This is great. While i dont agree with the vast majority of conservative viewpoints, a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of
People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great
Alupis · 1h ago
> a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of
It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.
Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.
However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.
Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
IsTom · 1h ago
> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
nextos · 1h ago
> no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
bobthepanda · 1h ago
There used to be more cross border banking until the Eurozone crisis exposed the structural flaw that under the regulations back then (and probably still currently) national regulators were responsible for bailing out headquartered banks, so you had small countries like Cyprus going belly-up because they had to bail out large cross-border banks.
VC markets are definitely not cross-border in practice.
sisve · 1h ago
I think a big big reason for that there is no Big tech companies in Europe is really that the landscape is so much more diverse then in the US.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
JumpCrisscross · 25m ago
> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
Until recently, the United States was seen as a reliable friend. So the benefits of aggregation from a cost and interoperability perspective outweighed the risk.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
Alupis · 1h ago
EU member nations have been attempting to diversify for as long as the EU has existed. Germany famously went down the Linux Workstation path and eventually gave up, instead of applying adequate resources to build a competing product.
There's no reason these things cannot succeed. Apple pulled it off with MacOS (built on BSD). It's just attention span, resources, regulations and the political will.
It's much easier to just buy Microsoft and hope for the best.
nicoburns · 1h ago
It depends how big you are. If you're the UK or France or Germany, then sure, it makes sense (but you still have less scale than the US). If you're Luxembourg or Macedonia then you probably dont have the resources and at least need to collaborate with your neighbours.
tonyhart7 · 1h ago
because other nations don't have same capabilities or resources
same like US not producing their own food and equipment
im3w1l · 53m ago
Sure but you can ask that at different scales, in a reductio ad absurdum: Why should EU use American tech company? But also why should Germany use French tech company? Why should one region of France use tech company from other region? Why should one person use tech from another person?
Barrin92 · 1h ago
> founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
bootsmann · 1h ago
The EU didn’t even exist by the time the last FAANG company was founded, Apple predates the fall of the iron curtain, so I doubt the EU is to blame for this (especially because Europe dominates in markets where integration has been going on for longer such a precision manufacturing)
jorgenveisdal · 1h ago
A lot of "mature" American software is garbage as well. Epic Systems has (thus far) been a disaster in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Norway.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
An open source electronic healthcare system is well within scope of a union providing healthcare for ~449M people collectively. Epic does ~$5B/year in revenue, certainly the EU can do better with the same spend or a bit less.
mathgradthrow · 1h ago
It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.
Alupis · 1h ago
I'm fairly certain it's a natural law carved into stone that the "Bigger" the Enterprise, the more their software is held together with duct tape, shoe string, and band-aides.
Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
elcritch · 1h ago
I have a rule of thumb that the more a piece of software costs, the crappier it will be.
nine_k · 1h ago
This likely happens when internal politics completely replace whatever somehow objective quality metrics, and the sales force becomes persuasive beyond reason.
«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.
The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»
Additionally, it seems the big enterprise vendors will cook up any solution to whatever problem (perceived or real) a customer says they have - no matter how out-of-domain it might be for the expertise of the enterprise vendor.
We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".
We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
delfinom · 1h ago
I would argue metrics, even objective quality metrics still lead to enterprise software. Hanlon's razor never fails.
Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.
And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys
nhanhi · 1h ago
Interesting, when was the last time an AWS DC burned down?
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
Alupis · 1h ago
I'm unsure if this is fair to OVH. Yes, they had a pretty epic fire not long ago - but their "bread and butter" has been low cost, from what I've gathered (never used them before).
I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.
I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
everfrustrated · 24m ago
Wasn't it worse than that too - their supposedly independent data centres were all sitting literally next to each other
blibble · 1h ago
still a lower risk than having your entire country's internet services turned off by the US regime to gain political leverage
andy99 · 1h ago
While I agree with your sentiment, it seems you've never used OVH.
tux3 · 1h ago
OVH has been getting a lot better.
They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.
It's starting to look like a real cloud.
No comments yet
silisili · 1h ago
While not using it on a huge scale, I've got a few projects in OVH cloud(US) and can't remember them having ever gone down in the last couple years.
I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.
Is your experience different?
tetha · 1h ago
There is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster?
For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?
And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.
If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.
If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.
But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
ahofmann · 1h ago
Ovh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.
lossolo · 1h ago
Care to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.
belter · 1h ago
They also use a lot of AWS...
physhster · 1h ago
I don't think OVH is anywhere near the level of AWS/GCP/Azure in terms of the quality of the infrastructure and networking. They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices.
They built a data center out of wood, with no fire suppression, and it burned down, taking businesses with it: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
whynotmaybe · 1h ago
You're right, it's not anywhere where the major US cloud vendors are.
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
dwroberts · 1h ago
> They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices.
You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
AndroTux · 1h ago
Agreed. It's laughable how many incidents OVH has on a monthly basis.
That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
bravesoul2 · 1h ago
Might be a feature. A chaos monkey. What do you do when your provider is like this: use a second cloud for resilience.
physhster · 35m ago
For cheap bulk compute, it's probably ok, but where would you serve your actual critical prod from?
neepi · 1h ago
Their recovery process was terrible as well. Wash everything, drop a load of PR stuff out about how good they were washing stuff, then hope it worked. What a shit show. I would never even go near them after that.
artursapek · 1h ago
lol
justahuman74 · 2h ago
It's simply irresponsible for the EU to depend so heavily on the US for sovereign-critical activities
stego-tech · 2h ago
Seriously. I wrote about it in March and have been banging on this particular drum since my first client demand to move wholesale into AWS.
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
tonyhart7 · 1h ago
"from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights"
what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
belter · 1h ago
I asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....
mistrial9 · 2h ago
> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price
specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
yjftsjthsd-h · 1h ago
Er, so now you're on AWS and instead of paying a sysadmin to run things, you pay a DevOps Engineer™ to run things. Just because it's in The Cloud doesn't magically remove the need to manage it.
freeone3000 · 1h ago
You still need an admin for AWS. It doesn’t actually abstract anything about services or workloads; it’s not Heroku.
stego-tech · 2h ago
I mean, I know all that now; it's what kicked off my descent into the politics and ideologies I hold near and dear to me now, and revitalized my interest in technology as a means of helping humans instead of amplifying Capital.
My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
mlinhares · 2h ago
China is proof of that with their own universe of cloud services, there's no reason Europe can't be competitive the same way, the talent is there, it needs capital and government push.
tonyhart7 · 1h ago
China is one huge economy that centrally planned + strive for sustainable themselves is not easy to achieve for EU
slaw · 42m ago
China software industry is 10 times size of Europe. It is easier when you are big.
znpy · 2h ago
> My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense.
You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly.
The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted.
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them.
When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies.
For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates.
It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).
watermelon0 · 1h ago
Same applies for clouds, each is a completely different beast. You have AWS EC2, GCE, Azure VM, and others.
The main difference between cloud vs on-prem/colo/dedicated is that you need SRE/DevOps for the first, and sysadmins for the second.
immibis · 1h ago
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
What happened to the idea of just running a program on a machine?
Or Kubernetes. Everyone loves Kubernetes, why not use it?
mistrial9 · 2h ago
yes I agree, more than I can say in a short post
immibis · 1h ago
AWS is also hard to administer. Sure you don't have to deal with physical hardware, but you don't at Hetzner, either.
ranger_danger · 1h ago
I have never had any issues with AWS, and I don't know anyone else that has either. I'm sure some might consider it difficult, but I don't think that the vast majority do, and I don't consider that enough of a reason to blanket state that it's hard for everyone... otherwise they wouldn't be using it anyway.
firesteelrain · 2h ago
Azure Europe is located in data centers in Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France and others.
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
Spooky23 · 1h ago
You’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.
firesteelrain · 5m ago
Entra (Azure AD) is indeed a globally shared service. But Microsoft has been moving toward regional anchoring with things like the EU Data Boundary.
If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it
mcv · 2h ago
It already was before, and it's doubly true now. There's always been tension between the EU's and the US's view on privacy and data protection, and it's only getting worse.
yalogin · 1h ago
This is a direct result of the current administration's overt animosity with Europe and every other democratic nation. EU saw that the tech CEOs are cozying up to him and probably it as a direct sign that they will be bend the knee and do whatever is asked of them. It is enough motivation to move things out. Wonder how many more countries follow suit. At the very least countries that don't have the resources/infra will want to diversify, may be.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
That and its inability to comprehend services exports.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 1h ago
I usually enjoy reading your comments, so I wish you'd expand a bit here.
JumpCrisscross · 31m ago
Balance of trade is commonly calculated by only considering goods [1]. America’s trade deficit is a deficit in the trade of goods; we usually have a services trade surplus [2].
When this administration has messaged [3] and made trade policy [4], it has used that goods-only view of trade, i.e. it ignores services.
Microsoft exporting Azure as a service has zero impact on how many goods America buys or sells. (If anything, it might increase the goods deficit if the servers Azure runs on, or the buildings its staff occupy, use any foreign components.) So by this administration’s accounting, the EU reducing its purchases of Azure is great if they e.g. buy two more Hershey’s bars. That’s economically nonsense, and that is the problem.
I think he is talking about the fact that Trump is screaming left and right that "EU iS ScREwINg US CiTIzeNs" because he merely takes into account trading of physical products, without showing the full picture. Basically if you consider services as well, the trade surplus is a few million euros only, because EU imports a lot of services from USA.
chalst · 1h ago
The case is strong for not depending on anything the Trump admin could have control of.
noobermin · 2h ago
I wonder if the US tech execs are going to start regretting cosying up to the trump admin. The US is soon to isolate itself, and take them along with it which is essentially soon to be their own fault.
eptcyka · 2h ago
Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy? What client devices can the EU buy? Without sovereign supply chains, I personally will take US hegemons above chinese hegemons any day.
eecc · 2h ago
“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.”
Arm? But also, thy ere is a big difference in that if Microsoft was somehow forced to hand over data, then they could, even if that data was in the EU. If Europe couldn’t buy US chips things would’t immediately fail, though it would still be a huge problem.
All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.
codedokode · 2h ago
US cannot even stop a single country from getting access to latest GPU.
dwroberts · 1h ago
> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy?
ARM? Something that is increasingly commonplace as a machine type in AWS and GCP
sealeck · 19m ago
Are there non-US/China vendors who will sell you a hyperscalar ARM CPU they have designed?
eptcyka · 1h ago
ARM is the architecture, have fun deploying on mediatek SoCs.
dwroberts · 45m ago
Sure but I'm saying ARM because the implication in OP is that Qualcomm is the only game in town for server compute on ARM, but it isn't. Even NXP (which happens to be Dutch) has some server-viable boards for ARM
Ekaros · 1h ago
Nationalizing ASML could be option to combat this. No more semi-conductor making machines for you...
iknowstuff · 40s ago
Worked out great for Iran
vdupras · 1h ago
With the semi-conductor world so interdependent, such scenarios look a lot like Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios. So... back to 180nm everyone? I hope you planned a way to black start into it!
wmf · 1h ago
SiPearl, MediaTek, etc.
throw0101b · 1h ago
> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy?
Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.
> What client devices can the EU buy?
Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
treesknees · 2h ago
In the short term, Trump could order the immediate shutdown of cloud accounts for the EU, as exemplified in the article. While this won’t completely eliminate the EU’s reliance on American tech, as you rightly pointed out, it does reduce the risk of a sudden disconnect and initiates a long-term commitment to gradually distance itself from US tech. It’s a step in the right direction.
wmf · 1h ago
This stuff has nothing to do with Trump; it's been going on for multiple administrations.
AndroTux · 1h ago
Yes, it's been going on for three administrations now.
adamcharnock · 1h ago
This is something we're [1] seeing a lot of interest in. I wouldn't say it is the driving factor, but it is a driving factor that's giving quite a lot
of companies the incentive to finally push the 'Leave AWS (et al)' button.
Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:
1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.
2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.
What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As
part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.
We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers
integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.
If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.
Im very happy to finally see this happen. It's so dangerous to centralize our digital services in the United States.
firesteelrain · 2h ago
But are they really not using Azure Europe?
BartjeD · 1h ago
Azure Europe is one truth social post removed from a shutdown.
firesteelrain · 1h ago
That’s a dramatic oversimplification. Azure Europe runs in EU datacenters under EU laws. Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary limits access (even for US staff) It’s not as fragile as one political post bringing the whole thing down.
BartjeD · 1h ago
Ofcourse it is.
The IT of the ICJ on MS 365 got shut off... After a truth social post.
EU law means nothing when the employees are on the next plain to Washington. And when the funding and expertise and infrastructure is tightly controlled by USA entities, who'm react severely to the posts of the commander in Chief. (As would I)
firesteelrain · 53m ago
Inaccurate.
The ICJ email issue was tied to a support contract suspension.
If the EU wants full independence, that’s a fair goal, but we should be clear about what's actually happened versus what feels like it could happen.
nlitened · 2h ago
Once I made an account at OVHcloud and decided to rent a server for 400 EUR/mo. My request was rejected, stating that I should try renting cheaper servers first for a few months, before my account would be allowed to rent more powerful machines.
anigbrowl · 2m ago
[delayed]
gonzalohm · 2h ago
AWS does the same. Try creating a new account and deploying a GPU EC2 instance. You won't be able and need to contact support and explain the project you have in mind and how you want to control spending.
teeray · 2h ago
It’s basically the same idea as applying for a line of credit
rnxrx · 1h ago
I had the same experience with Digital Ocean. Thankfully there were several other providers happy to take my money immediately.
TypingOutBugs · 1h ago
DO will sign off in minutes (or did for me)
rozenmd · 2h ago
Almost every VPS provider does this.
jchw · 2h ago
Including GCP and AWS, even: you need to open support requests to gain access to the larger instance types (and to raise the quotas.)
1over137 · 2h ago
Why?
mlinhares · 2h ago
Fraud, its very likely people doing that are using stolen cards and will not pay, so the provider will be slapped with a loss for the service rendered and then a dispute on the card.
octo888 · 2h ago
Why let them rent a cheaper server? What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start?
rustc · 2h ago
> What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start?
That at least the card they're paying with is not stolen (the real owner would start a dispute).
CaliforniaKarl · 2h ago
It will start to build a positive reputation for the client, prompting the provider to take the greater risk.
samrus · 1h ago
Whether theyre paying their bill or not
codedokode · 2h ago
Are bank cards that bad compared to cash or cryptocurrency? Why don't they let pay with cryptocurrency which cannot be charged back?
Ekaros · 1h ago
With crypto you would need to pre-pay... And with many of the charging models of cloud offerings that is actually quite complex thing. Same really goes for deposited credits of fiat. What should happen when you run out? How fast should your resources be killed?
jeffrallen · 2h ago
Because if you pay with a stolen credit card and use the server to do a bunch of fraud/spamming etc there's nothing but downside for the provider. If they ask you to start out slow, and you establish yourself with them as a good client, then they will give you more freedom.
codedokode · 2h ago
Why not demand payment with cryptocurrency then?
vntok · 1h ago
Because, in the words of the parent, "if you pay with [stolen cryptocurrency] and use the server to do a bunch of fraud/spamming etc there's nothing but downside for the provider"?
CamperBob2 · 1h ago
It prevents the other kind of HN headline: I tried AWS for the first time last week and got a bill for $3 million this week. Help
rozenmd · 2h ago
fraud prevention
immibis · 1h ago
Some let you enter more KYC data, and maybe use a different form of payment, to bypass this.
data-ottawa · 1h ago
I tried signing up for their public cloud and got rejected with the same reasoning.
I wanted to use their object storage and some on demand compute, so that was a complete blocker.
st3fan · 2h ago
Yes! All they need to do is start somewhere. Pick a thing and move it into the EU. Then do the next thing. They will see it is possible.
Canada · 1h ago
Remember when we used to just run servers in our own buildings? We should all do that more.
neepi · 1h ago
Exactly that. Rather than centralise the risks, distribute them therefore reducing them.
One political change put millions of people and businesses at risk. Minimising this in future is not putting everything on someone else's computers.
1over137 · 1h ago
Many of us still run servers in our own building.
diamond559 · 2h ago
This will happen eventually as all US business are in the process of being de-facto nationalized puppets of the regime's will.
gadflyinyoureye · 2h ago
Citation needed.
rustc · 2h ago
Anyone have experience with OVH's VPS [1]? The prices seem to be close to Hetzner, cheaper than DigitalOcean but how is the reliability?
Personally, I've used two services hosted by OVH. Both of them regularly (about once a month) posted on social media that they're sorry their service is temporarily unavailable, because OVH has a cooling issue/had a faulty hard/OVH S3 storage was down/etc.
Might just have been bad luck, but personally, I can't recommend OVH. I'd go with Hetzner any day of the week.
lossolo · 1h ago
Perhaps they were simply unlucky, or using that claim to cover for their own mismanagement. I just checked one of my OVH machines, it's been up for 313 days with 100% service uptime, only rebooted for an OS upgrade.
While I love and regularly use Hetzner’s cloud and dedicated servers for many things, it’s unfortunately not yet on the same scale as OVH in terms of product offering. But I hope that changes over time.
AndroTux · 1h ago
Sure, it's possible that they were just unlucky or not quite honest, but often they backed it up with links to the OVH status page. Regardless, that's why I prefaced it with personal experience.
I'm curious, though: Do you have monitoring set up for your OVH machine? Because I've noticed that very often, disruption may just be short and not necessarily noticeable unless you happen to use the service at the time. But for something critical (or a website for your business), this is still a problem.
One of the services I used was Migadu. I migrated away from them after three months because they were just constantly unavailable for short periods of time. It was really annoying. Looking at their status page, you can see disruptions quite often. Of course, I can't say whether that's OVH's fault, or Migadu's, or a mix of both:
Edit: The other service I used was masto.host. Just checked his social media account, and the last incident was two months ago: https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/114350904325778343 - If you scroll down on his profile, you'll see more posts like this, quite frequently.
lossolo · 53m ago
We serve a high volume of requests per second on certain OVH servers for a specific service, with continuous monitoring enabled. While their network didn’t maintain flawless uptime every second of the year, it achieved approximately 99.999% availability based on our observations, which is enough for us. However, we don't rely on their fully managed cloud services (databases, data platform, their containers etc), but we use their LBs, network services etc and as to servers we prefer solutions that are closer to bare metal. So we can’t speak for all of their services, only the ones we’ve used and have experience with.
ge96 · 2h ago
I've been using them for several years now, the cheap ones anyway 1 core 2GB of RAM mostly
They provide some DDOS protection and also I remember when there was a fire at a datacenter/downtime they refunded me for the down time that was nice
My stuff is basic though personal sites either Apache/PHP or NGINX/NodeJS
tester756 · 1h ago
I've been using cheap Linux OVH VPSes to host various .NET apps and I really recommend them.
I love the payments simplicity and transparency.
dasv · 2h ago
Well, except for the time their datacenter caught on fire I haven't had any problems.
rtsil · 2h ago
I had a cheap VPS (kimsufi) with them for over 10 years and I don't remember a single downtime notification. Before that, I had another for 5 or so years and I received two notifications, but each time it was to tell me the problem has been fixed.
remram · 1h ago
Kimsufi is dedicated, not VPS
lossolo · 1h ago
Yes, I'm currently hosting my private domain's email infrastructure using their VPS offering. I've also used their services for commercial purposes and have been using various of their products for almost 20 years.
pier25 · 1h ago
Why OVH?
It's one of the biggest hosting companies in the world (probably the biggest in Europe) but it doesn't have exactly the best reputation.
nickdothutton · 1h ago
I understand the sentiment but would lay money on them being on MS, Google, or AWS within 5 years.
dsign · 1h ago
I simply can't understand how, for anything critical, can anybody rely on somebody that makes Microsoft Teams and Windows 11. It sounds like the EU is getting a little bit of common sense.
yread · 1h ago
Isn't OVH Canada-based? I try to dig into who is the counterparty for important documents (like a DPA) and it was all mostly the Canadian corporation. Of course, that's still better than US, but not truely European
_verandaguy · 1h ago
OVH is French, though it does have at least one data centre in Canada.
faraggi · 1h ago
no. french.
aktuel · 1h ago
I guess Microsoft walking around with its flap open and dangling Azure's masterkey hasn't helped either.
neepi · 1h ago
Hey lets lock ourselves into a different cloud solution.
What happened to organisations being the sovereign entities not national tied clouds?
oncallthrow · 1h ago
OVH is even worse than Azure
rvanmil · 2h ago
Wouldn’t it be great if this finally breaks the Microsoft stranglehold. We could pop open the champagne and toast to liberté égalité and digital sovereignty ;)
up-n-atom · 2h ago
Another lesson to be learned is not to put all your bread in 1 basket. They should disperse between all the European providers listed and not just with OVHcloud. Like that’s the entire premise of a network.
is_true · 2h ago
I've never had so many administrative issues with any other company.
firesteelrain · 1h ago
There is also EU's GAIA-X project which is meant to build a federated, interoperable, and sovereign European cloud framework
And this one might too. EU tends to not have the same US capital
bravesoul2 · 1h ago
Buy OVH? Opinions? Price to revenue 2.6. pe quite high about 150
refulgentis · 2h ago
Presumably US-centric reactions to this stuff on other social media is 100% consistently "lol EU", other than when I'm fired up enough to make a late stage Americana quip. (Ex. This morning, buncha nonsense making fun of Macron tweet re: EU should buy France fighter jets turns to lolol omg the Frenchie surrender monkey is selling war)
As a US citizen, I'd like to thank any of you imposing costs on us for how intellectually lazy & stupid we've gotten en masse. Reality intruding over and over and over is the only way things start getting better.
sharpshadow · 1h ago
Many European companies will follow.
AtlasBarfed · 2h ago
Isn't hetzner EU based?
rf15 · 2h ago
Yes, Germany afaik.
xiconfjs · 2h ago
Correct.
geff82 · 1h ago
Germany and Finland.
wigster · 1h ago
trump has probably cost the big US hosts 100s of billions. no one can trust them going forward
amazingamazing · 2h ago
They should - more competitors will bring the price down.
imperio59 · 1h ago
I used OVH years ago when "the cloud" wasn't a thing. Always super reliable. Always super pro. You love to see good competition in this type of market.
moralestapia · 1h ago
What a giant mistake to make this public.
(I'm not referring to Euractiv but to whoever the sourve is).
They have nothing to gain and only gave a heads-up to Microsoft. Why would they do that?
heraldgeezer · 1h ago
OVH is not comparable to Azure... at all.
Does OVH have intune-like service? Cloud DBs? Office 365 runs on Azure.
fakedang · 1h ago
While we're at this, I also want to add that it's an absolute travesty that a company like SAP has stopped offering onprem licenses and is now hosting their stuff only on AWS, GCP or Azure (and pushing hard for it).
cynicalsecurity · 2h ago
I've once tried to get a VPS from OVH and my account was immediately blocked after trying to pay for it with my debit card based on who knows what reason. My card has never been rejected before. The helpdesk didn't tell me the reason saying "they don't have access to that information" (ridiculous) and I could try uploading scans of my ID to their system. They said it as if they weren't sure themselves on what I should do. Thank you, but no. I would never host anything on OVH. There are other much better hosting providers in Europe.
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timewizard · 2h ago
Is it time to renegotiate contracts? It'd be a good move to bully your way into more favorable pricing anyways.
People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great
It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.
Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.
However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.
Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
VC markets are definitely not cross-border in practice.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
There's no reason these things cannot succeed. Apple pulled it off with MacOS (built on BSD). It's just attention span, resources, regulations and the political will.
It's much easier to just buy Microsoft and hope for the best.
same like US not producing their own food and equipment
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.
The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281)
We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".
We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.
And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.
I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.
It's starting to look like a real cloud.
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I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.
Is your experience different?
For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?
And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.
If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.
If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.
But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las...
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly.
The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted.
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them.
When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies.
For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates.
It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).
The main difference between cloud vs on-prem/colo/dedicated is that you need SRE/DevOps for the first, and sysadmins for the second.
What happened to the idea of just running a program on a machine?
Or Kubernetes. Everyone loves Kubernetes, why not use it?
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it
When this administration has messaged [3] and made trade policy [4], it has used that goods-only view of trade, i.e. it ignores services.
Microsoft exporting Azure as a service has zero impact on how many goods America buys or sells. (If anything, it might increase the goods deficit if the servers Azure runs on, or the buildings its staff occupy, use any foreign components.) So by this administration’s accounting, the EU reducing its purchases of Azure is great if they e.g. buy two more Hershey’s bars. That’s economically nonsense, and that is the problem.
[And thank you! :)]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade
[2] https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/us-international-trade-goods-a...
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...
― Voltaire
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-fro...
All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.
ARM? Something that is increasingly commonplace as a machine type in AWS and GCP
Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.
> What client devices can the EU buy?
Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:
1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.
2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.
What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.
We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.
If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.
[1]: https://lithus.eu
The IT of the ICJ on MS 365 got shut off... After a truth social post.
EU law means nothing when the employees are on the next plain to Washington. And when the funding and expertise and infrastructure is tightly controlled by USA entities, who'm react severely to the posts of the commander in Chief. (As would I)
The ICJ email issue was tied to a support contract suspension.
If the EU wants full independence, that’s a fair goal, but we should be clear about what's actually happened versus what feels like it could happen.
That at least the card they're paying with is not stolen (the real owner would start a dispute).
I wanted to use their object storage and some on demand compute, so that was a complete blocker.
One political change put millions of people and businesses at risk. Minimising this in future is not putting everything on someone else's computers.
[1]: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/
Might just have been bad luck, but personally, I can't recommend OVH. I'd go with Hetzner any day of the week.
While I love and regularly use Hetzner’s cloud and dedicated servers for many things, it’s unfortunately not yet on the same scale as OVH in terms of product offering. But I hope that changes over time.
I'm curious, though: Do you have monitoring set up for your OVH machine? Because I've noticed that very often, disruption may just be short and not necessarily noticeable unless you happen to use the service at the time. But for something critical (or a website for your business), this is still a problem.
One of the services I used was Migadu. I migrated away from them after three months because they were just constantly unavailable for short periods of time. It was really annoying. Looking at their status page, you can see disruptions quite often. Of course, I can't say whether that's OVH's fault, or Migadu's, or a mix of both:
https://status.migadu.com/
Edit: The other service I used was masto.host. Just checked his social media account, and the last incident was two months ago: https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/114350904325778343 - If you scroll down on his profile, you'll see more posts like this, quite frequently.
They provide some DDOS protection and also I remember when there was a fire at a datacenter/downtime they refunded me for the down time that was nice
My stuff is basic though personal sites either Apache/PHP or NGINX/NodeJS
I love the payments simplicity and transparency.
It's one of the biggest hosting companies in the world (probably the biggest in Europe) but it doesn't have exactly the best reputation.
What happened to organisations being the sovereign entities not national tied clouds?
https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/
As a US citizen, I'd like to thank any of you imposing costs on us for how intellectually lazy & stupid we've gotten en masse. Reality intruding over and over and over is the only way things start getting better.
(I'm not referring to Euractiv but to whoever the sourve is).
They have nothing to gain and only gave a heads-up to Microsoft. Why would they do that?
Does OVH have intune-like service? Cloud DBs? Office 365 runs on Azure.
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