I've posted this a couple times before when EU tech + Hetzner comes up (and probably will again):
I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
Yeah. Azure is such a weird platform for not actually having a competitive way to just cheaply deploy a simple .NET app, it's a weird design decision.
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.
Indeed Azure & AWS use complexity (e.g. their terrible docs) and convoluted non-standard terminology, approaches and non-interop to keep developers in their platform silo and competitors, who provide the same advantages with better DX and less complexity, away from their money cows.
It's worth considering why you are choosing a European stack.
Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.
Good list but the biggest missing piece for most new SaaS products right now is AI/LLM APIs. If you're building anything with AI features you're calling OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar - all US. Mistral exists but the ecosystem around it is much thinner. That's probably the hardest US dependency to drop in 2026 that I can think of.
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
Yeah the LLM dependency is the elephant in the room for
anyone serious about going full EU. But honestly there's
another layer people don't talk about — even the idea
validation stage is US-dependent now. Most founders are
just pasting their idea into ChatGPT before they build
anything. If you're truly sovereignty-conscious that's
worth factoring in too, not just the infra you deploy on.
No love for Gcore Labs? They're seemingly completely unknown but their free DNS product is rock solid. They also have a FaaS platform I've never gotten around to trying. Some of their products have a high premium but the range available under one roof is very broad
The EU providers are simply not on par with AWS, CloudFlare, GCP, etc.
Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.
There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.
You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.
62 comments
I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.
While I'm cloud agnostic, this unique difference for Azure should not be overlooked compared to the other clouds.
But popular restaurants can be better, and they can be worse..
Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
Having a global monopoly on these kinds of things is part of what has let U.S. companies get away with being so anti-consumer for so long.
https://olly.world/what-it-actually-costs-to-run-pagecord-ma...
Any recommendations?
Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.
There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.
You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.