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I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
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They are competitive price wise, but less competent human wise.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
To be fair, Hetzner didn't change prices for existing services, just for new customers / services added. I think that's a fair and realistic approach.
I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.
As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)
To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/
> not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company,
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.