Mastodawn

thanksforallthefish

VPS in Europe, not AWS/Google/M$

https://literature.cafe/post/30660967

VPS in Europe, not AWS/Google/M$ - literature.cafe

Hey all, I hope I’m on topic, I host a bunch of self hosted services at home, however with the way things are going in the UK I’m looking to get a VPS set up, initially to use as a proxy and wireguard pop, probably move more stuff to avoid censorship later on (use case is a little fuzzy just yet). So, primary question is - good VPS providers that aren’t the big 3 tech bros, in Western Europe, preferably France, Netherlands Belgium or Spain. Secondary question, my ISP throttled all VPN traffic the other week, 3 different VPN providers (2 mainstream 1 small player) across about a dozen devices throttle to 250K, turn it off or split tunnel and back to 100mb plus (I have a 1Gb connection). The reddit bots immediately jumped in with “oh it’s just your VPN provider” however if I dropped phones off the wifi and connected to mobile telephony the VPN’d connections were fine - similar speed to split tunnel less some overhead. Lasted for 12 hours and then went back to normal. I assume I was being sin-binned for too much sailing of the seven seas. Any idea what settings I can tweak to make it harder for them to throttle me ? I tried changing the Mullvad one to use port 443 but it didn’t affect it - maybe they’d already put the throttle on for anything encrypted by that point ?

CallMeAl (like Alan)15h ago

For European VPS providers:

Dutch: tilaa.com French: ovhcloud.com German: hetzner.com Swiss: exoscale.com

thefactremains 15h ago

Lithuania: hostinger

VPS Hosting | Powerful KVM-based Virtual Private Server

Buy VPS hosting to boost your online project’s performance. Experience powerful servers with NVMe SSD storage, AMD EPYC processors, and more.

Hostinger

thanksforallthefish 13h ago

Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.

thanksforallthefish 13h ago

Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.

卩卄卂丂乇 6h ago

Kimsufi.com for low cost servers from OVH.

ShortN0te 13h ago

German: netcup.eu

DacoTaco 7h ago

Came to say ovh, ive hosted my site on ovh since forever

I believe exoscale is not Swiss owned anymore. An alternative would be Infomaniak.

Koenig2005 15h ago

For your first question: Here in Germany we have Ionos and Strato which offer VPS for relatively low prices. A friend of mine uses Ionos VPS and from what I experienced during study projects, it works well. Your second question could maybe be answered by someone with more experience in that area :)

thanksforallthefish 13h ago

Thanks very much

thefactremains 15h ago

hostinger

Go to lowendbox.com and click “shop now” under “explore cheap hosting deals” to filter by country. I have Racknerd and Hosthatch (in SE/NL), both of which have been fine for my extremely limited needs.

LowEndBox

Cheap VPS Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Web Hosting Providers Listing & Reviews. Discussions on how to host websites on bare minimum VPS.

LowEndBox

thanksforallthefish 13h ago

Thank you

doctor0710 14h ago

I’ve been very happy with Netcup too as a European VPS provider. They have a coupon until the 17th if you decide to go with them, I think it applies 7EUR off of a purchase above 7EUR: netcupSpring26

As for throttling of the VPN traffic from the ISP side, that’s hard to say. Theoretically it’s possible they are doing deep packet inspection to specifically target VPN traffic, which would work through different ports, but I’d think that’s overkill. Maybe they’re doing it by protocol and just throttling UDP traffic, which would be easier, but I don’t know how to confirm that with mullvad.

thanksforallthefish 13h ago

Thank you

Decronym 14h ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #231 for this comm, first seen 11th Apr 2026, 11:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Decronym

sun_is_ra 13h ago

Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:

They analyze internet packets, detect VPN connections and deliberately throttle them.

They just slow down anything that is not a common protocol (not http, https, ftp, …) that would make other things like torrent or even ssh session to be also equally slow.

If it is the first possibility, I know that OpenVPN with static key tend to be very difficult to detect if not impossible. Its also a bit faster but it has its cons that I encourage you to read about.

If it is the second possibility then you need to disguise your VPN traffic as https. I know its doable but I am fuzzy on the details.

thanksforallthefish 11h ago

Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?

SlurpingPus 6h ago

To disguise the traffic completely, you can use either aforementioned Shadowsocks or obfs4, which both make it look random and are used by Tor bridges to circumvent packet inspection and whatnot. obfs4 is a bit ass to setup standalone, because it was made specifically for Tor — you need a different piece of software to make it work like a proxy. Dunno about Shadowsocks.

Regarding VPN blocking in general, I wonder how the UK or your provider deal with the fact that a lot of businesses use VPNs for their day-to-day operations. From quick googling, VPNs don’t seem to be banned nationwide, so it would be nice if you asked the sysadmin at your work to set up a VPN, see if your ISP blocks connections to it, and raise a stink if they do.

I haven’t investigated it much but AdGuard’s VPN masquerades as https traffic and might work for you. They recently open sourced it too:

https://github.com/TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel

GitHub - TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel: Modern, fast and obfuscated VPN protocol

Modern, fast and obfuscated VPN protocol. Contribute to TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

thrillhouse 11h ago

ShadowSocks might be what you’re referring to. shadowsocks.org

Shadowsocks | A fast tunnel proxy that helps you bypass firewalls.

A fast tunnel proxy that helps you bypass firewalls.

misterbngo 12h ago

online.net, French dedi provided that rolled their own cloud stack in the last decade

SayCyberOnceMore 12h ago

VPN throttling: are you sure your DNS traffic’s going through the VPN tunnel and going to an external server, not your ISP’s?

If they can see where you’re browsing, maybe that’s triggered something.

If it was only for a few hours though, maybe they just had an internal problem?

Give them a call and ask them. And if they’re doing something weird (throttling traffic), they should be able to tell you why… and consider leaving them if they’re not providing the service you need.

thanksforallthefish 12h ago

Great questions.

I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.

The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.

There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like

“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”

Continue loop until you hang up.

SayCyberOnceMore 3h ago

Yeah, ok, fair enough. That probably answers all the questions…

Virgin will be throttling, AND having internal problems 🙂

Be interesting if your VPS hop also gets throttled…

Katherine 🪴11h ago

This is late but I switched to Hetzner and Domeneshop from AWS for VPS hosting and DNS and I’ve been quiet happy. I have a dedicated VPS with far more power for far less than I paid through AWS.

Also using Hetzner’s storagebox as a Google Drive replacement.

Nick7903 8h ago

You gotta take a look at datalix.eu, they are actually the backend for a lot of small resellers and they got good hardware for the money.

They always have a “sale” going on but they sometimes chance the hardware, i recommend waiting for the one with ddr4 ram it costs the same, also the “sale” VPS renews at sale price too also when the hardware on “sale” changes

Drunk & Root 7h ago

netcup seems good

Been a hetzner customer for years. No regrets.

Argyle13 5h ago

I have had one at Strato (German, now part of Ionos), for several years. Not a single problem with them, and prices are quite good.