5 Most Reliable and Cheap Offshore Hosting Providers

The USA hosts 60% of all the data centers and servers worldwide, and the reason is clear, as it is the country where the Internet has been invented and the first country to start using it commercially on a wide scale.

But what do you do if you don’t want your web site or application hosted in the US? You could have plenty of reasons for this: no presence or customers in the country (although this is a bit far fetched, it’s possible), no copyright licenses for your content (but you have a license in the EU, for example), privacy concerns (right now, the USA, UK are having some big debates about whether data centers can just take any info on clients’ servers and give it to the governing authorities).

Well, you still have the choice of hosting your stuff in any other countries that have data centers and work worldwide (more and more do these days) and with companies that have normal, acceptable prices (not pay $70 per Gigabyte like you see on Google, which are simply people that rent servers in foreign countries and resell them to you at these crazy rates). It would be better if you knew the language and laws of the country where you choose to get the hosting, but it’s not necessary, as a lot of them have an English language option and accept foreign credit cards and other payment methods.

Of course, all of these companies have their own data centers in those countries and are not just foreign representatives of American or British hosting companies.

1und1 (Germany). This company does have a couple of data centers in the US and UK, but their origins are in Germany, the country where they incorporated back in the 90’s. An amazing offer from 1und1 (that is possible only in Germany and France because of their high-speed country wide fiber network) is the 100Mpbs, unlimited bandwidth, which is really unlimited and you can use tens of terabytes per month without being charged a dime. This could probably change as the network gets more saturated, but for now, 1and1 Germany is one of the best and cheapest choices for data-intensive sites. Germany also has favorable laws on copyright, which makes it a better choice a better choice for running sites that host content like video sharing, file hosting, torrent trackers, etc. They are also very cheap for what they offer and they of course have a cloud hosting offer if you’re interested.

OVH (France). This provider has a data center in France (where they’re apparently pretty well known) and works with clients from all over the world. They do have an English site, but their support is French, so you might have to know the language if you need their help (though they do advertise English support). Thanks to the French national fiber network and relative lack of big data centers, they can afford to offer a super speedy 200Mbps, unlimited bandwidth connection for their higher-priced servers, which is just great for any data-intensive sites, although the country’s new privacy and copyright laws, which allow the ISP’s and hosting providers to deliver any data from your server to the authorities might be bad for some people.

Hosting.ua (Ukraine). This provider operates from and has a data center in Odessa, one of the biggest cities in Ukraine. They have nice hardware at good prices, an English site, Terms of Service and Control Panel language, and a few varying connection speed options: 1Gbps with a 2000GB/month limit, 10Mbps unlimited bandwidth and 100Mbps with automatic switch to 10Mbps after 3000GB per month are used, which is great for a variety of uses. You might doubt the security and reliability of the data hosted in any Eastern European country, but that’s not true anymore. Their data center (along with many others in Eastern Europe and Russia) are built to modern standards and are the same as any other good data center in the world. And because they have a new high-speed fiber network at their disposal and don’t know what to do with it (the population is quite scarce for such a big country and most of them don’t use the Internet, even thought they have a great 20/1 Mbps ADSL all over the country), they can offer those in
credibly high speeds that only big corporations like Google have access to in other countries (1Gbps is VERY speedy).

eName (Romania). This company has a brand new data center in the heart of Romania, at the fringe of civilized land, as they say . They have VPS and dedicated server packages to offer for anyone who needs them. They also have an English version of their site, which is simply great. The only bad thing about them is that the bandwidth is quite limited compared to other countries, but that might change when the country rolls out their own national fiber network.

Serverboost (Netherlands). This is a great offshore hosting company that has its servers in the Netherlands and offers some of the lowest prices for international hosting. They have VPS and dedicated server packages and work with anyone that has a Paypal account (which is almost everyone). They have a pretty standard site in English, not much different than a lot of other hosting companies anywhere in the world. I think they’re worth checking out.

There are a lot of other hosting companies in countries other than the US and UK that work with international clients and offer great hosting packages, so if you can’t or don’t want to host your stuff in those countries, you can easily go with a foreign one. The above companies are some of the best and most well-known, so they can be trusted.

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