Hetzner is not small, I would say it's several times bigger than OVH in turnover, but this is just a guess based on their perceived markets and market share in those markets.
The cloud offered by Hetzner is the perfect sweet spot for me, but the vast majority of IT crowd and non-IT decision makers in EU want AWS-like.
But all EU alternatives that mimick AWS will be worse than the alternative.
Pretty much like wvery MS Word copycat was worse... until Google Docs shifted the paradygm.
Calling yourself a cloud doesn't make you one. Can you do auto scale groups with dynamically scaling load balancers yet on OVH? AWS has had that for 15 years now.
I dont think you realize how small scale majority of EU gov software has to be.
When you have country with population under 10mil and your gov form is used by 10% of those people a year… Thats 80k submissions a month, split by 20 workdays = 4k submissions a day over 8 work hours = 500 submissions hour or about 8 submissions a minute.
I know these are wrong numbers and there are peaks etc. But many would dare to put this on single server with sqlite. Even if you 10x that.
You do need autoscale groups or self healing architectures. Govs requirements are CRUD apps whos biggest issues are design, accessibility, data permissions etc. Not scale.
While the often advertised point of auto scaling is to handle some imagined large load, in reality it's used as a reliability principle.
For example, it enables seamless rollout strategies for frequent cicd. Any regressions in application performance are automatically handled by scaling up, etc.
> The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.
I mean, see Azure and Google Cloud a few years back. For quite a while the market was AWS, and also some joke services which nobody who wasn't required to used (notoriously, in 2012 Azure was substantially entirely down for _over a day_ due to a leap day).
OVH (french) is very well known and I like them a lot. Used them for domains a lot, because they are very cheap and their management is nice.
I also like very much ScaleWay (french also) for price and quality of service, have used them for years on my startup, can highly recommend.
Also heard a lot of good things about Infomaniak (swiss), but never used them myself.
Would love to hear about european cloud providers with comments from users.
The cloud offered by Hetzner is the perfect sweet spot for me, but the vast majority of IT crowd and non-IT decision makers in EU want AWS-like.
But all EU alternatives that mimick AWS will be worse than the alternative.
Pretty much like wvery MS Word copycat was worse... until Google Docs shifted the paradygm.