Picking a European Public Cloud Provider

The catalyst

Given the last months' activity, it is clear to me that Europeans have to invest within Europe, to be less dependent on America. I don't want to dwell on it more than that, so with that in mind, I've spent some time the last week researching alternatives in the public cloud space for my future cloud needs.

My initial thought process

At first it was hard for me to justify using something other than AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. These three providers are the industry standard, and "everyone" uses one of those three. Ideally, I'd want my servers to be in the same country as me, Norway, but only Azure offers that. But I realized that it's more important to me, to have a cloud provider that is European.

On further reflection, I also came to the conclusion, that not all projects need global scale, and I'd be more than happy with a solid virtual private server (VPS), where I can deploy my services as a Docker container.

This is when I thought, this will be easy, I'll just find a great public cloud provider, with servers in Norway!

Oh how wrong I was... First off, I couldn't find a single provider that offers self-service, that also has servers in Norway. I even have friends in infrastructure companies in Norway, but no one offers self-service, it's all book a call, send an email, or some other form of legacy process. In the end I'm not even sure they'd want me as a customer, since my needs at this point would be a single VPS. Furthermore, I don't think I've ever met anyone, who liked their infrastructure provider.

So with that, the real journey began.

The one provider to rule them all

As a person who is terminally online (I touch grass though, I'm sane, I think), and spends way too much time in the tech sphere, on X (Twitter), Reddit, Hackernews, whatever... My first inclination was Hetzner. There was so much buzz around Hetzner, and simply hosting everything on a VPS at the end of 2024. I simply didn't care, as I didn't want to self-host anything. At this point though, I'm both fed up with pay per seat pricing models, and I've ignited a spark of curiosity for self-hosting.

I took a look at Hetzner, and it looked like a good choice, it has easy to find pricing and information, and lots of people seemed to be happy with it. But I wanted to do my due diligence, and look at other providers. And oh what a rabbit hole I fell into...

It didn't take long to stumble upon European Alternatives - European Cloud Computing Platforms, here I was given a long list of european public cloud providers, that I had never even heard of, worst of all Hetzner wasn't even on the list. Well, it turns out that the list is of course a bit arbitrary, and even worse, it doesn't try to provide information on how to pick one of these providers. All it really did was help with analysis paralysis, as I was now faced with a long list of providers, that I had never heard of, and now I had to figure out what each provider offers.

Luckily I soon after found eucloud.tech - EU-based cloud providers, which provides at least some information, it also appears to be more up to date.

My requirements

I want to sign up, and get started, without talking to a sales person.
I plan to start with a single VPS, but I need the option to scale to several VPS, using a managed load balancer if demand increases.
It's a requirement that the provider offers a published API for infrastructure as code.
I require an S3-compatible object storage service for backups and general object storage.
A managed database offering is crucial, since I expect the first thing I'd want to stop maintaining would be the database.
I would like a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to optimize performance for my web applications.
I would like to host my services in Norway or the Nordics if possible.

Comparison Table

Below is a table summarizing features I found noteworthy, personally.

Feature	Hetzner	Scaleway	OVHCloud	GCORE	Open Telekom Cloud	UpCloud
Country	🇩🇪 Germany	🇫🇷 France	🇫🇷 France	🇱🇺 Luxembourg	🇩🇪 German	🇫🇮 Finland
IaC (Terraform Downloads)
Self Signup	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
VPS	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Managed Load Balancer	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Object Storage	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Managed Database	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Managed Redis	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅
Managed Cassandra	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅	❌
Managed NoSQL	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌
Managed Kubernetes	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Managed Kafka	❌	🚧 (Discovery)	✅	❌	✅	❌
Managed Elasticsearch	❌	🚧 (Discovery)	✅	❌	✅	✅
Container Registry	❌	✅	✅	✅ (Beta)	✅	❌
DNS	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌
CDN	❌	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Secret Manager	❌	✅	❌	✅	🚧 (Planned)	❌
Key Management Service	❌	✅ (Private Beta)	✅	❌	✅	❌
Serverless Containers	❌	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌
Serverless Functions	❌	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌
Serverless Database	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌
Serverless Queues	❌	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Serverless Pub/Sub	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌
Transactional Email Service	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌
API Gateway	❌	🚧 (Discovery)	❌	❌	✅	❌
Web Application Firewall	❌	🚧 (Discovery)	✅	✅	✅	❌
Monitoring	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌
Analytics	❌	🚧 (Discovery)	✅	❌	✅	❌
Datacenter Locations	🇫🇮🇩🇪🇺🇸🇸🇬	🇫🇷🇵🇱🇳🇱	🇫🇷🇩🇪🇵🇱🇬🇧🇨🇦🇺🇸🇦🇺🇸🇬🇮🇳	🇩🇪🇳🇱🇱🇺🇯🇵🇸🇬🇺🇸	🇩🇪🇳🇱🇨🇭	🇫🇮🇸🇪🇩🇪🇵🇱🇬🇧🇺🇸🇦🇺🇸🇬🇪🇸

Information gathered from each provider's website, and roadmap. Might contain errors.

To begin with I wasn't going to include so many providers or features, but I decided it wouldn't be that much work, I was wrong, but here we are.

With the above table, I was able to get an overview of what each provider offers, and I was actually surprised at how comprehensive some of them are, and I'd never even heard of them before, just goes to show how focused we are on the big three.

Finding more data points

I wanted to gauge the usage of each provider, and I tried to think of good indicators, what I came up with was, Terraform provider downloads and Google Trends. You'll find the Terraform provider downloads in the comparison table above if you missed them. Google Trends was a bit of a let down, since the data is relative, and it only supported 5 search terms, but I've included a graph under anyways.

I used "Telekom Cloud" instead of "Open Telekom Cloud", since it was the only variation returned any results. Data from Google Trends, as of 07-03-2025

My breakdown of the providers

Hetzner

As I mentioned earlier, I was initially leaning towards Hetzner, and the Google Trends data confirms why it was the provider I had heard most about. Hetzner has clearly become quite a popular provider online, but I'm afraid their offering is too basic for my needs.

Upcloud

Upcloud also seems like a good provider, but like Hetzner it is mostly focused on VPS hosting, and doesn't offer a comprehensive suite of services, so not quite what I'm looking for.

GCORE

I didn't really find much information about GCORE outside of their own site, but their website and offering looks solid. Their Function as a Service offering has the most runtime support, and they are priced competitively at least according to their own comparison with other providers on their site. They seem focused on Edge Computing, and personally that isn't really a selling point to me.

Open Telekom Cloud

I can't say I had ever really heard anyone talk about Open Telekom Cloud before, but they offer a comprehensive suite of services, and on the surface they look like they would cover my needs, but they smell and look very enterprise to me. Their Terraform provider downloads and Google Trends being far below the other competitors, that is a bit of a canary in a coal mine to me, but I'm not sure how much weight you should put on it.

I'm not sure what is up with their sign-up, either you're not supposed to sign-up, or it is bugged, the "register" button is literally a link that sends you to their frontpage, in german no less. After some digging I found a "shopping cart" flow, with a checkbox with the follow text:

I confirm that the registration and use of the offer will take place exclusively in the course of my commercial, governmental or self-employed professional activities as a businessperson and not as a consumer.

So I guess, it is only for businesses, which is fine I guess, but I'm not really sure if I'd classify this as self-service.

OVHCloud

OVHCloud falls mostly in the same category as Open Telekom Cloud, they offer a comprehensive suite of services, and they seem to cover all my needs, but they completely lack a serverless offering. On the other hand, they seem to have a strong data platform offering, but that doesn't really interest me for now.

Scaleway

I had heard of Scaleway before, and I knew they were the provider of choice for Mistral.ai, but I didn't actually know how comprehensive their offering was. With some core features like an API Gateway on the roadmap, they are shaping up to be a really good alternative to the big three. They already seem to have a good serverless offering, with functions, containers and queues. The only lacking part is their limited datacenter locations, but not a dealbreaker to me.

Their brand looks great, and their public website is very polished, I guess that is to be expected, when they just completed a rebrand back in November 2023. They also have a satisfying timelapse video, from when they changed their the name from Online to Scaleway on one of their datacenters. What that signals to me, is that unlike Open Telekom Cloud and OVHCloud, Scaleway is willing to create a new brand to better position themselves to innovate and compete. I mean seriously, who thought Open Telekom Cloud was a good name, it oozes enterprise, not that OVHCloud is any better, perception is important.

Conclusion

T-Systems, the owners of Open Telekom Cloud, and OVHCloud came out best in a report that Forrester did. I don't know how biased the report is, it looks like pretty straight forward business consultant level fluff, and without the detailed scorecards, it is impossible for me to determine how they came to their conclusions, so huge grain of salt. OVHCloud, T-Systems, and Scaleway were "participating partners" whatever that means, so perhaps equal bias towards all? It at least confirms to me that Open Telekom Cloud, OVHCloud, and Scaleway are established players, that rank well in the cloud space.

In the end I have simple needs, but I want to make a bet for the future. With Scaleway I was at first I was drawn in by their flashy marketing, but after doing my due dilligence, their offering and roadmap was very impressive as well. I like that they are already offering comparative services to most of what I'd reach for on AWS besides virtual private servers, like SES, SQS, S3 and Lambda. Their online presence was also better than competitors. To me they look like an innovator, and not just a provider trying to expand. Obviously they are going to play catch up to the big three, in regards to features, but they seem to be on the right track. That is why ultimately I made the decision to go ahead and bet on Scaleway.

Closing Thoughts

In 2025, the choice of a cloud provider isn't just about technology or price. For me, Scaleway stands out as the best option as a European public cloud provider. There isn't much I'll miss from the big three, and I think in general it is probably time to focus more on self-hosting again. If you have other needs check out some of the other providers, hopefully the comparison table I made, can help you make a more informed decision.