite good, but it is much more expensive than other services.
The smallest, cheapest, single VPS system that I had running came out at about £26 per month. And that's with almost no bandwidth - which is pay as you go (typically I used 2p per month). They split this cost up, so you get billed separately for an IP address (which you can share between boxes via a load balancer), bandwidth, actual number of box-hours, etc, and then tack VAT on at the end.
It's a great service, I just ended up paying much more than I expected because of the way they structure their billing/price plans.
I suggest Switzerland. It's not part of the EU (therefor not subject to EU laws), it's politically neutral (it never goes to war), it's one of the best examples of healthy democratic systems and it values privacy very much.
Do you have a proposed provider? because i find it a bit hard to find one that doesn't host their servers in the Hetzner Datacenter in Germany.
EDIT: word
I used to work for a business ISP (PSINet) who had a DC near the foot of Mt Geneva in Switzerland - not sure what happened to it after things wound down?
If you know who is just "reselling", it would be cool to get the names so they can be outed and avoided. (Sorry, no, I currently don't know that market well, yet.)
They really are the mutts-nuts!