Certain projects must place data or compute in specific regions. Access to providers with strong presence in those regions supports compliance and latency goals. For European customers, that often means a European provider rather than a European region of a global platform.
What residency requires
Projects subject to regulatory requirements must confirm that the chosen regions and services meet those obligations. Documentation and contractual clarity matter: where data is stored, where it is processed, where backups live, and which support staff can access it. Residency is a property of the whole architecture, not only of the primary server.
The providers
Hetzner is chosen for strong price-to-performance ratios, European data centers, and generous traffic allowances on many plans, with both cloud virtual machines and dedicated servers.
OVHcloud offers European infrastructure and a broad product range that includes dedicated servers and public cloud, suited to both small projects and larger deployments.
Scaleway is valued for European data residency, developer-friendly tooling, and a mix of compute, storage, and related services.
UpCloud emphasizes performance and European roots alongside global reach.
Designing for portability
Deep integration with proprietary managed services can increase switching costs later. Teams that value flexibility often design around portable layers such as containers, standard databases, and infrastructure-as-code tools. That approach pairs naturally with the European providers, whose strengths are in core infrastructure rather than extensive managed-service catalogs.
See the European cloud comparison for the listed options and prices side by side.
